‘I wanted to talk.’
‘Seems to be the fashion at the moment.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind,’ he muttered.
‘I thought we could go to your hotel. Maybe a meeting room or something.’ Not his apartment though. No. Way too many disturbing and distracting memories there.
‘Good idea,’ he said, taking her arm and wheeling her round. ‘You’d better come with me.’
He marched her out of the gym at such a rate that she had to jog to keep up. He held her tight as he led her into his hotel and across the lobby and she tried not to respond to the feel of him that she’d so badly missed. When he bypassed the ground-floor meeting rooms and took her to the lift she protested but her protest went unnoticed.
By the time they reached his apartment Lily was out of breath and her stomach was fluttering because Kit had a kind of energy about him, a sizzling sort of tension and a sense of purpose that she’d never seen before and it was doing crazy things to her heart.
&n
bsp; He dropped his things on a chair, then thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and turned to face her. At the fire in his eyes and the intensity of his expression, Lily’s knees nearly gave way and a flicker of hope at the thought that she might not have screwed things up for good began to burn deep inside her.
Kit raked his gaze over her. ‘Dan was right,’ he said flatly. ‘You do look awful.’
‘So do you.’
‘Yes, well, I feel it.’
‘Me too.’
‘But I’m glad you’re here,’ he said, flashing her a quick, lethal smile.
Oh, thank goodness for that, she thought, letting out a breath of relief because he was acting so oddly she hadn’t been sure. ‘You are?’
Kit nodded. ‘Saves me a journey.’
‘Where were you going?’
‘To come and find you.’
Lily felt her heart turn over and that little flame of hope began to burn a little more fiercely. ‘Oh.’
‘So my carbon footprint thanks you.’
‘It’s welcome. But now can I tell you what I came to say?’ she said, feeling so encouraged by the fact that he hadn’t ignored her or turned her away that she was now practically exploding with the need to fix what she’d done.
‘In a moment,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’
‘I don’t want to sit down.’
‘Sit.’
She sat, even more bemused and now quite a bit more turned on by his dark, edgy demeanour. ‘Are you all right, Kit?’ she asked, leaning forwards and looking at him closely. ‘You seem, I don’t know, a bit weird.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Sure,’ she murmured, and then couldn’t quite remember what she’d been thinking because Kit was fixing her with a look that had her heart thumping and her mouth going dry and her head swimming.
‘OK, so here’s the thing, Lily,’ he said, and for some reason she shivered. ‘Despite what happened a fortnight ago, we are not over.’
As his words hit her poor, battered brain her heart tripped and then swelled to bursting. ‘You have no idea how glad I am to hear you say that, because—’