CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS clearly the wrong answer. He stared at her for a moment too long—the same moment in which she realised her mistake. Then he let her hands fall as he suddenly rose, looking skywards to the sun before searching about for his clothes. ‘It’s time we were leaving.’
‘Alejandro?’
‘Get dressed! It’s time to go.’
She sat there, too stunned to react, unable to assimilate the sudden change from caring to cold. She’d thought that today she’d seen a glimmer of something in him, sensed the tiniest spark of something deeper than mere desire. She’d opened her mouth and told him the truth, and she’d ruined everything.
What the hell had she done?
In the time she took to don her bikini and shorts and locate her sandals Alejandro had stashed the remains of their picnic away and swept up and shaken the sand from the rug. He threw his towel over his shoulder. ‘Ready?’
She grabbed her things and stumbled after him along the beach. ‘You did ask,’ she protested. ‘Why did you ask if you didn’t want to know?’
He didn’t answer. Because he didn’t know why he’d asked or what had prompted him. The question had emerged from his mouth fully formed. He only knew that never in a million years had he been expecting her to say what she had. If she’d said she’d had enough of the sex, if she’d said she was sick of the hours he worked or was homesick for Sydney, those reasons he could have coped with. He might not have believed her, but those reasons he would have understood. Those reasons would justify what he had to do.
But for her to say that she’d walked out on him because she’d fallen in love with him? It made no sense. No sense at all.
‘What does it matter why I left?’ he heard her cry out behind him. ‘Sooner or later you would have grown tired of me anyway and cast me off. You would have traded me in for another model as easily as you’d trade a car.’
He spun around. ‘That was my decision to make!’
She stopped following him, her eyes sheened with moisture. ‘Can’t you just forget I said anything?’
How he wanted to. He turned and crashed his way along the path, scattering birds and butterflies, sending them for cover, and all the time wishing he could forget. But how could he forget those words and how they’d sounded? And how could he forget the look in her eyes when she’d told him?
She’d fallen in love with him and then she’d walked out on him. And now he had forced his way back into her life so he could take his turn and leave her high and dry. If he dumped her now she’d think it was because she’d admitted falling in love with him.
It shouldn’t matter!
But for some reason it did.
He’d wanted to get even with her. Had hungered for it. But he’d never expected that getting what he wanted might ultimately taste this bad.
Mierda! What a mess.
The tide was higher when they reached the dinghy, the tiny beach all but covered, and the wind was up, turning the waters of the passage bumpy. He stashed the basket a
nd towels away and untied the boat, telling Leah over his shoulder to jump in as he pushed it out. He wouldn’t look at her. He couldn’t. Not if it meant looking into those eyes again.
But once inside the boat he had no choice.
She sat there, her hands planted firmly on the bench either side of her, her jaw set, her hair twisted into some kind of quick-fix hairdo that looked as if it was about to come undone at any minute. He pulled hard on the oars, using the exercise for therapy, wishing the pain in his muscles would overshadow the pain in his twisted gut, wishing that the creak of the oars in the gates would blot out the sound of her words playing over and over in his head. “Because I fell in love with you.”
She wasn’t supposed to fall in love with him. That had never been part of their arrangement. She’d been just another in his long line of women companions, with a similar list of necessary attributes.
She was beautiful.
Convenient.
And, best of all, temporary.
The blades dug deep as the swell caught them, the boat lurched and tilted, but still she sat there, unflinching.
She’d been too temporary. Why couldn’t she have waited until he was finished with her? It would have happened. It always had before.
Until Leah.