‘How do you think the evening went?’ he asked, trying to draw her out.
‘I’m too tired for a conversation, Abe.’
‘But not too tired to read?’
‘I’m too tired to have sex,’ Georgie said bluntly. She shuffled to switch off the light on her side.
He stared at her as she swivelled away and he couldn’t help reaching out to manoeuvre her so that she was reluctantly facing him, bodies so close that he could feel the heat emanating from her.
‘Is that what I asked?’
‘No, but it’s what you meant.’
‘I thought you seemed to be having a passable time this evening, after the nerves.’ He heard the warning bells behind her incendiary statement and chose to ignore them.
‘I’m surprised you even noticed, Abe, considering you didn’t spend more than five minutes in my company.’
Abe stilled. ‘Is that what this is about? The fact that you had to circulate on your own without me holding your hand every step of the way?’
Georgie recoiled, stung. ‘I don’t expect you to do that, Abe.’
‘I realise,’ he said, bypassing his discomfort at knowing that he had spoken more harshly than he’d intended, ‘that this is all new to you and, believe me, I want to make sure you settle here and find a way of calling it your home, however long that may take.’
‘To which end, you’re prepared to give me my very own villa, which I can turn into the sort of house I am accustomed to?’
‘You think I am being selfish in that?’
‘I think you’re being considerate, Abe. Considerate and thoughtful, because what other choice do you have?’
‘Perhaps we should have this conversation in the light of day,’ he suggested, reaching to turn off his side light, plunging the bedroom into flickering shadows and dark pools.
‘You wanted to talk,’ Georgie said, more calmly, ‘so let’s talk. This evening... I finally realised where I am in the pecking order of your life.’
‘Extremely high, if you want the truth.’
‘No, I’m nowhere near the top. I’m only in it in the first place because of Tilly. You’re prepared to do everything within your power to make me feel comfortable here because I’m the mother of your child. But tonight... I realised that, underneath it all, this is a purely business arrangement to you. Yes, I don’t doubt that you like me well enough to “rub along nicely”, and I don’t doubt that you enjoy making love with me, but it’s still a business arrangement.’
‘Where are you going with this, Georgie? Have I ever misled you on that front? I thought I’d been open and honest about our reasons for marrying from the start. Would you rather I’d lied to you?’
‘No. And, no, you haven’t misled me. The sad truth is that I ended up misleading myself.’ She felt too close to him, his bare chest within touching distance. She sat up abruptly, drew her knees up and folded her arms around them and for a few seconds she buried her head against her knees, just trying to marshal her thoughts.
She wasn’t surprised when she felt him getting off the bed and she raised her eyes to follow his progress in the dark. He pulled a chair across so that he was sitting by her side of the bed.
For Abe, she thought, bed equalled sex and this was definitely not the sort of conversation he felt comfortable having between the sheets.
He could compartmentalise brilliantly. His love for his daughter—immediate, instinctual and without compromise—was wonderful but it didn’t spill over into his feelings forher, for Georgie. Georgie was finally waking up to the reality that she would always and only ever be the duty he had had to take on board as part of the package deal to have his daughter.
The sex was a great bonus but, without it, he would still have offered her exactly the same deal because he would have wanted the same net result.
Georgie knew that they could carry on making love and she could continue to fool herself that what they had might actually end up going somewhere, but tonight had finally opened her eyes to a future that was much more likely. In fact, a future that was downright inevitable.
The problem was that, the more she slept with him, the more blurred the lines between fiction and reality would become.
He saw things through a filter that was purely black and white and that was why their arrangement would work so brilliantly for him.
For her, however...?
‘Don’t go there, Georgie.’ Abe broke the silence, a roughened undertone in his voice.
