Christmas with Her Bodyguard

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.’

‘And you expect me to believe that?’

Something flashed through her eyes for a split second before she shut it down. It shocked Myles to realise that he recognised it as regret.

‘I expect that you probably won’t. But I didn’t ask you to. I simply asked you to listen to me.’

‘So you could make out that I was no better than that pervert bodyguard of yours?’

But what really rattled him was the realisation that, if what she was saying were true, then it was all too accurate a description.

Her face might as well have been on fire but to her credit she didn’t drop her gaze. If anything, she tilted her head a little higher.

‘That’s not at all what I’m saying. You’re nothing like him. I knew exactly what was happening between you and me, but I didn’t have a clue what he was doing.’

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‘He was making a name for himself,’ Myles snarled. ‘That’s what he was doing.’

‘Yes, thank you. Well, that became clear after the fact.’

She threw her hands up in the air, her composure slipping, and to Myles’ shock he realised that his fury was aimed more at the slimy Justin than at Rae.

‘Did you love him?’ He didn’t know why he even asked.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t care. It was just some morbid curiosity, surely?

‘I... I wanted to love him.’ For the first time she allowed her eyes to slide away. ‘He told me he loved me and I believed him.’

‘Why?’

She snapped her gaze back up to glare at him, making Myles feel as though he was missing something obvious.

‘Why do you think, Myles? Because I wanted to believe him. The idea of someone loving me, me, was so thrilling. For years the boys I’d known had only ever been able to talk about my sisters, how glamourous, or sexy, or hot they were. And then here was Justin paying attention to me, and I fell for it.’

He wanted to tell her that not everyone she’d known had been so taken with her superficial sisters that they’d overlooked the real thing standing right in front of them. To point out to her how close he’d come to being with her that New Year’s Eve.

But voicing something like that would be tantamount to knowingly walking out onto quicksand. The consequences were inevitable. So instead he bit back the words and stayed silent.

‘I suppose I found it flattering,’ Rae continued with a self-deprecating laugh. ‘And hearing someone tell me they loved me was like balm to my battered ego. Not least after I’d humiliated myself the night I offered myself to you only for you to throw me out of your bedroom.’

‘Christ, Rae, you blame me for humiliating you simply because I had enough respect for you not to sleep with you when you were my best mate’s seventeen-year-old kid sister?’

‘That wasn’t what you said, though, was it?’ she fired back. ‘You said that I was insane if I thought you were ever going to sleep with me.’

Instantly, shamefully, he recalled his harsh words and the way he’d thrown that handmade quilt from his guest bed over her practically naked form and bundled her out into the corridor in wholly ungentlemanly fashion.

Ironic then, that he’d thought he was being gentlemanly by not sleeping with her.

‘You were seventeen. I was twenty-one.’

‘So? That’s perfectly legal. Plus, I was a few months off being eighteen and you were only just twenty-one. There’s barely three years between us.’

‘It might not have been illegal but it still wouldn’t have been a good idea,’ he bit out stiffly.

Which made it sound logical, and well thought-out. But the truth was that his decision back then had been less about logic and more about convincing himself to keep his hands off her than anything else.

At twenty-one, he’d never before experienced such a heady, all-consuming attraction before. His teenage years had been too focussed on dragging himself out of the hellhole of his childhood, trying to build some kind of real future for himself. He’d had a couple of girlfriends but nothing that had amounted to anything much.