At exactly the same time, Eve and Luca looked up.
‘No,’ they said together, their eyes meeting and in that meeting was a moment of shared and delicious collusion.
But when the technician had wiped off the conducting jelly and told her to get dressed, Eve began to feel slightly uneasy. Luca’s face was a study in brooding displeasure. She reached for her trousers.
‘I’d better get dressed.’
‘I’ll wait outside,’ said Luca shortly.
As she pulled on her clothes Eve told herself that she was not going to be intimidated by him. She was not. She could tell that he was mad—hopping mad—but he had no right to tell her how to run her life.
She sighed as she slithered into a pair of trousers with difficulty. Things had been going so swimmingly, too. He had behaved like a perfect angel on trips to see the doctor, shamelessly charming her so that the medic had billed and cooed at him with what Eve had thought was quite unprofessional abandon. He flew in at the drop of a hat, as if he were merely travelling from one part of the South Coast to another, and not from another country.
But then he travelled a lot. She knew that because he had told her, in one of his increasingly frequent telephone calls to see how she was.
She had begun to look forward to them. In a way, it was easier talking to him on the phone—then she didn’t have to look at his gorgeous dark face or cope with the very real awareness of him as a man, and how her feelings towards him hadn’t changed.
Or rather, they had. The attraction she felt for him hadn’t, but getting to know him had made her realise what she had always feared, deep down—what she had thought the moment she’d seen him on the other side of the room at Michael and Lizzy’s party.
That he was ‘the one’.
But that was strictly a one-way street and there was absolutely no point going down there.
He was waiting for her outside in Reception and his face was like thunder.
‘Did you bring the car?’
She nodded.
‘Give me the keys.’
She handed them over and wondered if she was becoming one of those frightful women who secretly wanted to be dominated. But she reasoned that maybe it was just nice to have someone take over for a change. She yawned.
He didn’t say a word when they got in the car, and when they were headed out towards the Hamble he still maintained a simmering silence.
‘Luca?’
‘Not now, Eve,’ he said quietly. ‘I am trying very hard to concentrate on driving and if we have this conversation then I am very afraid I won’t be able to.’
He waited until they were back in her cottage and then he let rip.
‘Are you going to explain what all that was about?’
‘You mean the film crew?’
‘Please don’t play games with me, Eve. You are an intelligent woman—you know exactly what I mean.’
She sat down in one of the armchairs and looked up at him defiantly. ‘It’s for the programme.’
‘Yes, I gathered that much.’
‘They wanted to film the scan, that’s all.’
‘That’s all?’
She shot a glance at him. ‘I don’t see what the problem is.’
He gave an angry laugh. ‘You don’t see what the problem is?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘What, for half the nation to be staring at your naked stomach!’