THE BUSINESS OF procuring her new passport prevented any further conversation beyond the practical, but that didn’t stop Carla’s head spinning with everything that Rico had told her in the car.
When she’d finished telling her tale, which oddly hadn’t been as difficult as she’d feared, and prompted him to reveal his, she’d never dreamt it could be as upsetting as it had been.
The things he’d been through... The loss of his parents... The shunting between foster families and finding himself on the streets... And then the horrors of the gang he’d joined that she couldn’t even begin to imagine...
He’d been so young. He’d suffered so much. He’d been abandoned and then left to fend for himself. He’d been tortured, by the sounds of things, and she was
sure that wasn’t all of it. How could her heart not have twisted and ached for him? How could she not have burned up with the injustice of it? She could barely bring herself to think about the brutality he must have experienced. And yet he’d been so cool, so unfazed as he’d recounted the desperate nature of his childhood, as if he were talking about someone else entirely.
How had he achieved that level of acceptance? she wondered, her eyes still stinging faintly and her throat still tight as they were ushered into an office without Rico even having to give his name. Had shutting himself down been the only way to handle the impact of his experiences? Was that why he’d chosen to cut himself off from others both geographically and emotionally?
It was astonishing he was as together as he was, in all honesty. Unlike her, it didn’t sound as if he’d had any support, at least in the emotional sense. Unlike her, he’d had to make sense of everything entirely on his own. Yet, somehow, like her, he’d come through it and used it to make a success of his life. His determination and resilience matched her own. As did the lengths he went to in order to protect himself.
So where else might the similarities lie? she couldn’t help wondering, even though it had no bearing on anything. They’d both lacked a proper home with roots. They both had an insanely strong work ethic and a reluctance to share personal information. Apart from unbelievable chemistry, what else might they have in common?
She didn’t get the opportunity to probe further and find out. The consul himself—whose wife apparently ran a charity supporting homeless kids, which Rico generously supported, hence the owed favour—appeared within moments and ten minutes later, having obtained her passport, she and Rico were heading for the exit.
But when she suggested taking a tour of the city with the aim of continuing their earlier conversation under the guise of seeing the sights, he claimed he needed to get back to work. Her subsequent invitation to lunch was refused, and when she told him she knew how he felt about skipping meals he merely muttered something about grabbing a sandwich at the airport.
The guard he’d momentarily dropped for her had shot back up, she realised in the car on the way back to his helicopter—a journey spent in an uncomfortably prickly silence—and it was more disappointing than she could have imagined, because she sensed there was so much more to him and his story.
Never mind the fact that she’d revealed nothing of the effects her experience had had on her. She wanted to know more about how his had affected him. Not for Finn, who’d be fine with the facts, but for herself. Now she’d had a glimpse of the intriguing man beneath the surface, she wanted to smash through his defences and find out everything.
And not just on that front.
His continued indifference to her after what had happened last night was another source of increasing bewilderment and distress, even though she really ought not to be thinking about it at all. Why wasn’t he suffering from her proximity the way she was from his? was the shameful thought that kept running through her head. Why, when he’d mentioned the occasion she’d seen the scars on his chest, had he remained so unmoved, while she’d instantly caught fire? How could he continue to act as if nothing had happened?
Maybe he really had wiped it from his mind. Perhaps what she’d assumed to be denial was, in actual fact, a complete lack of interest. Perhaps she’d in some way disappointed him. And yet she hadn’t imagined the heat and fierceness of their kiss, or his loss of control that had gone with it. The swirling intensity of his eyes, blazing into hers, was seared onto her memory.
And she might as well admit she wanted more of it all.
In the absence of conversation, the desire she’d managed to get under some sort of control while they’d been talking was flooding back, drumming through her with increasing potency with every passing moment, and by the time they were back in the helicopter and once again flying over the land below she couldn’t help feeling that perhaps she’d been a bit pathetic by fleeing his kitchen like that.
Since when did she run away from anything these days? Why hadn’t she stayed and handled the hot situation with the cool she was capable of? She’d dealt with far worse. So what had she been so afraid of? How awful would it have been if she hadn’t been distracted by the burning garlic and things had reached their natural conclusion?
She had nothing to fear from Rico or the fierce passion he aroused in her. They weren’t really kindred spirits, despite her overly dramatic proclamation, which had been made in a rare moment of emotional weakness, and it wasn’t as if she was actually contemplating a relationship with the man. The last thing she wanted was commitment, or any kind of emotional intimacy, for that matter, when emotions involving the opposite sex were so dangerous, but he clearly wasn’t all that keen on attachment either.
So surely there was nothing stopping her having one night with him, she told herself, going a bit giddy at the very thought of it. She was leaving in the morning. She could embrace and explore the desire she felt for him without the fear of being manipulated or sucked in any deeper, and she could depart with no looking back and no regrets. Who knew when she’d next get the chance?
She wanted him, quite desperately, and, while whether he still wanted her was another matter, one thing was certain—she would never know if she didn’t ask.
* * *
Now they were back, Rico needed to remove himself from Carla’s vicinity before he made a move from which there would be no return.
Two moves, actually.
First off, it appeared that revealing the barest details of his life to date had acted as something of a trigger and he’d found himself wanting to tell her not only everything but also how he felt about it all, which was wholly unacceptable and made absolutely no sense.
Why would he ever want to do that? he’d asked himself while she’d been signing the forms and taking possession of the travel document that was so important to her. To create that kind of connection he’d have to be mad, and even he couldn’t be so reckless as to risk that kind of insanity.
Nevertheless, despite his best efforts to put it from his mind he’d been so unsettled by their conversation in the car he’d automatically answered her question about the favour owed him by the consul, and at that point he’d realised he’d be better off not talking at all.
Which brought him to move number two, namely the increasingly difficult to resist desire hammering away inside him that in the absence of conversation had swollen to unbearable proportions.
He hated the fact that it was so hard to control. He couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that one tiny loosening of his grip on it would unravel him completely. He didn’t want to want Carla—she’d been bang on about that—any more than he wanted to keep dwelling on what she’d told him about being so sickeningly abused. He didn’t want to wonder how she’d felt about it then or how she felt about it now, or what long-lasting effects it might have had. He wasn’t jealous of the support she’d had in the shape of a best friend. The stab of shame that he’d felt when he’d caught the appalled shock in her eyes at his confession he’d actually joined the gang, as if he’d somehow let her down, had been wholly unnecessary. He had no need to apologise for anything. There was no point in regretting anything he’d done and it didn’t matter one jot if he disappointed her. Why did he care about proving to her his integrity? They weren’t kindred spirits. They couldn’t be.
The crushing pressure of everything battering at his head and body was too much to bear and he didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to hold it together. So he was going to hole up in his study until six o’clock in the morning, repairing the dent in his fortune and those of his clients while cobbling together some sort of control over everything he was suffering, and to hell with whether that made him a lily-livered coward and a terrible host. Carla could fend for herself. He’d had enough.