‘No,’ he agreed. ‘And, trust me, I can understand your dilemma.’ She failed to fill in the gaps so he continued, his voice soothing and sinfully seductive. ‘Your mother is fully invested in this business about us being an item. She’s spent the past few years despairing of you ever meeting someone.’
‘That’s a massive overstatement!’
‘And now here we are. She likes me...’
‘There was no need to go overboard with theJames Stowecharm.’
‘I had no idea that that was what I was doing.’
‘I had hoped that she might see us together and realise how ill-suited we were to one another, but you had to lay it on thick.’
‘You can’t blame me for being myself—’
‘I tried to point out the glaring differences between us,’ Ellie interjected bitterly, thinking of her valiant, doomed attempts to get things back on track. ‘I told her the sort of background you came from, the life you were accustomed to leading. I reminded her that, once reality kicks in, things begin to fade...’
‘And she wasn’t buying any of it?’
Ellie shook her head curtly. She decided not to mention her mother’s response to all those genuine and true observations. She had listened, her head tilted to one side, a smile tugging at her lips, and philosophically had told her that she recognised what love looked like.
Besides, she had added, hitting below the belt with the unerring accuracy only a devoted parent could bring to the table,‘I know you and I know you would never hop into bed with a man just for the sake of it. You’re just not that type of girl and you never have been.’
‘Maybe she needs to see first-hand that things don’t always go according to plan,’ he said thoughtfully, and Ellie frowned.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Last night happened for a reason,’ he ruminated. ‘And that reason had nothing to do with the fact that you were in need of comfort...’
Ellie reddened. Outside the sounds of the day beginning infiltrated the bedroom, the early-morning greyness gradually turning into weak sunshine and trying its best to get past the curtains.
‘You still want me,’ he forced out into the open, just what she didn’t want to acknowledge, and she closed her eyes for a few seconds, her breathing quickening while she desperately wished that she was somewhere else. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ he murmured, trailing his finger along her jaw with such devastating effect that her breath hitched in her throat and her eyes fluttered open.
‘It’s mutual. I still want you. I never saw this coming,’ he admitted with roughened honesty. ‘I never thought any of this would happen, but it did. When we were in Barbados, I saw this as unexpected but temporary. Fun for a few days until fate decided otherwise. I still want you, so why not continue what we have? You can’t bring yourself to tell your mother that this isn’t going to end up in marriage, and she can’t see it because we only ever see what we want to see, and what your mother wants to see is you with me.
‘Maybe she needs to see us have this relationship and then, when it inevitably fizzles out, she’ll accept that it was something that wasn’t meant to be, with all the best intentions in the world. Maybe, that’s what the hungry paparazzi needs to see... Instead of mounting a defence, maybe we just need to go with the flow and let what we have run its course...’
Ellie listened to all of this in stunned silence. She knew exactly where he was going with this. When it came to women, James liked to be the one who called the shots. He was always the one who ended things. Like a toddler with a never-ending supply of brand-new toys, he enjoyed the freedom to dispose of one toy exactly when he wanted before moving on to the next.
He was being perfectly honest when he told her that he hadn’t foreseen things happening the way they had. Even when theyhadended up in bed together, he had still not foreseen wanting to continue what had started against all the odds.
It would fizzle out. It was, in his words,inevitable. She wasn’t one of his drop-dead gorgeous supermodels. She was his efficient, very ordinary-looking personal assistant. He had been charmed by the novelty, but he had always assumed that the novelty would wear thin very quickly. It hadn’t and, because it hadn’t, he now saw no reason why they shouldn’t continue what they had until it did.
On every level, he was a sensualist.
Into the lengthening silence, he continued without hesitation, his self-assurance growing by the second. ‘You’re speechless,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘I get it. It’s not a solution either of us ever thought of because we were both sold on the notion that everything had to be neatly wrapped up before start of play. We broke up because... I suppose I got a little spooked. I got the sense that you might have been reaching out for some kind of emotional involvement. We broke up, but it doesn’t mean that what we had wasbroken.We wanted each other then and we still want each other.’
‘Sorry?’ Ellie felt as though she had suddenly been plunged into an alternate universe where perfectly understandable words and sentences were reaching her as unintelligible mutterings in a foreign language.
Yes, she knew where he was going with this, but she couldn’t credit his massive misinterpretation of her expression and her silence. How could someone so smart and so perceptive be so dense?
‘We both thought that a few days in Barbados would get this out of our system. We both knew that it was a flash-in-the-pan situation. Still is, but the fire under the pan is taking a little longer than we anticipated to die out...that’s the power of lust.’
‘I don’t think you understand...’ Ellie said slowly.
He raised his eyebrows and smiled with the smooth confidence of a guy who had never been wrong-footed by a woman before in his life. He smiled with the utter confidence of a guy in complete control of his life and the outcome of the decisions he made. Right now he had decided that he wanted to carry on with what they had, and on the surface Ellie knew that every aspect of what he was suggesting made sense.
To him.
Because he wasn’t involved. Because the ending was inevitable. Because as far as he was concerned they were on the same page...just two adults who had had a bit of fun...so why not drift into having a bit more fun until the whole thing became boring and petered out? Sure, he’d beenspooked, but he was willing to overlook that, was willing to write that off as a by-product of their mutual physical attraction.
