‘It is not part of my professional engagement to spend my evenings with you—and this one is terminating right now!’
Tossing her napkin onto her chair, she turned on her heel, striding across the wide dining room, a red mist in her vision. She had had it with the jibes, the accusations—the whole damn lot!
Emotion raged within her as she strode out into the hotel lobby. Anger was uppermost—she had been pushed beyond what any person could endure—but there was so much more in her than anger.
She felt her chest tighten like a drum and her throat constrict. There was a haze in front of her vision, as well as the red mist of rage. She wanted out—oh, dear God, she wanted out! And not just out of this overdone hotel that screamed Money! Money! Money! Money! in her face with every piece of over-decorated gilded furniture and cream satin fabric and every ludicrously over-the-top floral arrangement on every available marble surface.
She wanted out of this unbearable situation. To be so close to Luke and yet as distant from him as the stars was torture. And for him to be doing nothing but taking pot-shots at her, criticising her and berating her so that she could do nothing right—nothing at all... It was as if he were a completely different person from the one she’d thought she’d known—as if that rapturous night she’d spent with him, when she’d had to tear herself away from him with all the strength in her body and soul, had never happened!
To think she had so stupidly, so pathetically hoped that maybe she would have a second chance with him to make up for having had to run out on him the way she had. What a fool to think they could recover the bliss they had found so briefly.
Misery consumed her, thick and choking in her lungs, as dense as the hot, humid air that hit her as she rushed out onto the forecourt. Blindly, she threw herself into the first taxi waiting there, summoned by a doorman who had hastened to open the door for her as she stumbled inside.
The taxi pulled off and she slumped back, numb to everything except an all-consuming misery.
CHAPTER SIX
LUKE JERKED HIS chair back, watching her rush from the dining room. For a moment he was simply frozen. Then, vaulting upright, he started after her.
But suddenly the maître d’ was there, consternation on his face, expressing his concern, asking if everything was all right, if there was something wrong with the food, the wine, the service, the staff—
‘No, nothing!’ Luke exclaimed, wanting only to push past the man and catch up with Talia, who was disappearing across the lobby, heading for the huge glass doors beyond. ‘My apologies!’ he threw at the maître d’, finally getting past him.
Then, in the lobby, he was delayed again, by a party arriving at the hotel who were filling up the entrance. By the time he emerged out onto the forecourt she was gone.
‘Get my car!’ he snapped at the doorman, who promptly got on his phone to the chauffeurs’ station.
It seemed to take an age for the limo to appear. He couldn’t complain—his driver would hardly have thought he would be leaving so soon after arriving.
He sank into the back of the car, cutting short the driver’s apologies for the delay. ‘It doesn’t matter. Just get me back to the villa ASAP!’
Urgency possessed him. Urgency and a whole lot more.
Never had a car journey seemed longer, or more tormenting.
Never had emotion burned him to the quick like this, crying out the lie he was trying to cling to—the lie that was impossible to fool himself into believing any longer.
I can never be indifferent to her. I will never be immune to her.
The very words mocked him pitilessly, rendering to ashes all he had felt, all he had believed, since the woman with whom he had shared a life-changing night had left him with barely a word.
* * *
Talia clattered up the wide staircase, ignoring Fernando’s stately greeting and his enquiry if there was anything she wanted.
Yes, to get out of here! Just get out! To get to the airport and on the first flight home.
But how could she? And where was ‘home’ now?
If she wanted to keep her poor stricken mother, so utterly unable to cope with the catastrophe that had torn her life apart, somewhere familiar and comfortable while she built up her strength, then she must stick this out. She had to go on enduring the torment of Luke being so horrible, so different from the man she’d spent that night with.
She was trapped here—hideously, unbearably trapped. Perhaps he would not even keep to their deal after her outburst in the restaurant.
Tears were choking her as she reached her bedroom, leaning back against the door in anguish, features contorted, consumed by the misery that encompassed her. She kicked off her shoes, struggled out of her evening gown, her underwear, and enveloped herself in her kimono-style robe. Finally she collapsed down onto the dressing table stool and frantically unpinned her hair. She brushed it with harsh, painful strokes, as if she could brush out far more than the knots that tangled it.
Emotions raged within her, hot and heavy and choking, and she batted away the pointless tears. This wasn’t Luke! Not the man she’d known—the man she’d found such incandescent, incredible bliss with. The man who had taken her to a paradise she had never known existed. The man who had wanted to whisk her away from the misery of her life, to sweep her off in his arms to a tropical island, to a place that could be theirs and theirs alone.
The choking came in her throat again, suffocating her with anguish. A cry rose within her. Oh, dear God, the bitter irony of it. For she was here on a tropical island with him. One of the thousand islands in the Caribbean that they might have run away to...