‘Would have what? That’s raking over old coals, Abbas. The past is best left alone. Let me fully explain why I ended up where I did. I could have worked something out with the illustrations if I’d really wanted, used up savings and maybe worked evenings so that there was some money coming in until I made a name for myself. I could have figured something out, but in the end there was no choice for me. Life had other plans in store. You see, I found out that I was pregnant.’
‘Pregnant?’
He couldn’t have sounded more shocked and his eyes lowered with laser-like intensity to her stomach.
‘Pregnant,’ he repeated, laughing shakily. ‘Yes, I can see how that might have interfered with the future you had planned. And...the baby?’ he asked after a brief hesitation.
‘A daughter. I called her Matilda.’
‘Nice name. And the father?’
His dark eyes remained pinned to her face but he felt a sudden surge of emotion at the thought of another man with her.Touching her...inside her...fathering a child.
He shifted because such raw emotion, springing from out of the blue, was not welcome. What they had enjoyed was in the past and, as she’d said, the past was best left alone. There was certainly no room there to harbour feelings of jealousy because she had moved on with another man. Any lingering sexual attraction he might still feel for her didn’t make sense. In his well-planned and well-ordered life, he couldn’t afford the chaos of emotion even though, and he was loath to admit it, seeing her again had fired up all sorts of memories and wayward thoughts that made him wonder whether he had actually put her behind him as successfully as he’d assumed.
Georgie didn’t answer. Her hand was shaking as she reached for the bag she had brought, fishing out her wallet, from which she carefully extracted a photo to extend to him.
‘Tilly is a little over three years old. That’s her.’
‘Attractive child.’ He set the photo on the table next to him and looked across at her quizzically, wondering what it was about her that wouldn’t let him shut the door completely on their past. ‘But I admit I’m confused. Where is this going?’
Abe genuinely didn’t know. For once his sharp brain had hit a roadblock and, search as he might, there were no clues on her face to offer any signposts as to what his next move should be. Why was she here? She’d picked at the food and been uninterested in any kind of catch-up conversation. This had not been the evening he had envisaged but in truth he wasn’t entirely sure what hehadenvisaged.
Did she think that there were still the embers of a fire between them that could be stoked back to life? He’d tiptoed around that possibility, then closed the door by telling her that his offer of dinner had contained no hidden agenda, but had he not been clear enough?
Surely she couldn’t be playing some sort of long game—it didn’t tally with the girl he remembered, who had been so open, so honest and so lacking in guile, but then people changed and especially so when bitterness took the starring role. Had she sensed his weakness? Had she gauged, despite his best efforts, his infuriating temptation to touch what he used to be able to freely touch?He would have to disabuse her of any notion that they could pick up where they had left off, that playing hard to get wasn’t going to stir his interest, but, for a fleeting moment, he felt the pull of something so powerful that he breathed in sharply and lowered his eyes, shielding his expression.
‘I don’t see a wedding ring on your finger,’ he said abruptly. Perhaps the father had done a runner.
Had she come here to ask for money? he wondered. But he dismissed that thought as fast as it surfaced. Every instinct told him that this was not a woman with a begging bowl behind her back and every intimate memory reminded him that she had never been the sort to ask for anything.
‘For a very good reason,’ Georgie said in a low voice. ‘Because I’m not married.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘You really don’t get it, do you?’
‘Get what?’
‘You probably don’t remember but I got a stomach bug when we were...going out. Something I ate.’
‘Sardines.’ Abe frowned and then smiled and relaxed at the innocuous change of subject. ‘I warned you not to have them. You can never trust the quality of the fish cooked in a pop-up restaurant on a beach. You were out of it for nearly two days.’
‘I’m surprised you remember.’
‘I remember everything about our time together,’ he returned, shocked to find it was the truth.
Searching her face, Abe noted the flushed softening of her features and the flare of her nostrils and her sudden intake of breath and felt the atmosphere between them change, and this time the charge was sexual, firing him up and killing all of his good intentions to ignore the chemistry that was still lingering somewhere inside him. He shifted, gritted his teeth against the heaviness of a sudden erection that threatened to be all too visible unless he could manage some of the prized self-control he was so proud of.
Without either of them noticing, the distance between them decreased as she leant into him and he, in turn, edged towards her.
‘Georgie...’
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t look at me.’
Their eyes tangled and just like that every thought flew out of her head and Georgie was back to the past, back to the way she had felt when he had first touched her, as though she’d spent her whole life in deep freeze, waiting for him to come along and wake her up, like Sleeping Beauty and that kiss, minus the happy-ever-after ending. She’d run away to Ibiza to recover and she had found love, or maybe love had foundherbecause she certainly hadn’t been looking for it.
She would have turned away, but she could barely move. Recall of all the pleasure she had had at his touch slammed into her with shocking clarity and she felt the tightening of her nipples in hot response. Her tongue darted out and her lips remained parted as her eyes dropped to the wide, sensuous curve of his mouth, a mouth that had once devastated her body and set her aflame with desires she’d never suspected she was capable of feeling. He had shown her how to feel alive again. She had always marvelled that he had been attracted to her in the first place, when she’d known that he could have had any woman at the snap of a finger, but there had been no room for doubts or insecurities in her headlong, burning need for him.
