He placed a hand on the small of her back to steady her as she swayed against him, using the other to lightly cup her breast.
‘Rafe.’ The word was a breathless whisper and she knew it wasn’t the way to deal with a man like Rafe. She had to be strong, cool; she had to show him she didn’t want this. But she did—so much. Desire was racing through her bloodstream, igniting nerve-endings. His hand began to move on her breast in a slow languorous rhythm that sent tremors coursing through her body and the assault on her mouth deepened, his lips and tongue creating an unbearable need.
She was vitally aware of the power in the male frame, the warmth of his body, the clean scent of his aftershave as the deliberate eroticism continued, and at the same time Marianne could feel his heart pounding like a sledgehammer against the solid wall of his chest. He was hugely aroused and there arose in her a primitive exultation that she could cause such desire.
It was the sound of an approaching car that caused him to release her and step back a pace a few moments before the vehicle came round the bend in the road. They stood staring at each other, both breathing hard and his body trembling almost as much as hers. ‘You see,’ he said in a ragged voice. ‘You see how it is? We only have to touch each other for fireworks to go off. Think how it would be if—’
‘Stop it.’ The heat was still suffusing her body but with space between them sanity had returned. ‘I don’t want this.’
‘I don’t believe you. You want me every bit as much as I want you—your body’s told me so. It’s too late to deny it, Marianne.’
‘I’m not denying sex between us would be good,’ she said shakily, ‘but I want more than that. I’m not like you, Rafe. It has to mean much more than what you have told me you could give. And one day I want to get married, have a family, babies.’
‘But don’t you see, you could do that? I wouldn’t stop you. Just because we spend time together doesn’t negate you meeting someone in the future who wants the same things as you. But this is now. Now, Marianne, and it seems crazy we want each other so much and yet you’re denying us. It doesn’t make sense.’
It made perfect sense. As she stared at him everything was so clear. She had been battling to keep the knowledge that she loved him out of her consciousness for weeks but now it was almost a relief to admit it to herself. Embarking on an affair with Rafe would be emotional suicide; it was as simple as that. You didn’t recover from the aftermath when a man like Rafe left—as he inevitably would—you just learnt to live with the fallout. And she wasn’t prepared to do that. She valued herself more highly than that. Some women could take his terms and make them work. She couldn’t. Weeks and months—maybe a year or two if she was lucky—of being near to him, part of his life, sleeping in his bed and he in hers, would be impossible to let go of. So where would that leave her when the time came? Destroyed, that was where.
‘Rafe, I can’t be what you want me to be,’ she said slowly, her voice still shaky but a thread of strength winding through it.
‘You are what I want you to be.’ He reached out his hand, touching the silken curtain of her hair. ‘You’re perfect.’
She smiled sadly. He didn’t see it. In fact, he was so far from seeing it he was light years away. There had to be more to a relationship than enjoying each other physically and love needed to be a two-way thing, at least for her. Not that he knew she loved him. And he never would. ‘I’m far from perfect.’ Her voice was firmer. ‘But I do know my own mind, Rafe. I don’t want the sort of deal you’re offering. OK?’
Dark colour flared across the hard cheekbones, his blue eyes narrowing. ‘This is not business we’re discussing, it’s us. You and me.’
She nodded slowly. ‘I know that. But you have carefully laid out the criteria and drawn up the contract so I couldn’t possibly be under any illusion about how you see this merger progressing. Well, haven’t you?’ she persisted when he said nothing but continued to stare at her, his eyes narrowing still more and becoming blue slits. ‘And I’m grateful, in a way. You have been nothing if not honest, and honesty is becoming a rare commodity in business these days.’
‘For crying out loud,’ he grated, ‘this has nothing to do with business, how many times do I have to tell you? This—you and me—is something separate from Seacrest and the hotel venture.’
‘Barely.’ She brushed a wisp of hair from her face as the sea breeze teased it. ‘Because all your life is is business these days, Rafe. Your work, your love life—they are so entwined as to become one. You employ the same set of rules in one area as you do in the other. Cards on the table, logical reasons for continuing, no emotion allowed to distort the picture. It’s all cut and dried. You remain in control, autonomous.’
‘You’re talking sheer garbage.’
‘Why? Because I’m not prepared to agree to your cold-blooded proposal?’ She shook her head. ‘Look, I want to go home now and I’d rather continue by myself. I don’t belong in your world, Rafe. I never have. And I don’t want to. I might meet someone in the future who lets me down. I might get my heart broken. I might even have a marriage that fails. But I’ll have tried, I’ll have lived and felt rather than keeping my emotions in cold storage through fear.’
‘Fear?’ Now she had really caught him on the raw. ‘You are saying I’m motivated by fear just because I choose to live my life without wanting the complications that come with the marriage mill? Hell, marriage is an unnatural enough state at the best of times and heavily weighted on the side of the female of the species. Love, if it even exists in the way you seem to expect, never lasts and even while it does is dependent on one person subjugating themselves to make it work. It’s unhealthy at best and disastrous at worst.’ He stopped abruptly.
She stared at him, knowing he had revealed far more than he had intended and that he would blame her for it. ‘Like I said,’ she said softly, praying she could hold back the tears until she was on her own, ‘we’re very different people who want different things. I don’t want to fall out with you but I can’t pretend to be anything other than what I am. Neither can you. We need to put an end to this, Rafe, once and for all, and move on. You do see that, don’t you?’
Her knees were trembling and, more because she didn’t want to sink to the ground at his feet than anything else, she forced herself to turn and begin walking away. She expected him to follow her. He didn’t.
By the time she reached Seacrest her tears were blinding her. The twilight was thick now, a crescent moon high in the midnight-blue sky and the soft whisper of the Cornish sea carrying on the breeze. She didn’t go into the house, making her way into the garden instead and walking down to her mother’s bench where Rafe had comforted her all those weeks ago.
She didn’t want to love him. She shut her eyes tight, rocking forwards and backwards with her hands clasped round her middle. She wanted to go back in time to before she had met him, before her parents had died, when she had been happy. She wanted to believe all those people who said love couldn’t happen suddenly and what she was feeling was just animal attraction which would die in time. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. She had been waiting for Rafe all her life and if she didn’t marry him, she would marry no one.
She lifted her face, staring mistily into the shadows. She had done the only thing she could but it wasn’t much comfort.
CHAPTER TEN
RAFE watched her go, knowing he was going to let her walk out of his life. He continued to stand frozen for a full five minutes before starting to walk, and then it wasn’t back to the village, nor to Seacrest, but across the fields to the cliff path. It took a while to find a spot where he could climb down to the beach but, once there, he started to pace the sand, his mind in turmoil.
He marched up and down for an eternity before sitting on a rock which still held the warmth of the day. She was right. They were too different in their thinking for a relationship to work even for a short while. He frowned, and then looked up at the sky. It was a fine night and thousands of stars twinkled above him, the sea calm and serene as it allowed small waves to lap towards the shore. Nature had conspired to produce a backdrop of great beauty but then it often did; it was man who tended to mess the planet up, he thought darkly.
He lowered his head into his hands and listened to the sound of the sea. He sat for a long, long time.
He was a mess. He couldn’t shut out the truth any longer. He had been blocking out all manner of things for years.
For a moment he was tempted to rise to his feet and walk back to the village, to drink brandy with his father and discuss the business, anything to evade the thoughts gathering steam in his head. Yet he had to face what his real feelings were.