Consequences of a Hot Havana Night

So why had she turned and run from him?

But that question didn’t need answering.

She thought back to when she’d been waiting for him on the boat.

Waiting.

Worrying.

Hurting.

She stopped at the bottom of the staircase, blinking furiously.

Earlier, when she’d realised that she loved César, it had been a shock. For years she had lived believing that she would never love again. She’d shut down that part of her life. And then she’d moved here to Cuba, and suddenly there had been César, and now she was pregnant, and her world had started to grow warm again, and the ice around her heart had begun to melt.

It had felt exciting, pictur

ing the two of them together, but now she could see that she had just tricked herself into thinking she had moved on and was ready for love.

She wasn’t.

All she’d been doing was painting a picture in her head of a fantasy of love in a faraway place with a tall, dark, handsome stranger who made her heart beat faster.

César telling her that he loved her had made it real.

Too real.

She couldn’t breathe.

Fantasy love didn’t hurt, but real love did—because real love had to exist in the real world, where life was cruel and random. And that was why she had to leave now.

Her feet were moving of their own accord, up the stairs and into her bedroom. If she stayed, she wouldn’t be able to resist him; she didn’t want to resist him. But she couldn’t love a man who lived the way he did. He was a risk-taker, and loving him would mean accepting she could lose him, and that was a risk she couldn’t take—a pain she didn’t ever want to feel again.

Only it hurt so much to think that she was going to have to leave.

Trying to hold back the tears that were threatening to spill over, she found her suitcase and began grabbing handfuls of her clothes. It was the only way.

‘What are you doing?’

César’s voice broke into the tumult of her thoughts. Her heart froze. She hadn’t expected César to follow her. Why would he when she’d so inexplicably thrown his love back in his face?

Watching the light in his beautiful green eyes dim, she had wanted to take his hand and retract her words, to go to him and pull him close. But she had no right to do any of those things—not now, not ever—and the pain of knowing that, and of knowing that one day another woman would cradle his head in her lap, comfort him at the end of a long day, was her penance. It was necessary and right.

Only now he was here.

‘I’m packing. I need to go home.’

‘To England?’

The bruise in his voice wrenched at something inside her and, gripping the handle of her suitcase, she felt a tear slide down her cheek.

She swiped it away.

Please let him leave. Please don’t make me have to look at him.

‘Yes, to England. And nothing you say is going to change my mind.’

‘Can’t we talk about this?’