Lynne Graham's Brides of L'Amour Bundle

And then the proverbial coin dropped and she understood: you ran out into the street after me.

‘You’ve just remembered something from the past…’ Hilary framed, her tummy lurching with fierce tension. ‘And you’ve remembered something about me…’

‘It was as though someone had flashed an old photograph in front of me…’ In an impatient movement, Roel thrust open a door into an elegant reception room. Although that brief flare of lost recollection had disconcerted him, he had gained visible strength from it. ‘You were trying to return the tip I’d left…’

‘Yeah…’ Her hands wound together and then parted and then laced back together again to flex.

Roel gazed at her in bewildered disbelief. ‘Why would I have been tipping you? Was that a joke or something?’

Hilary turned pale as death and hurt as much as if he had slapped her. She could already see the chasm opening up between them. She was not what he had expected her to be. She was not and could never be a part of his privileged world. ‘I’d just cut your hair…’

‘My hair?’ Roel stared at her much as if she had suddenly started performing back flips for his amusement.

Hilary compressed her lips and gave a tight nod of confirmation. ‘I’m…I’m a hairdresser. That business with the tip you left happened the very first time we met—’

‘Inferno! I can recall everything I was feeling and thinking in that one tiny moment in the street! You had me as hard as a rock,’ Roel admitted with shattering frankness, his fierce gaze wholly pinned to her. ‘I wanted to haul you into the limo, check into a hotel and have a lost weekend.’

Hot pink flooded her triangular face and then slowly and painfully receded again. Well, at least he wasn’t throwing her any false sentimental lines. She should be grateful to learn that he had found her attractive even though he had been far too aloof to show the fact. But she wasn’t grateful. She was hurt and furious. A lost weekend? Was that all she had seemed good for? A right little tart likely to go to a hotel with a guy she barely knew for casual sex? Anguish arrested her feverish thoughts at that point. She would have gone. Maybe not that first day but later, if he had asked, she would have gone because by that stage she had been so besotted she would have settled for anything she could get. Even if that did encompass just the physical side of things, she conceded, her throat closing over with angry tears.

‘Scusate! I should not have said that.’ Roel lounged back against the wall, visibly struggling to master the total exhaustion weighting him.

‘Oh, don’t let it worry you. I’m not thin-skinned,’ Hilary told him in an artificially bright voice. ‘Please lie down for a while. You look ill.’

Shedding his tie and unbuttoning his shirt where he stood, he strode heavily through to the connecting bedroom.

‘I think I should call the doctor,’ Hilary remarked from the doorway.

‘Dannazione…there’s nothing the matter with me!’ Roel slashed back at the speed of a cracking whiplash. ‘Stop fussing.’

Hilary watched him sink down onto the bed and then tumble back against the pillows. He had not even removed his shoes. She pulled the blinds at the windows. Eyes semi-closed, he extended a lean hand in a graceful conciliatory gesture.

‘You should know by now that I make my own decisions, cara mia.’

‘That’s not a problem,’ Hilary assured him tenderly, strolling back and sitting down on the bed to let her small fingers curl into the warm clasp of his. No, his desire to make his own decisions was not a problem as long as his decisions agreed with her own conclusions.

‘What I said…that flash of memory caught me off guard and I was crude.’

‘Not crude,’ Hilary responded in a quiet voice as sweet as honey, for she was determined to get her own back for the hurt he had caused he

r. ‘A bit basic, but I can forgive you this once because the rest of the time you are the most romantic guy I’ve ever known.’

Roel’s grip on her hand loosened and his spiky black lashes lifted on stunned dark golden eyes. ‘Romantic…?’ he parroted.

Even in the shattered state he was in, his wide sensual mouth was ready to curl with extreme scorn at such a suggestion. ‘You’re teasing me…’

‘No, I’m not,’ Hilary asserted.

Roel tugged her below a powerful arm and muttered sleepily. ‘You can stay until I fall asleep.’

She almost made the mistake of asking him if his mother had done that, but mercifully recalled that no such cosy events could have figured in his childhood. He had only been a year old when his mother had taken off with her lover and never come back even for a visit. Unable to avoid answering her nosy questions, he had once told her that in a single derisive sentence that had pierced her tender heart.

When he was asleep, she went downstairs. She ate a beautiful meal in a superb dining room filled with enormous furniture. Her heart was too full to allow her thoughts to settle on anything other than Roel. It seemed obvious that before very long she would be going home again and instead of being happy at that possibility she felt unbearably sad because it meant that she was going to lose Roel again. He had already remembered something from those missing five years in his memory bank and it had happened even sooner than she had expected.

She had suspected that Dr Lerther was being rather too optimistic when he had repeatedly stated that Roel’s amnesia would be of a very temporary nature. Now she could see that the consultant had been right on target with his forecast. Soon Roel would recall everything about the five years he had forgotten. He wouldn’t need her any more. Had he ever really needed her? Or had that just been her own wishful thinking?

She curled up in a chair by the bed to watch over Roel while he slept. From now on, she told herself that she would ensure that their relationship remained strictly platonic. When he had remembered the truth about their supposed marriage how would he look at her? Would he think it strange that she had slept with him? Would he even care? He was a guy, a little inner voice protested soothingly. He was not going to waste loads of time agonising about why she might have done certain things. No, he would only want to get back into his real life. He would probably be very relieved to learn that, in strictly conventional terms, he did not really need to think of himself as a married man. In fact when he had regained his full memory he would most likely laugh at how events had developed.

When Hilary wakened she was lying in bed. Daylight was striking through a slender gap in the curtains and gleaming over Roel’s proud dark head as he looked down at her. At some stage of the night he had stripped. His bare bronzed chest was just inches away from her and she was incredibly conscious of the hair-roughened masculine thigh lying against her own.