‘Yes.’ No. She just had to get away from him. She didn’t like the way she felt when he looked at her like that. As if he saw...into her. She pushed the chair back from the table, stood and nearly tripped right back into it when her foot caught on the long hemline of Benoit’s trousers.
He reached out an arm to steady her, the muscles of his forearm corded and powerful; she looked from there to his face and his eyes...frosty blue shards flaring in the sun. She pulled herself back upright, rubbing at the spot on her arm that prickled from where he’d held her.
He’d let her off. She knew it and he knew that she knew it too.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT SHOULD HAVE been easy to get lost in a house several times the size of the one that Skye shared with her sisters, but it wasn’t. She was acutely aware of Benoit the entire day she tried to hide from him. First, she’d gone back to her room but there was absolutely no chance of her falling back to sleep again. Then she’d wanted to go for a shower but Benoit was still outside, having been for a swim, just soaking up the sun like a seal. Sleek and wet and...
Stop it!
Then, when she’d ventured downstairs to the book
case that stretched all the way up to the ceiling and ran the entire breadth of the house, she’d been overwhelmed by choice. There were thousands of books. She ran her fingers along the spines, awed by the sheer number of crime novels, biographies and architecture and design books. She found a thriller she hadn’t read and turned to go back upstairs but Benoit was cutting through the open living area so she dropped, sinking into the plush sofa, hoping that she hadn’t been seen.
She lost herself in the story of a misanthropic British secret agent two years from retirement, stalking his arch nemesis through Westminster and London to Moscow and eventually Paris. She missed the sounds of Benoit making lunch in the kitchen, missed the sounds of her stomach growling as she turned each page. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had the luxury of getting lost in a book, without worrying for her sisters or her mother.
An ache she’d been ignoring for far too long rose within her. Usually she was too busy with work, with the house, with checking on Star and Summer and her mother to pay any attention to it. But here in the stillness of Benoit’s Costa Rican paradise, with no distractions, it was getting harder and harder to ignore.
The suspicion that she hid behind all those things swirled like steam within her, thick, damp and sad. Sister, daughter, secretary, parent... The suspicion that she hid in those roles because they gave her purpose. They gave her a sense of identity, something she had lost when she had been torn between two vastly different households and ended up feeling as if she quite fitted into either of them.
She’d been so young she’d barely even had a sense of who she might be when it had seemed far easier just to be something else. The perfect, well-dressed daughter for her non-confrontational father, the stand-in parent for her half-sisters, the sensible, practical daughter for her mother—the mother who did exactly what she wanted, was exactly who she wanted to be, not having to conform to the rules because Skye was there to do it for her.
But who did Skye want to be?
‘It’s a good book, Skye, but it’s not that good,’ Benoit announced, cutting through her thoughts and the sob that had half risen in her chest. He placed a glass of wine on the table in front of her that looked red and rich and her mouth watered.
She looked up, startled. Night—it was night again?
‘You’ve been reading for about eight hours.’
‘Eight?’
‘Yes. Hungry?’
‘All I do here is eat and sleep and—’ She broke off, looking at Benoit’s broad, encouraging smile. ‘What?’
‘That is the point.’
‘Of your escape here?’
He gave a deep sigh as he sank into the corner of the large L-shaped sofa, the breath expanding a chest clearly defined by a lightweight dark wool sweater over a white linen shirt. ‘Yes. To completely switch off and recharge. There isn’t always time in France.’
‘Why Costa Rica? Why not the Caribbean or Monaco or...?’ she asked, genuinely curious.
‘Some other generic playboy destination?’
‘Yes! That, exactly,’ she replied, enthusiastically warming to the teasing, perhaps too much, desperate for a distraction from her thoughts.
Benoit leant his head back against the high arm of the sofa so that he was looking up at the ceiling. She hadn’t meant it to be a probing question, but she realised in an instant that she had pushed his thoughts to a part of his past that he didn’t want to go.
‘My brother and I used to play forts. Anaïs would pack us lunch and we’d run off to the woods for the entire day, building fires, exploring. I loved it. I thought I’d be an explorer one day. But every time I’d ask where Xander wanted to explore next. It was always the same—’
‘Costa Rica,’ they said together, Skye smiling at the sweet story.
But it was a sad smile he offered her in return. ‘I think even then we were making ourselves scarce from our father. He was...’ Benoit struggled to find the right words to describe him. ‘You never knew what mood he’d be in. He was charming and irrepressible when he was in a good mood, but most of those good moods were spent with other women, outside the home. And when it was bad he would rage through the house, berating us or our mother for some imagined slight.’ The memories of those times rose up around him. His father’s spiteful shouts, red-faced rage and fury were something he rarely dwelt on. ‘He could be paranoid and furious. It’s partly why he was so dangerous as CEO. The board thought that a wife and family would settle him, but I think we only made it worse. He had a marriage of convenience with my mother. I’m sure that she didn’t know what she was getting into, which is why she chose to run away.’
He had spent so much of his childhood protecting Xander from his father, from his mother’s absence. So yes, he knew something of what Skye felt towards her sisters. But he also knew what it had felt like when all that sacrifice, all that protection was turned against him, betrayed. Since the night his mother had left he’d always tried to protect Xander, to look out for him, to bear the brunt of his father’s fury. Only for him to sleep with Camilla.