“I’ll only stay if you talk to me.” She touched her face. “I like this.”
Ah, she meant his hair-free face. He sighed. She moved, threw the covers back and swung her legs around.
She would go unless he stopped her. “I am very different to what I was.” That point reinforced by the fact he was a good size bigger than he’d been. She stilled, her back to him. “Get back under the covers, it’s cold in here.”
“You have bare feet. You get under the covers.”
He grunted, he’d already broken a bunch of rules that allowed him to be here, but his feet were freezing. He pulled the quilt from the bottom of the bed and drew it over his legs.
She got back in the bed. “Go on.”
“Alan was a chemist. Smart about money. We were well off. I went to the best schools, the best universities, Sydney, London.”
“Alan?”
“My father. I stopped calling him Dad when Mum died.”
She folded her arm. “Keep talking.”
“We built a business.” He’d made it sound like a simple thing. It was anything but simple. “Alan was the science, I was everything else. But we argued, we fell out, and I lost it.”
“Lost, as in put it somewhere and can’t remember?”
He shook his head. Not a kind of lost he could explain to her. “I don’t have amnesia, Foley. I’m not a man you should romanticise. There won’t ever be a happy ending here.”
He said it and realised that’s probably what she was doing, playing beauty to his beast. He pushed the quilt off and stood. He went to the window. He should never have brought her here, told her his name. He should never have kissed her because now that’s all he wanted to do, crawl up that bed to her side and hold her, feel her skin on his, trace her jaw with his lips and nose, with his cheek, put his hands on her and know she wanted hers on him. She’d be naked under that cashmere. He’d showered, he’d shaved. He’d done that for her. No. No. No.
The storm of her was still in his body, still in his heart and he had no right to it. Outside the wind crashed through the tops of trees and moaned and he was trapped here with another of his bad decisions.
“Talk to me.”
/> He turned. She was right behind him. “Go back to bed.” He spoke gruffly, mad with himself, with her, with his father and the board and the lawyers and that anger never went away, it was always so close to the surface. “Fuck, Foley, get in that bed.” He needed her away from him.
“No.”
“That’s not an answer I want.”
“I don’t answer to you.”
He stepped around her. He had to leave, go back downstairs where he was allowed to be, this room, this house, too many mistakes, itching at his brain.
“What did you lose?”
He made it to the door. He’d lost too much. Colleen Adderton, Harold Ameden, Swen Aslog, too many people hurt, too much money at stake. Too many careers and egos, and he’d made it all happen, it still happened, he couldn’t stop it then, he couldn’t now. The only thing he could do was walk away before it destroyed him too.
It came out of him in a ragged whisper. “It was my ambition, my fault.”
Her arms wrapped around him from behind. “You can tell me.”
He couldn’t tell her. He’d dirty her too. She’d hate him like the victims and their families did. She’d be right to. He tried to step out of her hold, but he was so tired of the guilt, of his powerlessness, of fighting his need for her.
“You have to get away from me.”
“I’m not frightened of you. I don’t believe you’re a bad person. Something bad happened to you, but we can fix it.”
He’d tried to fix it. Spent millions of dollars trying to fix it. Lawyers and courts, action group, campaigns. “What the fuck can you do about it?” He broke her hold and turned to face her. “You can’t fix anything. You can’t cure me. You have no idea what I’ve done.”
“Then tell me.”