Remembering how she’d pushed him away, and the distance in her voice as she’d told him that she only wanted him because he was there, he felt his stomach clench. Not with anger—for that would have meant he thought she was telling the truth, and he knew without question that she had
been lying to him.
Except, of course, the part when she’d told him that she wanted him to leave. She had wanted him to leave, but only because she didn’t want a witness to her pain. A week ago he would have believed her cover story—would have been drawn by the apparent confirmation in her words of who he thought she was: a hustler he had every reason not to trust.
Now, though, it wasn’t Cristina he was struggling to trust but himself.
An image of her face—pale, strained and young—slid into his head, and he felt his breathing quicken. Suddenly he was moving again, as though by doing so he could put some space between himself and that picture of her looking so tense and wary.
Had she wanted to, she could easily have seduced him. It would have been the perfect moment, for there was no way he could have resisted her. She had brought him to his knees…reduced him to nothing more than a rippling mass of impulses. His face felt suddenly hot with an almost adolescent shame as he remembered how effortlessly she had robbed him of his reason and resistance.
But hadn’t it been inevitable that it should happen? They’d been alone in her room, and they’d been tiptoeing around one another since the moment she’d stepped foot on the island, the attraction between them invisible and yet omnipresent, heavy and taut—like rain about to fall.
So why, then, had she stopped?
A beat of blood pulsed inside his chest.
Every time he’d imagined just such a scenario in his head it had played out in many ways, but each time the outcome had been the same. With the two of them alone in her room, Cristina lifting her mouth to his, her breath whispering against his lips, her body blurring beneath his fingers…
He’d expected her to offer herself to him, slowly peeling off her clothes in front of his unfocused gaze, only for him to push her away, demonstrating his resolve before casually turning his back on her.
Only none of that had happened. It had been she who had stopped it—not him. He’d been wrong, so maybe he’d been wrong about her in Segovia. Maybe she really hadn’t known who he was.
His mouth twisted.
Or maybe she was playing the long game? Using her body to mess with his head.
How was he supposed to know?
He’d thought he understood Cristina but he didn’t know the woman who had pushed him away, and her sudden physical and emotional retreat was not just baffling, it had got under his skin.
It was all deeply unsatisfactory. And confusing. And he hated it. He disliked and distrusted anything he couldn’t classify and contain. But it was proving impossible to do either with Cristina, or any decision involving her.
Even his presence on the island now seemed rash and irrational; he was there because he’d thought she had set him up and he didn’t trust her to be near his parents. Now, though, that image of an unscrupulous, manipulative Cristina just didn’t match up with the panicked woman he had watched retreat into herself. He no longer knew what was real and what was just him being paranoid.
What he did know was that being around her all the time was no longer necessary on his parents’ account. If she was a threat to anything it was to his sanity and—he glanced down at the outline of his erection—to his self-control.
He couldn’t function with Cristina constantly in his thoughts. And she was in his thoughts all the time—at breakfast, during every single lap he swam in the pool, and as he was lying wide-eyed in his bed every night.
He needed distance and discipline. Not easy when he was stuck here with a woman who could so easily bypass his defences. The only woman, in fact, ever to do so.
His lip curled. The less time he spent with her the better—and not just because his physical response to her was instant, extreme, and quite frankly painful. She threatened his equilibrium in other ways. Feeling her withdraw from him, watching that flicker of vulnerability in those beautiful brown eyes, had moved him more than he was willing to acknowledge.
He blew out a breath. Cristina had got inside his head and she was proving impossible to dislodge. But there was a solution—an obvious one. Work had never let him down, and in having decided to stay in Spain he had created an ample backlog for himself. He would speak to his PA and soon he would be too busy to think about Cristina Shephard.
For now though, a cold shower should help dull the ache in his groin and, turning, he walked determinedly towards the bathroom.
*
On legs that still shook Cristina walked across the room and closed her window. She knew logically that it wasn’t cold. She could see the sun and feel the warm air on her skin. But that didn’t seem to matter. She felt cold to the bone and brutally tired—as though she’d run a race.
Her mouth trembled. A race she’d clearly lost.
Maybe it would always be like this. Maybe it wouldn’t matter how fast or how far she ran she would never escape her past. Somehow it would always pull her back.
Reaching down, she picked up the photographs from where they’d fallen. She carefully pushed them back into the portfolio and sat down on the bed.
It was her own fault. She should have told him to leave sooner. Or better still left herself.