At the thought of what might be to come—the ridicule, the spite, the relentless pressure—the limoncello turned to battery acid in my stomach and the lobster and fruit revolted. Despite the warm breeze rustling through the palm trees, I couldn’t breathe. My hands shook. Nausea rolled through me. Paradise had become poisonous.
Sweating, with panic tightening my throat and my heart beating too fast, I headed back to my room and rang first Seb and then, out of a weird kind of desperation, my mother, but both calls went to voicemail. I hung up, feeling achingly alone, hatefully pathetic, vulnerable and weak.
What was I going to do?
I couldn’t stay here. It was doubtful I’d be recognised by any of the guests, but I was a sitting duck for a pap with a boat and a long-lensed camera. Yet if I left, where would I go? I couldn’t go home. I’d be mobbed. And there was no one there for me anyway. Seb was on the other side of the world and why I’d called my estranged mother was beyond me.
I needed time to regroup and restore my defences. Somewhere safe. Secure. Where I’d be accommodated and protected, if not welcomed. Where at least if I was judged, I’d be expecting it.
I wasn’t as alone as I felt, I reminded myself, a glimmer of light flickering in the darkness as I recalled the resolve with which Nick had told me he’d help with the management of my fortune. Could Seb have been right yet again? Was Nick indeed the man I needed right now?
He had to be. There was no one else.
‘Do you want me to come and get you?’ he said curtly, answering on the first ring.
I swallowed hard, hating the tightness of my throat and the crushing pressure on my chest, hating my despair and dependency, especially on him. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘I’ll be there in an hour.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THECLOUDSHADthickened quite a bit by the time we arrived back on Suza, Nick’s island, but that was about as much of the journey as I registered. Stunned and distraught, I’d barely been aware of even moving as I’d packed up my things and settled my bill, let alone taken note of my surroundings or the man who’d so swiftly come to my rescue. I’d lost the capacity for speech. Thoughts had spun through my head like the whirring engine of the boat carrying me and my suitcase to relative safety. Even the jarring bounciness of the waves couldn’t distract me from the chaos roiling around inside me.
How could it be happening all over again? Where would I find the strength and resilience to get through it? Could I even begin to hope that in this clickbait-y world today’s headlines would be tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapping?
Every cell of my body was on the brink of splintering, I realised as Nick showed me to an elegant guest suite and set my suitcase beside the enormous bed. Tears of frustration and helplessness had been stinging my eyes since I’d read the headlines and my nerves were stretched to snapping point. But I refused to break down in front of him. He’d run a mile, no doubt with a sigh of yet more exasperation at my drama, and then I’d have another thing to feel awkward about.
‘I’ll leave you to settle in,’ he said, his jaw set, his expression stony, the irritation I could feel vibrating off him completely understandable when my being here had to be disruptive, inconvenient and the very last thing he needed.
I swallowed hard and accepted the guilt as just one more emotion piling in on top of the rest. ‘I’m so sorry about all this.’
He shot me a dark, frustrated look. ‘How is it your fault?’
‘Isn’t everything?’
‘No.’
‘It certainly feels as though it is,’ I said, my voice thick, my throat tight. ‘I’m the one who lived a shallow and frivolous life back then and was regularly photographed stumbling out of taxis before falling from grace. I’m the one with the winning lottery ticket now. But thank you for coming to my rescue. I had no one else to call.’
Something flickered in the depths of his eyes, but it had vanished before I could even begin to decipher it. ‘Not a problem,’ he said, turning on his heel and heading for the door. ‘If you need anything, let me know.’
I felt marginally stronger after a weep fest and a shower, but I had no doubt it would take a lot more than that to unravel the tangle of emotions churning through me. On top of everything else that had happened recently, processing this latest development was simply too much for my poor battered and bruised brain to handle.
As if in solidarity, the puffiness of my eyes and the redness of my nose were proving an insurmountable challenge for my make-up, and as I stared at myself in the mirror, flinching at my reflection, I was sorely tempted to hole up in my room until I’d made sense of everything going on. Only when I’d constructed a rock-solid facade of cool indifference would I be ready to face my reluctant host.
But that could take days and I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone with my tumultuous thoughts for a moment longer. They were too huge, too complicated, too overwhelming and I was teetering on the brink of total collapse. Nick had said to let him know if I needed anything, and right now I needed a distraction. I’d already texted Seb to let him know where I was, and reading the hundreds of emails that were still flooding in appealed about as much as morbidly scouring the headlines. But there was always the financial planning report Nick had sent.Thatrequired attention. So, having shoved on a pair of sunglasses to achieve the result that make-up had failed to do, I lifted my chin, pulled my shoulders back and headed downstairs.
Following the faint sounds of his voice, I found him in a room that had to be his study, facing the window and staring out to sea with his big broad back to me. He was raking one hand through his hair in what looked like a gesture of frustration and holding his phone to his ear with the other.
‘I want them gone,’ he was saying with a cutting coldness that sent a shiver down my spine despite the heavy warmth of the air breezing in through the window and fluttering the papers on the enormous mahogany desk. ‘The pictures. The articles. The photographers. I don’t care what it costs. Just get it done. Now.’
He hung up and turned slightly to stash the phone in the back pocket of his jeans and went still when he caught sight of me. He looked me up and down in a way that made me strangely aware of what I was wearing—a short yellow dress with spaghetti straps that suddenly felt a lot skimpier than when I’d put it on—and for the briefest, most bizarre of moments I forgot how to breathe. My lungs seized. My breasts tightened and tingled, and my temperature shot so high I felt as if I were about to spontaneously combust.
But before I could work out what on earth was going on, his dark, unexpectedly stormy gaze landed on my face and his brows snapped together, which instantly refocused my attention and loosened my chest enough for me to breathe and my brain enough to engage.
‘Who was that?’ I said, making a pre-emptive strike designed to deflect both a remark on the evidence of my earlier distress, and—an even greater threat to what little self-possession I was clinging onto—an albeit unlikely enquiry into how I might be feeling.
‘My head of PR.’