Читать книгу Modern Romance March 2015 Collection 2 - Кэтти Уильямс, Jane Porter, Cathy Williams - Страница 15
ОглавлениеANTONIA ROMERO WAS an elegant, quietly spoken woman who immediately put Milly at ease. She ushered them in warmly, allowing Lucas to kiss her on the cheek and then fret at the fact that she had come to the door herself when she should be resting, when there was help in the house to do things like answer doors.
‘I just couldn’t wait to meet Milly...’ she protested, drawing Milly into the living room, where tea and pastries were waiting for them on a low glass table while a pretty, smiling maid hovered in the background, ready to leap to service. ‘And I know you must be tired after your trip but I’m dying to hear all about your romance. I knew it. I just knew that son of mine would end up finding true love with a real woman and not one of those plastic dolls he’s spent his life fooling around with.’
Milly sneaked a surreptitious look at Lucas to see how he was handling his mother’s criticism and he caught her eye and grinned, eyebrows raised.
‘Didn’t I tell you that my mother has no problem saying exactly what she thinks?’ He shooed Antonia back to the sofa as she automatically rose to pour them tea and hand round the pastries. On cue, the maid leaped into action and refreshments were served before the maid vanished out of the room, shutting the door behind her.
With Antonia on the low, damask pink sofa facing her, Milly had a chance really to look at her hostess. There were fine lines of strain around her eyes and mouth and she was borderline too thin, barely filling the black, shapeless dress that hung down to her calves, yet it wasn’t hard to see that she must have been a great beauty in her day. Not that she was exactly ancient now. At a guess, Milly would have put her in her mid to late sixties.
She tried to maintain the chirpy smile of a woman in love as Lucas helped himself to a few more pastries before subsiding right next to her on the sofa, a replica of the one on which Antonia was sitting, his thigh pressed against hers.
She had been leaning forward, perched on the edge of the sofa, her hand primly linked on her knees, and now he pulled her back so that she tumbled against him.
‘What would you like to know?’ Lucas’s voice was teasing as he fondly addressed his mother. ‘You have limited time for questions because you should be taking it easy.’
‘I’m sitting,’ Antonia retorted, smiling. ‘How much easier can I take things? Please don’t join the queue along with all my friends who have insisted on treating me with kid gloves ever since I got ill.’
‘Why don’t you explain...?’ Lucas brushed aside Milly’s hair and delivered a feathery kiss on the side of her cheek, just enough to send the heat spiralling through her.
Milly’s eyes glazed over. If she wasn’t under a microscope, she would have punched him, because he was the one who had propelled her into this awkward situation; how fair was it that she was now being dumped in the thick of it, having to concoct some vaguely realistic lie? Not very.
Antonia was watching her expectantly and Milly reluctantly stumbled into a suitable tale of sudden love and searing romance. She swept aside the minor detail of her broken engagement as just a bit of nonsense from which she had thankfully escaped because, had she not, how else would she have found herself with Lucas? Fate.
Good word. Antonia picked up the cue and reminisced over her own wonderful marriage. Fate had thrown her and her husband together from such a young age.
How could Milly resist confiding about her own parents, also childhood sweethearts? She couldn’t. They had died too young but desperately in love; she felt scared at the thought of being deserted by those she loved, but she still believed in love with all her heart, whatever the risks it brought. She was thinking of Lucas and the mystery gold-digger when she said that. Belatedly, as Antonia nodded approvingly, Milly remembered that this was not supposed to be a bonding experience. She cleared her throat and wondered whether she should shove the man at her side into picking up the baton and continuing their fictional tale of love.
‘Of course.’ She decided against that course of action because who knew what he would say? He hadn’t uttered a peep while she had been in confiding mode, although she had felt him edge a little closer to her, all the better to...what? Prolong his mother’s incorrect assumptions? ‘Wonderful though our sudden love is, I have to admit that your son can be a little...forceful.’
‘Too forceful?’ Antonia asked, and Milly ruefully inclined her head to one side, as though seriously giving the question house room, before erring on the side of tactful.
‘Borderline arrogant,’ she sighed, patting Lucas’s thigh without looking at him. ‘I guess it’s something to do with having grown up in the lap of luxury. I’m afraid I grew up in the lap of, well, rubbing pennies together and trying to make ends meet...’ She left Antonia to make the obvious deduction, which was that they were worlds apart and therefore incompatible in a fundamental area. The first of many, if only she knew.
Antonia seemed delighted with her admission. ‘So good,’ she murmured, tearing up, ‘that you’ve finally come to your senses...’ she smiled at her son and leaned forward ‘...and realised how much more fulfilling it is to have a real woman at your side. My dear, let me tell you about my dearest husband and myself. We rubbed many a penny together before Roberto’s career began to take off! I could tell you a hundred tales of having to choose between paying the bills and buying food, especially in the beginning when we owed the bank so much money...’
* * *
‘Thank you so much for helping me out there,’ was the first thing Milly said when, an hour and three pastries later, they were being ushered up to their bedrooms. ‘Why didn’t you...why didn’t you...?’
‘Launch into a speech about why our fast and furious romance is destined to crash and burn within the next fortnight?’
He hadn’t known about how she felt about her background. Orphaned as a kid and brought up by her grandmother, yet never looking back and blaming an unfortunate past. Still believing in the power of love even though abandonment issues should have made her wary and cynical, disinclined ever to trust anyone to get too close. Still ever-hopeful, the eternal optimist.
He had known women who had been blessed with the best life could offer and still managed to moan and complain about nothing in particular.
‘Bit soon for the cracks to be showing, wouldn’t you agree?’
At the top of the landing, the maid turned right and they both followed, Lucas breaking off to say something to the maid in rapid-fire Spanish that had her laughing. Their cases had been brought up whilst they had been in the sitting room.
‘Your mother’s really lovely,’ Milly admitted. ‘It’s going to be a shame when she has to face up to the fact that you’re so obnoxious that no one in their right mind would ever put up with you.’
Lucas looked down to see whether she was joking, but her expression was thoughtful and earnest.
‘There are times when I can’t actually believe that I’m hearing what you say correctly.’
Milly stopped and looked at him with a little frown. ‘Do you have any idea how arrogant you were when you led me to believe that you were someone you weren’t? I may only have been the chalet girl, but you just didn’t see why you should be honest with me. For a start, you assumed that I was the sort of low life who would be out to see what I could get if I knew you were rich, and then you just didn’t give a damn if you weren’t honest. You didn’t care about my feelings at all. I know you had one bad experience with a gold-digger but that’s no excuse to just assume that everyone falls into the same category, guilty until proved innocent.’
‘How did your feelings have anything to do with...anything at all?’
‘You barely apologised for having duped me,’ Milly told him flatly.
Where had that come from? Lucas, frustrated, raked his fingers through his hair and stared at her, lost for words.
‘You just assumed that it was okay because you can do what you want to do without bothering to consider other people.’
‘Is this conversation going anywhere?’ he questioned in a driven voice. He glared at the maid, who seemed to be suppressing a smirk.
‘I’m projecting...’
‘You’re what? I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m projecting ahead to when you mother sadly discovers what a selfish, self-centred guy you’ve turned out to be.’
‘I’m guessing she’s probably wised up to those traits a while ago,’ Lucas said drily, eyebrows raised. ‘And, while we’re on the subject of scrupulous honesty and caring about the feelings of others, have you mentioned to your grandmother what’s going on in this part of the world?’
Milly flushed. ‘I didn’t see any point in worrying her by going into details.’ It wasn’t as though this was going to be a long-term situation. Two weeks—three, absolute max—he had told her when she had agreed to his plan. In those weeks, even if a dramatic break-up hadn’t been staged, they should have covered the important phase of their fairy-tale romance revealing shaky foundations.
In those couple of weeks, he had privately thought, his mother would put to bed all ideas of trying to see him settled with the woman of her dreams. She would kill off notions of fairy-tale romances insofar as they pertained to him and she would resign herself to cheerful acceptance that what he wanted out of life, emotionally, was a far cry from what she thought would do him good.
She was his mother and he indulged her but, at the end of it, it was his life and he would choose its outcome whether or not it flew in the face of her ideals. This exercise in harmless fiction would be a gentle learning curve for her.
‘I’m only going to be here for a short while and, when I return to London and my life’s all sorted out, maybe then I’ll let her in on some of the details.’
‘You honestly think your life’s going to be all sorted out when you return to London?’
‘You said that...’
Lucas waved aside her predictable cry of protest. He had offered to have a formal agreement drawn up listing the conditions of this arrangement, what she would be given at the end of it, but she had airily told him that that wouldn’t be necessary.
‘I’m not talking about the job and the accommodation and the money, Milly. I’m talking about your blind faith in life always turning out for the best.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this.’ She turned away and felt his hand gently stay her.
‘If my mother’s long overdue a little learning curve, then you should take this opportunity to put in place one of your own. Reality doesn’t disappear because you decide that you’d quite like it to.’ He nodded to the maid, who had tactfully moved to stare through one of the sprawling windows on the landing, ears blocked to any conversation—although Milly didn’t think she spoke a word of English, so that probably was a step too far when it came to fulfilling her unspoken duties.
Milly watched, mouth open in anger, as he sauntered off, once again speaking Spanish, once again making the maid giggle. The maid might have been an old retainer well into her sixties, but it was obvious that he could still work the charm offensive on her.
Which was something he couldn’t be bothered doing in her case.
How dared he think that he could bring his jaundiced views to bear on her life?
Placid by nature, she could scarcely credit the fury bubbling up inside her as her brain began functioning once again, and she tripped along behind him, barely paying attention to the magnificent surroundings.
The house was in the style of a rambling ranch. A short flight of stairs led up to the first floor, which, like the floor below, was wooden-floored, the wood gleaming from years of polish.
The corridor opened out in places into small sitting areas and curved round in other places, leading to nooks and crannies, various bedrooms and sitting rooms. It should have been disjointed and higgledy-piggledy but in fact there was an attractive coherence about the honeycomb nature of the layout, something whimsical and charming.
A lot of light poured in, thanks to large windows at regular intervals, a couple of which were fashioned of stained glass so that the bright sunlight was refracted into thousands of splintered shapes.
Through the windows, as she marched along in Lucas’s wake, she could see extensive lawns and the bright turquoise of a swimming pool.
She stopped behind Lucas as the maid disappeared into one of the bedrooms and she hovered, arms folded, still simmering.
‘Good news and bad news.’
‘Huh?’ Snapping out of her reverie, Milly focused on his swarthy, handsome face. He leaned against the doorframe, the very picture of cool elegance.
‘The good news is that it’s a vast bedroom, complete with two sofas. There are even twin wardrobes. The bad news is that we’re sharing it.’
The maid had vanished and Milly stared at Lucas, heat flooding her cheeks.
‘You told me that there was no way your mother was going to...going to stick us in the room together! You told me that your mother was very old-fashioned, that she hadn’t been brought up on a diet of sex before marriage. You said that she might know what you got up to but she’d always been adamant that you wouldn’t get up to it under her roof.’
‘I have a feeling that on those occasions when I showed up with a woman in tow she decided that the best way to avoid contributing to a loveless union was to locate us at opposite ends of the house.’
‘Is that all you can say?’ Milly hissed as her anger headed a little bit further north.
‘At the moment, yes.’ He pushed himself away from the doorframe and strolled into the guest suite.
Normally, he was given his usual room in the other wing of the house. He had barely noticed that they were being shown to a room in the opposite direction.
‘How is this supposed to work?’ Milly persisted, hands on hips as she followed him through.
‘You should shut the door. The last thing we need is for wagging ears to hear us at each other’s throats.’
‘I thought that that was supposed to be the whole intention.’
‘Not on day one. Now shut the door, Milly.’
‘Bossy,’ she muttered, stepping into the room with the unwillingness of someone entering a torture chamber.
How was she supposed to share a room with the man standing in front of her? How could he look so cool and collected when she was suddenly a bundle of nervous tension?
‘You might want to freshen up,’ Lucas said neutrally. He nodded in the direction of the en suite bathroom, which she saw was as big as the bedroom, which was huge.
‘We can’t share a room.’
‘I won’t be breaking that to my mother at this point in time, Milly, so you might as well settle into the idea. What’s the problem anyway?’
‘The problem is that I don’t even know you...’
‘It wasn’t a problem when we were in Courchevel,’ Lucas pointed out with infuriating logic. ‘And frankly, thanks to your reckless habit of saying what you want and asking whatever questions you choose to ask, you probably know me a lot better than most.’ And that was a shocking revelation. But true. A certain, intangible unease snaked through him.
‘We weren’t sharing a bedroom there. We were sharing a mansion.’
‘But, on the upside, at least now you know that I’m not a homicidal maniac or a ski instructor on the lookout for a body to take to bed.’
‘I didn’t sign up for this.’
‘For what, exactly?’ His voice was silky smooth and those midnight-dark eyes watching her speculatively made her feel hot and tingly all over.
All those forbidden thoughts that had crowded into her head from the very first moment she had laid eyes on him surfaced with frightening ease.
Thoughts of him touching her, tasting her; crazy, stupid thoughts that were just the product of a fevered mind unbalanced by the trauma of a broken engagement.
Except, when was the last time she had thought about Robbie? How traumatised had she really been, exactly? If her heart had been broken, wouldn’t she have still been cooped up somewhere, licking her wounds and thinking about a future that wasn’t going to happen?
‘Cling to the prospect of what you’re getting out of this,’ he advised her. ‘And, if it puts your mind at ease, I’m happy to take the couch.’ He’d contemplated the enticing prospect of taking her to bed—before she had discovered who he really was and all the advantages that came wrapped up with him. She might make a big deal of her maidenly virtue, but how long would it be before she began really looking round his mother’s mansion; before she heard about all the other houses he owned, scattered across the globe like unused jewels waiting to be aired when the occasion arose?
Take one self-confessed romantic, tie it up with a broken heart and then into the mix throw one billionaire with a healthy libido and what did you come out with?
Complications. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. And, when it came to complications of an emotional nature, well, that was something Lucas could do without.
So if that quirky something about her got to him...if there was something about her unruly hair and sexy little body that got his imagination firing on all cylinders...he would have to put it to rest. He was accustomed to getting exactly what he wanted with the opposite sex but, in this instance, his hands were tied and he wasn’t about to untie them so that he could play with a bit of fire.
Milly eyed the couch with jaundiced eyes. Okay, so he wouldn’t be sharing the bed with her—the gigantic king-size bed with its gauze canopy—but she would still be aware of him sleeping only a matter of metres away.
And that shouldn’t be a problem. He certainly didn’t see it as one. Maybe he had flirted slightly with her, in his few days as a ski instructor, but that was then.
‘I’m not accustomed to sharing a bedroom,’ she protested feebly and his face relaxed into a disbelieving, mocking half smile.
‘You were engaged...’ He drew that one sentence out as though it was explanation in itself that she wasn’t quite telling the truth.
Milly reddened, mouth dry. ‘You keep reminding me of that,’ she said in a valiant attempt to change the course of the conversation because she didn’t like where it was heading. ‘I guess in a minute you’ll start lecturing me about not facing reality and being a hopeless romantic and burying my head in the sand...’
Lucas narrowed his eyes on her. ‘You didn’t share a bedroom with the guy?’ he asked, honing in on the truth with deadly accuracy. He watched the way she guiltily glazed over and licked her lips. He knew that he shouldn’t pursue the topic because, frankly, there was no point. This wasn’t a ‘getting to know you’ exercise, after all, although stable doors and horses sprang to mind, resuscitating that unease he had earlier felt. They knew each other... Like it or not, weird though it seemed...
‘I don’t think that’s any of your business,’ Milly said haughtily. ‘And I think I’ll have that shower you mentioned...’
‘Course it’s my business,’ he told her with just the sort of slow smile that implied that shrewd mind of his was leaping to all sorts of correct conclusions about her relationship with Robbie. ‘We’re in love. Isn’t that what star-struck lovers do—share everything?’
‘You...you’re...’ She spluttered furiously at him and he grinned.
‘You’re like a little spitting cat.’
‘If your mother was a fly on the wall, she’d get a pretty good picture of how not star-struck lovers we are!’ She could all but get the words out. The man was infuriating! There wasn’t a human being on the planet who could work her up so fast and so effortlessly.
‘Or...’ Lucas held her gaze but he was still grinning ‘...she might decide that a little volatility is good when it comes to...being in love and star-struck...’
‘Well, she’d be wrong,’ Milly hissed, making a beeline for her case and rummaging until she had located some clothes. ‘And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to have a bath.’
Sure you don’t want me to join you? The instinctive riposte was on the tip of his tongue but then the thought of actually doing that, of actually sliding into the warm water with her, soaping her, feeling her curves pressed against him, slammed into him with the force of a runaway train and his mouth tightened.
‘I have work to do,’ he said abruptly. ‘Take your time. Dinner’s usually served around seven-thirty. Early by Spanish standards but my mother’s schedule is no longer what it was. I’ll either come and get you, take you down to the dining room, or I’ll dispatch one of the maids to show you the way.’
Running a bath, door firmly locked, Milly figured that this was how it must feel like to be a toy at the whim of an unpredictable owner. He had managed to rile her, provoke her and then, when it felt as though she actually needed to have some sort of full-blown argument with him, needed to wipe that annoying, laid-back grin from his face, he changed, just like that, for no particular reason.
Boredom.
She eased herself into the bath and closed her eyes. He had suddenly become bored. He enjoyed provoking her and he knew he could. It amused him. But, like a kid with the attention span of a flea, his amusement had a very short sell-by date because, however different he might find her, she just didn’t have what it took to hold his attention for longer than five seconds. Thank goodness this was all just a fabrication! Because if it wasn’t then she would never be good enough for him, would she? Being different didn’t count. Being a novelty didn’t count.
* * *
She mentioned that over dinner. A fabulous dinner served by a different maid. A typically Spanish meal of paella rich with seafood with lots of salad. Just a casual little remark when there was a lull in the conversation, a little throwaway observation about her sheer amazement that she and Lucas had become involved, because they were just so different, because she was just the sort of girl he would find boring...
Antonia had smiled and talked about opposites attracting and then, sensing something intense in Milly’s expression, had kindly listed all the ways that relationships worked when two people complemented each other by bringing different personality traits to the union.
Lucas had failed to take the bait with the opening. Was he still of the opinion that his mother should have a honeymoon period before the cracks began showing?
When Milly thought of that bedroom, waiting for them to share it, she was of the opinion that the cracks should surface sooner rather than later.
She thought so even more when, over coffee in the sitting room, yet another room new to her, he draped his arm over her shoulders, sitting next to her with the indolent casualness of a man with his woman. His low, sexy voice was warm and teasing. He absently played with her hair. When she spoke, she could feel his breath warm on her cheek as he looked at her.
Antonia was taking in everything, eyes shrewd, and if he didn’t see that then Milly certainly did and it was the very first thing she said to him when Antonia excused herself for the night, leaving the two of them alone in the sitting room.
‘You could have helped me out when I began listing all the reasons why we didn’t make sense as a couple.’ She sprang to her feet and plonked herself down on a chair far away from him although, even though there was now distance between them, she could still feel the weight of his arm around her and the warmth of his thigh pressed against hers.
‘Did you see your mother? She thought it was cute that I was pointing out all our differences!’
Lucas shrugged and Milly gritted her pearly-white teeth in pure frustration.
He hadn’t seen his mother this happy in a while. How long had she been secretly harbouring hopes that he would meet the woman of his dreams and bring her home? She had dropped hints in the past but she had really only begun pressing him after her illness. But had she been fretting long before then?
‘The time isn’t right for a two-pronged attack.’
‘There’s no question of an attack.’ Why did he have to be so dramatic? she wondered. Why did he have to make her out as the bad guy in this when she was only here because of him and only gently laying the foundations for their break-up because that was what she had been primed to do?
‘And,’ she continued, ‘I’d rather you didn’t sit so close to me...’
‘Sit so close to you?’
‘I just think that your mother might find such public displays of affection a little embarrassing, that’s all.’
‘We’re sharing a bedroom. Somehow I don’t think she’s going to swoon because I stroke your thigh now and again. Did she look embarrassed?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘The point is, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m not going to retreat to the furthest corner of the room. That would be unnatural. Furthermore, I don’t see why it’s such a big deal.’
‘The big deal,’ Milly said with a ferocious whisper, because how could he be so cool when she was all over the place? ‘Is that I’m still in the process of getting over something pretty big and pretty horrible and maybe I need just a little more physical space than you’re giving me. Lord knows what your mother must secretly think of me.’ A sudden thought occurred to her. ‘What if she thinks I’m a gold-digger? After all, one minute I’m engaged to one guy and the next minute I’m going out with a billionaire.’ She wrung her hands in despair at the misconception.
‘What if she thinks I targeted you...? It makes horrible sense in a way, doesn’t it? What if she imagines that I’m just one of a long line of women who want you for what you can do for them...?’
Lucas raised his eyebrows and held up one imperious hand to stop her before she could begin exploring this new theme in exhaustive depth.
‘She doesn’t think that,’ he told her flatly. ‘Nor does she think that you’re somehow emotionally unstable and fickle because you’re going out with me hard on the heels of a broken engagement.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Oh, but I can and I have.’
‘What do you mean you have?’
‘I told my mother that this was not a case of you jumping from one man to another without pausing for breath. I’ve explained that I’m not a rebound love affair—which, as you can imagine, would not have sat well with her.’
‘When did all this explaining take place?’ Milly asked in frank bemusement.
‘When you were soaking in the bath for two hours,’ Lucas said drily. She thinks you’re impossibly brave. As I do...
‘And she believed you?’ Milly aimed for an incredulous laugh. ‘I know you could sell ice to Eskimos, Lucas, but women are very intuitive when it comes to stuff like that; when it comes to matters of the heart...’
‘Which is why she knows it’s the truth,’ Lucas told her with silky assurance. ‘She’s met you, talked to you and she knows—like we both do, Milly—that whatever you had with your ex-fiancé wasn’t love. You may be the jilted girlfriend, and that’s not a great place to be, but you’re not the heartbroken jilted girlfriend. So your little speech about feeling uncomfortable sitting too close to me because you’re nursing a broken heart is, frankly, a load of rubbish. Maybe you’re scared of being too close to me because you think I’m going to make a move on you...’
And hadn’t the thought crossed his head more than once? Good job he had iron self-discipline and was smart enough to spot danger before it spotted him.
‘Not going to happen. Or maybe,’ he mused thoughtfully, ‘you’re scared because you think you might make a move on me...’
Milly could feel herself burning up as he shoved his version of reality down her throat. There was nothing he said that had not occurred to her before, even if only in passing.
And that included the shameful fact that she found the man physically attractive, that she had flirted with silly fantasies...
‘In your dreams,’ she told him tartly. But she heard the faint wobble in her voice. She wasn’t accustomed to playing these sorts of games. She was straightforward; she had never found herself in this kind of situation. She was walking in unchartered territory and it was only her survivor’s instinct that told her that, whatever she did, she should not show him that he was right. That maybe, just maybe, that bed held unspoken terrors for her because she could picture, far too easily, what it might be like to have him in it next to her...
