“But we can make it work, you and I!”
“No, we can’t.” He’d had enough. He was trying to be nice, trying not to be cruel, but this woman didn’t seem to understand subtleties. He needed to be explicit, it seemed. “You and I will never be together, do you understand?”
Glaring at him with unshed tears glinting in her eyes, her mouth straightened to a hard line. The flirtatiousness was all gone. “Fine. Have it your way—for now, but you just wait.”
Maxim began backing out of his room again, not even caring anymore whether the floorboards creaked. “I’ve had a long day and I’m going to bed.” He waved at his bed dismissively. “If you want to stay, fine with me.” He was sure that the sheets would be infused with that cloying perfume she liked to wear, and after having feasted on Sienna’s earthy, mesmerizing scent, it would be more than he could bear. “There are plenty of other rooms in the house I can borrow for the night.”
Éloïse curled her lip at him contemptuously and in grating French, questioned his masculinity. Max didn’t even care. Her opinion of him was inconsequential. And then, as he turned, he heard her mutter, “I told her it wouldn’t work.”
He stopped dead and spun around. “What?”
“Nothing,” Éloïse said, but Max didn’t like the knowledge her eyes shielded. She placed both hands against his chest and shoved him backward into the hallway.
But he knew. He understood exactly what she meant. His mother had been behind all this. She’d probably urged Éloïse to try to seduce him.
The wave of revulsion made him shudder. He needed to get away. He made his way down the hall in his undershorts. It was a large house, and there were a couple of unoccupied guest rooms. The direction he took was opposite to the one in which his father and mother’s suite lay. His dad was still off on his trip, but there was the risk that his mother would hear him, and that was a risk he wasn’t prepared to take.
Slipping into the first guest room he found, he carefully pulled the door back into place. In the silence of the house, the sound of the door closing might just as well have been a firecracker. He cringed, waited, but nobody called out. Nobody came.
Maxim would have killed to have been in his own bed, surrounded by his own scent and familiar items, but any port in a storm, he reminded himself. And when he closed his eyes, it was lights out.