‘Who’s there?’
He could hear the squeak of alarm in her voice. What the hell was he doing, lurking in the gloom?
‘It’s me.’ Clearing his throat, brusquely he moved along to the glass door, pushing it open authoritatively. ‘I heard a noise. Came down to see what it was.’
‘Oh.’ She stared at him for a minute before swimming over to the edge of the pool and hanging on with fingertips that were level with his bare feet. ‘You scared me.’
‘Sorry.’
He looked down at her head and shoulders, streaming with water, her hair slicked back darkly over her forehead and then fanning out around her like seaweed. Closer inspection revealed that beneath the blue of the water she was naked. Dio.
He looked away with a jolt. ‘What on earth are you doing here at this time of night anyway? You realise that it’s nearly three a.m.?’ Gruffness covered the growl of desire.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’ She pushed off from the edge of the pool, took a couple of strokes, then stopped to look at him again, treading water. ‘I decided to take a midnight swim. A three a.m. swim,’ she corrected herself.
The idea had come to Lottie after several hours of fitful tossing and turning. Their evening out had ended on such a sour note, with a silent drive back to the villa and Rafael refusing even to look at her as he headed for the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Lying in bed, staring at the moonlit shadows on the ceiling, she had tried to work out just where it had gone wrong—why it always went wrong.
She had heard Rafael come upstairs, the soft click of his bedroom door. Wide awake, she’d thought back over their time together in the villa: the fraught atmosphere, the tension that had been building and building between them.
She knew that it was more than just the hurt of the past that had caused it, though that would never leave them. It was the raw, fresh assault of the present too. The insidious, sensual, sexual connection that their close confinement had revealed. That was what they were both fighting. That was what made their time together so unbearable.
Her night-time dip had been a good idea and had made Lottie feel strangely calm. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but somehow the warm water caressing her naked body had not only washed away her stress but also heightened her sensuality, producing an almost carefree drunkenness. She was in a beautiful place, with a beautiful man, and there was a chance—maybe a good chance—that she was pregnant with his baby.
And now he was here, standing at the edge of the pool, staring at her, the muscular planes of his naked torso shadowed in the dim light. The sight of him stirred an impulsive recklessness in her.
‘I’ll leave you to it, then.’ With one last piercing look Rafael was turning to go.
‘Why don’t you join me?’ Her words had escaped before she knew it, echoing around them and halting Rafael’s movement.
He glanced back at her as she bobbed up and down in the water. ‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘For fun, Rafe. We are supposed to be having fun, remember? It’s doctor’s orders.’ Swimming a few strokes closer, she stopped again and looked at him earnestly, her eyes wide and daring.
Fun. Rafael realised that that was something Lottie had been full of—certainly when he had first met her. It had been one of the many things that had made him love her. She had been so different from anyone he had ever known before—different from the women he was forced to socialise with in Monterrato. Those women were like strategic pawns, carefully chosen because they were the daughters of heads of state or influential businessmen. Part of the reason he had insisted on going to England to do his business doctorate had been to get away from the whole hideous mating ritual.
But he had never expected to find Lottie—never expected to fall so blindly in love and for Lottie to get pregnant so quickly. That had led to the hurried wedding and what now felt like the happiest period of his life. His father had been livid, of course. Rafael still had that furious letter somewhere—their last exchange before Georgio had died of a massive heart attack. Which had to be a coincidence. He was not responsible for his father’s death. He just wished Georgio had had the chance to meet Lottie. She would have softened his angry heart.
He could see Lottie, waiting, looking up at him, her arms and legs moving silently, tentacle-like, beneath the brightly lit water. She was goading him to join her, probably thinking there was no way in the world that he would. Because he wasn’t fun, was he? And, worse than that, he had drained the fun out of Lottie, or at least had a damn good go at it. He could see that now.
Like some vampire of doom he had weakened her carefree spirit, her zest for life, first by throwing her, totally unprepared, into the role of Contessa di Monterrato and then with the death of their baby and his subsequent determination to get her pregnant again. It was a wonder she had any fun left in her at all.