Zac opened his door and extracted her case, but when she joined him on the pavement and held out her hand for it, he merely tucked it through his arm. ‘I’m seeing you to the door. If you break your ankle from here to your doorstep, I’d never forgive myself and I don’t think Jennie would forgive me either.’
A broken ankle was the least of her worries.
Once outside the house, Rachel looked up into his extraordinarily beautiful eyes and said with barely a tremble, ‘Goodbye, Zac. It’s been nice, and I hope your grandfather does recover against all the odds.’
He’d set the case down on the pavement and taken her in his arms again. Now his brows drew together. ‘That sounds final. Us, I mean. I thought we could keep in touch. Phone, write, maybe? And I might be over here in the future on business again.’
Please don’t do this to me. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ This had to be final for her to survive emotionally.
‘Why? Because of this Giles character?’
Was he mad? She shook her head. ‘It’s got nothing to do with Giles,’ she said carefully. ‘But you’re in Canada and I’m here, surely that’s enough.’
‘That prevents calls and letters? Come on, Rachel, it’s the twenty-first century. Great silver birds fly in the sky and cut down the miles amazingly.’ He paused. ‘I though we were getting on OK? Have I misread the signals?’
She tried to bring her chaotic thoughts into order. ‘Zac, when we talked last night we both agreed…’ She took a deep breath. ‘I thought we’d agreed we’re very different people, that we see things differently. Your lifestyle isn’t one I could embrace, and vice versa.’ Surely he had considered they were incompatible? And that being the case, why continue the sweet torture of seeing each other, knowing it could only end messily, something he’d spent most of his adult life avoiding?
His eyes were unfathomable as they gazed into hers. ‘So you don’t want to keep in touch, to see me again?’
Maybe if he hadn’t told her about Moira and his son she could just have said no and that would have been that. She could have walked away with her dignity intact. But he had told her and that had changed things. It was important he understood now because she wasn’t another Moira who’d play fast and loose, but neither could she go into a relationship with him knowing it would mean little beyond a warm, willing body in bed as far as he was concerned. And at least she wouldn’t see him after she’d told him.
Rachel took a deep breath and hoped his coat was thick enough so he couldn’t feel her hands, which were around his waist, trembling.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to see you again. I do. Which is why I can’t.’ She wasn’t putting this very well, she could tell from the look on his face. ‘What I mean is, I—I like you, Zac. Too much.’
His brow wrinkled. ‘How can you like me too much?’
For such a worldly-wise individual, he could be incredibly dim. ‘You’d break my heart when you left,’ she said simply. ‘As, of course, I know you would. I—I wouldn’t want you for a week or a month or a year, Zac. However long it lasted before you moved on. I’d want you for ever.’
He retreated. Emotionally and physically. She saw the withdrawal in his face even as his arms dropped from around her and he took a step backwards, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his black overcoat. ‘That’s crazy. A few days ago I had to force you to go out to dinner with me and now you’re saying you’d want me for ever?’
‘I do want you for ever, that’s what love does.’ There, she’d said it, the word guaranteed to send him back to Canada as fast as the speed of light. ‘I’m just being honest here, Zac.’
His eyes narrowed, shutting out all expression. ‘You don’t love me, Rachel,’ he said quietly after a painful moment had dragged by. ‘This is just a rebound thing after the Giles bozo. I’ve wined and dined you and made you feel like a woman again, and you’re mistaking gratitude and attraction for something else.’
Gratitude? She might have known he’d say something to make her angry, he usually did. ‘Believe me, Zac,’ she said heatedly, ‘gratitude is the last thing I feel towards you. You bulldozed your way into my life and turned it upside down and then made me fall in love with the most unsuitable man I’ve ever met. You live on the other side of the world but it might as well be on another planet so different are our lifestyles and what we want out of life. You’ve been totally unfair and typically male, and if I didn’t love you, I’d hate you. Now I’ve got to try and pick up the pieces again and you calmly suggest we keep in touch so you can swan in and out of my life and make things a hundred times more difficult. No, it’s definitely not gratitude I feel.’ She glared at him, furious he’d made her say all that and spoil their last meeting.
‘You’ve got to go.’ From somewhere she found the strength to take control again and speak calmly. ‘Go and book your flight, Zac. Every minute probably counts.’
The strength held long enough for her to stand on tiptoe and kiss his cheek, every part of her breathing in the smell and feel of him for the last time.
She was conscious he was standing like a block of granite, his face dark and grim, but she didn’t intend to prolong this a second longer because she knew her control was only skin deep. Another moment and she’d fling herself at him and recant everything she’d said. And she couldn’t do that, for both their sakes but especially—and she didn’t apologise to herself for it either—her own.
She opened the front door and slipped inside the flat, leaving him standing there. When she shut the door, he hadn’t moved. She leant against it, praying without hope he’d knock in a moment or two. He didn’t.
After what seemed a long time, she crept into the sitting room and stealthily peered out of the window. He had gone. Walking through to the hall again, she opened the front door and looked to where the Aston Martin had stood. It, too, had gone.
And it was only then she allowed herself the luxury of tears.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘OH, Rachel. Why didn’t you say you’d keep in touch? You might wear him down that way. You know, the steady drip, drip.’
It was two in the morning and Jennie and Susan had returned from a night on the town a little while earlier to find Rachel still crying. After making a pot of coffee, her two friends had settled down with tissues and comfort and listened to the whole story, patting her hand or giving her a hug at the appropriate moments and saying all the right things.
Rachel turned pink-rimmed eyes on Jennie. ‘I don’t want to wear him down, that’s why. He is as he is and if he couldn’t enter wholeheartedly into a relationship, it’s never going to work. I wouldn’t want to be wondering every minute when it’s going to end. I’m not made that way.’
‘But if you’d carried on with him, he might have begun to think he couldn’t do without you.’