Pride After Her Fall

His chest felt tight, but he knew he would get past this. He had life lessons to draw on in how to master his own emotions and make them serve him. Painful lessons, learned by a small boy too young to really understand what was happening in his life, always looking for someone to cling to, always being punished for it. The constant cycle of confusion.

There was nothing confusing about the life he had grown up to lead. Everything was compartmentalised. Everything had its place.

Including this. Including Lorelei.

Tomorrow he would be flying back to Monaco and straight into the press conference, a show race for Eagle in Lyon, and then training. He wasn’t ready. He had been doing too much thinking about this beguiling woman in his arms and not enough about the job.

The irony was, if he was given another week he’d spend it all with her.

But he’d never put a woman before the job.

Like his parents, he knew how to be ruthless to achieve his ends.

* * *

Lorelei was dreaming. In her dream she was walking down a long corridor. There were doors on either side of her, stretching as far as she could see.

As she passed they would open.

There was her mother. She was young—as Lorelei recalled her in her earliest years—holding out a doll with long golden curls that bore a marked resemblance to the child she had been before she cut off her hair. Another door opened on her father, Raymond, as she had last seen him, rigid in a suit, his back to her. Finally there was Grandmaman, holding out money in one hand and a tiny miniature of the villa in the other.

Lorelei could feel the constriction growing in her body. She was moving faster. Hands were coming out to snatch at her skirt, her ankles, demanding things of her until she thought she would go crazy. And then she heard a deep, certain voice saying her name. ‘Lorelei.’ She stepped into his arms and the walls of the dream fell away. She was held poised in midair in the strongest pair of arms imaginable.

‘Nash.’ She clung to him and knew she was home, would always be safe.

He wouldn’t let go. Which meant she could let go...

Lorelei gasped, coming awake in a bath of perspiration. Nash was leaning over her in the dark. He gently stroked the hair back from her eyes.

‘Go to sleep. His voice was deep and sleep roughened. ‘It was just a nightmare.’

‘Oui,’ she murmured croakily, and closed her eyes.

For a long while she lay awake, with Nash’s arm pinning her, his body curved around hers like a bulwark against uncertainty.

She felt a little triste. It could have been because of the fast-fading dream but was probably because they were going back to Monaco tomorrow.

But it wasn’t the villa or her debts that filled her horizon, it was the man beside her, who appeared not to be sleeping either, although his chest rose and fell steadily.

She burrowed in a little closer.

I’ve fallen in love with this man, she thought, framing it like a statement and waiting to feel the panic it should open up inside her.

All those fears of dependency, of being left behind, of not being loved back.

None came.

She curved her body trustingly into his and closed her eyes. She was back in the ocean with him, certain of this one thing: this has been as close to flying as I’ve ever come.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘LORELEI, we need to talk.’

According to the flight screen they were twenty minutes out of Nice.

Lorelei removed her ear buds and looked up. Nash had been hooked into a laptop for the better part of an hour, which was why they hadn’t been sitting together.

Or at least she told herself that was why, but she had been telling herself a great many things since boarding his plane. If he was being a little distant this morning she assumed he was thinking about what he was flying back into. She certainly was.

He was a famous man, about to reignite that fame, and there were consequences for her. She would be foolish to discount them.

But when she looked at him everything fell away, leaving only what she felt for him: a tremulous sort of tenderness mingled with a longing to have this in her life.

He dropped into the seat beside her, stretching out his long legs, but there was nothing casual about the expression on his face.

‘You look ominous,’ she said lightly.

‘Do I?’ He looked at her, his eyes cool. ‘I’m going into lockdown tomorrow. That’s going to have ramifications on my personal life.’