She opened the door with her polite expression at the ready...and for a few electrifying seconds felt the blood drain from her face as she stared up at the last person she expected to see standing outside her mother’s house.
A feeling ofdéjà vuslammed into her with the force of a sledgehammer and it was all she could do to remain standing in the doorway, as rigid as a block of marble.
What the heck washedoing here?
How many times did he have to walk away before he realised thatwalking awayshould remove the option of suddenly materialising on her doorstep?
She thought back to their last conversation, to her admission that she had fallen in love with him... She’d never seen a guy back away so fast. He’d seen the conflagration ahead, and had run in the opposite direction just as fast as his legs could take him. Even though she’d expected nothing less, she’d still been devastated at his response.
Mortification surged through her, as well as mounting anger. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded bluntly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Let me in.’
‘Over my dead body.’ But she couldn’t help but sneak a glance towards the staircase behind her, because if her mother ventured out of her bedroom getting rid of James would not be possible.
Yes, Ellie had begun the process of cementing all the differences between her and James. All those niggling things that were already bricks in the wall that would eventually separate them.
With a timeline set for herself of a mere week, she knew the process would have to be ratcheted up. But at this point in time, a mere couple of days since James had returned to London, the foundations she had begun to lay would be blown out of the water should her mother clap eyes on the guy shamelessly standing at the front door.
She was infuriated that, despite everything she was feeling, she could still tune into his over-the-top sexuality with such effortless ease. The guy had practically had a seizure when she had admitted her true feelings for him, yet here she was,stillfighting to ward off the spool of vibrant images unravelling in her head.
‘Where is your mother?’
‘Asleep,’ Ellie said sharply. ‘And I don’t want you coming in because I don’t want her to know that you’re here.’
She loved him.
She’d closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and admitted how she felt, because that was the sort of person she was. Honest, upfront and straightforward. But what had he done? He’d run faster than a sprinter at the sound of the starting gun.
Now, with her foot poised to nudge the door shut in his face, he felt a sickening sense of panic that he might have left things too late, because the truth was that love when it fell on barren ground, was quick to turn to hate...
What would he do without her in his life?
He felt giddy at the flashbacks that poured into his head—watching her down-bent head as she fiddled on her iPad, searching for just the thing he had asked for, her calm amusement at all his rowdy employees, who always seemed to do as she asked whenever she asked, the way she had guarded her private life and then shared it with him, handing him the gift of her confidences...
‘I was a complete fool.’ There was no point trying to preserve his dignity or play games in which he might emerge the winner. There was just this moment in time and his one chance to try and fix what he had wilfully broken.
‘I don’t want to have this conversation. I want you to go before Mum hears someone at the door. She might be a sound sleeper, but doorbells can wake people up. I don’t want her seeing you. You’re not getting it, James.Don’t just stand there staring at me!’
‘I’m getting that you opened your heart to me and I—’
‘Now Ireallywant you to go!’ The last thing Ellie needed to hear was a minute-by-minute recap of her soul-baring confession. When she had admitted to him how she felt, she hadn’t expected to clap eyes on him again, but now he was here, larger than life, and it was agony.
‘You love me.’ He breathed urgently, his voice lacking its usual self-assurance. ‘And it’s mutual.’ He said that very fast, to forestall her slamming the door on him.
On the verge of shutting the door very firmly on his well-heeled loafer, Ellie paused and looked at him suspiciously.
She’d been down this road before, hadn’t she?Let’s carry on, he’d urged.Where’s the harm? Let’s get what we have out of our systems and then we can break up...why not?
But surely he wouldn’t be so cruel as to use her own declaration of love against her in some stupid quest to take what he still wanted? Did he think that her loving him made her a dead cert for a replay, using the same reasoning he had used before? Was he arrogant enough to think that he would be doing her a favour by inviting her back into his bed, and would use whatever verbal tools he wanted, knowing that she was vulnerable to them all?
‘I hate you,’ she whispered, already in full defence mode at her own internal line of reasoning. It had leap frogged from assumption to assumption until she had managed to convince herself that she could not possibly believe anything he had come to say. Least of all some crazy, mumbled admission of love which he had pulled out of a hat like the proverbial rabbit.
She heard the shuffle of footsteps overhead and stifled a groan of frustration.
‘Just go! Mum’s waking up...’
‘Let me in. She doesn’t have to know that I’m here. I want to talk to you. When I’m done talking, I’ll leave and she will never know that I’ve been in the first place.’
