She took a few steps back and he stopped, wary perhaps, or trying to keep his temper now.
‘I shouldn’t have. Simon—’ She choked on his name. She couldn’t help it.
For a few hours last night, it was as if she’d forgotten all about him. But now, thinking of Ys and the lost city he’d sacrificed himself to find, her time with Rafael felt like the most terrible betrayal.
Rafael let out a soft rumble of a sigh. ‘Simon is gone,’ he told her in that calm, patient voice.
‘I know that.’
‘You can’t spend your whole life looking back.’
She shook her head and felt her eyes sting. Panic surged inside her, her heart hammering away. ‘I have to go. I can’t stay here.’
‘Don’t run away, Ari. Please. Don’t run away from me like you ran away from him.’
Her whole body straightened as if her outrage was steel snapping into place along her spine. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You don’t have to beg,mon coeur.’ He said it with a laugh and she wanted to lash out in a fury.
Perhaps it was a language thing. Perhaps he was just a smart-arse.
‘I’m not.’ She bit out each word and his humour seemed to fade. ‘I’m not begging and I am not your heart. I have to go.’
Disappointment filled his voice. ‘So this is it, is it? This is where you run away again. Like yesterday.’
‘I am not running away.’
‘Yes you are. You don’t want to get close to anyone. Perhaps you never did. You ran from Simon as well, didn’t you?’
The world seemed to contract around her, her skin tightening over her bones, the air compressing inside her lungs. There was a high-pitched whine in the back of her head, reverberating through her skull.
‘Whatdid you say?’ She ground out the words, her eyes so fixed, she thought they might bore holes through his head.
‘You keep running away, sabotaging your own life.’
‘I left for a job. A good job.’
‘A good excuse.’ He calmly crossed to the wardrobe and pulled out another dressing gown. It was something of a relief when he covered himself up, but at the same time, she couldn’t shake the horrible feeling that it signalled the definitive end of something. ‘Ari, this is not a – how do they say it? – a quick roll in the hay for me. I don’t do that.’
‘Don’t you? With all your supermodel girlfriends?’ It was a low blow but she couldn’t help herself.
‘One supermodel,’ he corrected smoothly as he turned back to her.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Just the one then.’
He raised one eyebrow as he studied her. ‘You’re overwrought. Maybe we should—’
‘Stop telling me what I am and what I should do, Rafael. You don’t control my life. I can come and go as I please, and I always have done. I left Simon here because that job was everything I’d worked for.’
I left Simon.The words hammered away in her skull.I left Simon.Was that what had happened? She hadn’t meant to but, in fact, she had left. Had their relationship been over long before he sent that letter?
‘And did you ask him to go with you?’
She paused. Had she? She must have. But right now she couldn’t remember. Simon had told her to go, that she’d regret it if she didn’t. But had she ever asked him to go with her? And if he had asked her to stay, to live here in Sainte Sirène with him, would she have?
‘That’s not…’ She couldn’t even finish it. ‘I need to leave now.’
‘Ari,’ he tried again, in that cool, calm voice that she knew meant he was at his most logical, that he was looking inside her and pulling her apart. ‘Please don’t run away this time.’
