‘We’ll take it very slowly,’ he said.
She shook her head. She felt a heavy weight in it. Yet with a flicker of her mind she knew she did not sense the weight as crushing.
Comforting...
The word formed in her mind and she tried to shake it loose. She must not think that—must not.
She heard his voice continue. ‘As slowly as continental drift,’ he said.
And now his eyes were resting on her, and the expression in them was one she had not seen. It did strange things to her, tightening her throat as if she were about to cry, which made no sense at all.
‘Will that be slowly enough for you?’ he asked.
She felt her head incline, for the weight it was bearing was too great. Continental drift... A pull of desolation went through her. She had her own version of continental drift.
An island of my own, cut off from the rest of the land—drifting ever further away, taking me with it, taking me away from everything like this. Everything that goes with a man like Rafael Sanguardo...
She wanted to tell him so—tell him that even geological time would not be enough to accomplish what he wanted. But she kept silent.
‘Good,’ he said. His voice was quiet. Then, in a different tone, he said, ‘Ah, I believe this is our food arriving.’
It was, and she was glad. It gave her the chance to pull herself together, to shake loose the weight in her head. What had happened just then she did not know—only that she was glad she was past it. She’d said what she had to say—that his attempt to persuade her into dating him, romancing him, having an affair with him, was not going to work and could not work—and that was the important thing. At least his words had indicated that he wasn’t going to try and hustle her, pressurise her or hurry her. And that meant, she realised with a little ripple of relief that carried agitations of its own, that she didn’t have to keep her guard sky-high this evening. That she could afford to lower it a little—just a little.
The way I want to...
The realisation was impossible to suppress. And that in itself was disturbing, too. But she was here now. To stand up and leave would be rude, and churlish, and he did not deserve that. It was not his fault that she could not do what he had so openly stated he wanted to do.
He’s done nothing wrong—he has not behaved badly. When he intervened over Karl Reiner he was chivalrous and protective. Now he is only being attentive, as he said he wanted to be. There is nothing to fault him.
No, the fault was not in Rafael Sanguardo...
She felt them again—those trailing tendrils that dragged across her skin, the miasma of the mind that she could never banish. Never free herself from. That barred her for ever from what Rafael Sanguardo was offering her.
All I can have of him is this—this brief time with him.
And she must make the most of it! Take what little she could. Put aside, just for now, her endless reserve, for she had made it as clear as she could that there could be nothing between them—nothing more than this.
So slowly, very slowly, she started to feel the tension around her begin to ebb a little. She would have this evening and then go home. Home to her solitary life. The only life she could have.
But until that moment she was here, with Rafael Sanguardo, making conversation with him, safe and innocuous.
‘Apparently,’ he said, ‘this house was owned by a Victorian banker who bankrupted himself aspiring to impress the aristocracy—doubtless those who went riding in Rotten Row, as you described the other evening—but they regarded him as a parvenu.’
‘You were only supposed to inherit money then,’ Celeste commented, ‘not make it yourself.’
‘That rules me out, then,’ Rafael replied, that mordant glint in his eyes again.