Their eyes clashed and there was so much in that look, so much unspoken and important. ‘I will.’ A gravelled admission that exploded through her.
She could barely look at him as she walked away, and every step towards the lift was an agony. The doors opened and she stepped inside, only then trusting her gaze to flip back to the door of the penthouse, craving one last look at Santos despite the fact she could see him with her eyes shut.
The door was closed.
* * *
He pressed his back against the door, his breathing rough, his body tense. Adrenalin hammered through him.
Go after her.
But what the hell for? Another night? Two? Until he no longer felt this addictive yearning for her?
He had always had the deepest determination not to hurt women—women as an abstract concept. With Amelia, that became very specific.
He wouldn’t hurt her. With his life, he pledged that.
Inviting her to stay longer would be a doorway to pain and he couldn’t do it. Already he could see her ambivalence and uncertainty. She’d been carefully measured but he knew her better than that now.
He had to let her go. He wasn’t his father. He didn’t use women for his own selfish purposes, disregarding how that might affect them. Santos was perfectly capable of having a sexual affair without letting his emotions into the equation, but he wasn’t so sure about Amelia. The street artist’s comment had simply cemented his doubts on that score. She deserved a family—not the illusion of one but the real deal. And, the longer she spent with Cameron and him, the more likely she’d be to imagine... He shook his head against the door, his lungs bursting. It was impossible.
He stayed pressed to the door for several minutes. Long enough for Amelia’s lift to have reached the lobby, for Leo to have lifted her suitcase into the boot, for him to have pulled the SUV out from the kerb and begun the drive to Charles de Gaulle.
And so she was gone.
* * *
He wasn’t a fool. The fact he hadn’t been with another woman a month after he’d last seen Amelia was an indication of how much their arrangement had affected him.
He wasn’t interested in being with anyone else. Not yet. The idea of having sex with any other woman left him cold.
He told himself it was just as well—Cameron wasn’t adjusting well to life in Athens and was taking more of Santos’s time and attention than he’d anticipated. But, still, his nights were free. Once the six-year-old was in bed, Santos was able to do as he wanted.
And yet he spent his time alone, in his study, catching up on work or losing himself in board reports. He also cursed the day he’d ever met Amelia Ashford.
* * *
Teaching made Amelia happy. Winscott Village made Amelia happy. Playing chess with Brent made her happy. Her work on the Hayashi Analysis made her happy.
But in the four weeks since leaving Paris—since leaving Santos and Cameron—Amelia had felt a heaviness deep inside her that nothing was able to shift. There was no happiness in anything any more.
It was a grief—but different from what she’d gone through when her parents had cut her from their life. Those emotions had made sense.
This didn’t.
She and Santos had been clear from the start. She’d known all along that she’d be coming back to Winscott to take up her teaching position. She’d known it would end and she’d simply enjoyed the time they had.
So why did she feel as though she was barely holding it together?
The days were something to be got through. She taught, and she went through the motions of being the teacher her pupils needed her to be, but at the end of the day she locked up her classroom and went home, stripping off her clothes as she walked to her bedroom, where she would curl up in bed, pull the duvet to her neck and simply stare at the wall.
The nights were the worst.
She’d outgrown nightmares as a ten-year-old but they were back now. Awful, terrifying nightmares—Cameron running through fire and her not being able to reach him, Santos following behind, neither of them coming out. It was all so vivid that she’d wake up in a sweat and take several seconds to remind herself that it was just a bad dream—they were fine. So far as she knew, at least.
The nights when she didn’t have nightmares were even worse, because then her head was filled with Santos—all the ways he’d made himself some sort of master to her body and its impulses; all the ways he’d made her feel more alive than she’d known possible. Those dreams were a form of torture from which she never wanted to wake.
The loneliness was awful.