The realisation made her throat clutch, telling her how much things had changed since her arrival.
My whole life has changed—because of Marc...
It was not until a fortnight later, as she checked her calendar with sudden, hollowing realisation, that she knew just how much...
* * *
Marc stood on the terrace of his penthouse residence in one of Manhattan’s most luxurious hotels, staring out over the glittering city. His meeting was over, and the client was pleased and satisfied with what Bank Derenz had achieved for him. Now, with the evening ahead of him, Marc shifted restlessly.
There was something else he wanted.
Someone.
I want Tara—I want her here with me now. To enjoy the evening with me. I want to take her to dinner, to see her smile lighting up her eyes—sometimes dazzling, sometimes teasing, sometimes warm with laughter. I want to talk about whatever it was we used to talk about, in that conversation that seemed to flow so freely and naturally. And, yes, sometimes I want to spar with her, to hear her sometimes deadpan irony and those sardonic quips that draw a smile from me even now as I remember them...
And after dinner we’d come back here, and she’d be standing beside me, my arm around her, all of Manhattan glittering just for us. And she’d lift her face to mine, her eyes aglow, and I would catch her lips with mine and sweep her up, take her to my bed...
He could feel his body ache with desire for her, the blood heating in his veins.
With an effort of sheer will he tore his mind away from that beguiling scene so vivid in his head. He must not dwell on the woman he had left sleeping that morning, her oh-so-beautiful body naked in his bed, her glorious hair swathed across the pillow, her high, rounded breasts rising and falling with the gentle sound of her breathing.
It had been hard to leave her. Hard to reject her plea to come with him. Harder than he’d wanted it to be. Harder than it should have been. Harder than it was safe to have been—
But the safe thing for him to do had been to leave her. He knew that—knew it for all the reasons that had made him so wary of yielding as he had...yielding to his desire for her.
And the fact that he wanted to yield to it again, that his body so longed to do so, that he wanted to phone her now, tell her a flight was booked for her and that she should join him in New York, must make him even more wary.
It isn’t safe to want her. It isn’t safe because it’s what she wants too. She asked outright—asked to come with me, wanted more than what we had in France. How much more would she have asked of me? Expected of me?
That was the truth of it. The harsh, necessary truth he’d always had to live his life by.
His eyes shadowed, thoughts turbid. He was making himself face what he did not want to face, but must—as he always had.
If I bring her here...keep her with me...how can I know if it’s me she’s choosing or Banc Derenz?
That was the reason he now turned away from the plate-glass window overlooking the city far below.
His thoughts went back to when he had last set eyes on her, sleeping so peacefully in his bed. He had slipped past her, to the bedside table, where he had placed the farewell note he had scrawled. And his gift for her.
The gift that would part him from her for ever. The gift that he’d left, quite deliberately, to tell her that what they’d had was over.
To tell himself...
* * *
Tara leant against the window frame of her bedroom at the cottage, breathing in the night air of the countryside. So sweet and fresh after the polluted traffic fumes of London. An owl hooted in the distance, and that was the only sound.
No ceaseless murmurings of cicadas, no sound of the sea lapping at the rocky shore, no scent of flowers too delicate for England...
No Marc beside her, gazing out over the wine-dark sea with her, listening to the soft Mediterranean night, his arm warm around her, drawing her against his body, before he turned her to him, lowered his mouth to hers, led her indoors to his bed, to his embrace...
She felt her heart twist, her body fill with longing.
But to what purpose?
Marc was gone from her life and she from his. She must accept it—accept what had happened and accept everything about the life she faced now.
Accept that what I feel for him, for the loss of him, is not what I thought I would feel. Accept that there is nothing I can do about it but what I am doing now. Accept that what I’m doing is all that I can do. All that can happen now.