He made the promise to himself, but it lacked true conviction. There was a part of him that loathed the fact their agreed time was coming to an end. A fortnight had seemed over-generous, initially—when had he ever wanted a woman for so long?—but he struggled now to imagine her body being denied to him. And her laugh. Her smile. Her kindness.
He closed his thoughts down with the sheer force of his willpower.
It was irrelevant. They had a deal and he intended to uphold his end of it.
‘I won’t.’
‘I’m not here for Laurence.’ She pierced him with her bright green gaze then, and he found it hard not to pull her to him, not to kiss her so that she smiled and sighed against him, her body soft and pliant.
‘Then why did you agree to this?’
‘Honestly?’
‘That’s what we said, isn’t it?’
Her nod was just a slow lift of her head. ‘I wanted you. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about you.’
His eyes swept shut for a moment, and he hated how delirious her admission made him feel. It was the exact opposite of what he wanted. He hadn’t com
e into this expecting to feel anything. It was sex—lots of sex, great sex—with a woman who meant nothing to him. More than that, she was exactly the kind of woman he wouldn’t usually touch with a ten-foot pole—her aristocratic roots were a permanent mark against her.
But she was nothing like he’d expected, nothing like her reputation suggested and nothing like he presumed her upbringing would have made her. She was just Jemima. Sweet, kind and utterly compelling.
‘Yes, I was desperate for you to buy into the hedge fund. And I’m so glad you did. I couldn’t bear to see Laurence fail and hopefully, if the market goes well, he’ll be able to help with Almer Hall soon, to take some of the pressure off me.’ Her smile reached deep inside him and yanked at his heart. ‘But I never would have agreed to sleep with you again, no matter the price, if it wasn’t what I really wanted.’
There was danger in her promise, danger because it suggested she was offering something he had intentionally avoided all his life. Acceptance. Affection.
He was glad their time together was almost over, glad their clean break was at hand. Glad he could go back to the way things had been before this.
Except, he wasn’t.
He thought of that future, he thought of not seeing her again, and something like a blade pressed against his chest, making breathing something of which he was painfully aware.
He turned his face away from her for a moment, a frown etched across his features as he studied the view from the window. There wasn’t much to see—just the dark ocean with a single, shimmering triangle of moonlight right at its centre.
‘So if I cancelled my investment now you wouldn’t mind?’
He felt the movement of the bed as she shifted a little. ‘Of course I would. But not because I’ve been here for a fortnight, and this relationship was predicated on that, and you’d be breaking your word or whatever. I’d mind because you made a promise to Laurence and he’s counting on you. I’d mind because it would be a terrible thing to do.’
He turned back to face her and spoke softly, wanting to erase the little line of worry that had formed around her eyes. ‘Relax. I have no intention of doing any such thing. But you are naive if you don’t see how connected my investment is with your decision to become my mistress.’
‘I...didn’t say they weren’t connected.’
‘I propositioned you because I desired you, and because I knew that desire to be mutual. But you agreed because you couldn’t not.’ Her face paled beneath his scrutiny. ‘I told you, I’m good at this. I manoeuvre all the pieces until I get what I want. It’s not luck. It’s not chance. It’s how I work.’
It was dark in the room, only the brief glint of moonlight to provide any illumination, but he saw the hint of tears on her lashes. ‘You’re wrong,’ she whispered. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’
Rejection fired through him, but he softened his tone, speaking calmly, gently, with only the slightest undercurrent of iron. ‘Yes, it is. And that’s okay. We all have our price—at least yours was charged in the service of something noble.’
* * *
His words were still ringing in his own ears in the morning; he hated to think of how she must feel, of how she was remembering what he’d said. They hadn’t spoken again since. She’d turned her back on him and silence had fallen, so it had been impossible to push those words from his mind, impossible to forget how he’d felt and why he’d said that.
But as night gave way to dawn, and she continued to sleep beside him, he pushed carefully out of bed. It was their last day together, their last night, and the thought gave him no pleasure.
He wasn’t ready to let her go.
It was the one thing he was certain of. The night before, he’d told himself it would be a relief to end this, but that had been a lie.