He tried to think how he would have felt if he’d been a child and his father had shut himself away for weeks on end. Children were sensitive and felt things more deeply than most adults credited.
His illness had been devastating for his parents, but they were adults and understood there was nothing they could have done to prevent it. Children were liable to blame themselves.
Just as he was considering which of his contacts would be best placed to recommend a psychiatrist at the top of their field, his phone vibrated, the Top Cat tune ringing out loudly.
Emily laughed, tears still brimming in her eyes. ‘I love that tune.’
He grinned in response and swiped his phone to answer it.
It was his lawyer, Zlatan.
‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, disconnecting the call. He got to his feet and looked down at her. She’d stopped crying. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks all blotchy. She looked adorable.
‘Are you going to be okay? I need to call Zlatan.’
She sniffed and nodded. ‘I still can’t believe that’s your ring tone. Top Cat was my favourite cartoon as a child.’
‘And mine,’ he admitted. ‘My father got some black market videos of it from one of his clients. When I was too ill to do anything else, I would watch them over and over.’
Their eyes held and he was taken with the most powerful urge to lean over the table and scoop her into his arms.
Yesterday he’d sworn to himself that whatever was happening between them had to stop.
All he could offer her was money. He knew without having to be told that she didn’t want it.
Emily needed someone to love her—someone who could give her a family all of her own to heap her love on.
And that was the one thing he could never give her.
Despite his best intentions, he’d climbed the stairs leading up to her hut in the dead of night, exhausted after the clean-up and little sleep, and found himself rapping on her door before he’d realised his legs had taken him to her door. Even then, he’d tried to convince himself he was there to apologise, nothing else. Certainly not to make love to her again.
He needed to put some distance between them. Things were becoming too... He didn’t know what the word was to describe the growing connection between them, knew only that nothing could ever come of it. ‘I need to get going. I have a lot of work to do.’
‘I’m going to stay in here and finish this off,’ she said, picking up the bright material she’d been working on when he’d walked in. ‘And then I might take another walk to the waterfall.’
‘It will be dark soon,’ he pointed out. ‘I would prefer it if you held off until the morning.’
He was rewarded for his concern with a soft smile. ‘If it makes you feel better, I’ll wait until the morning.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And I’ll hold off jumping into the pool until I can see the bottom.’
‘Very funny.’ Not even Emily would be crazy enough to jump into that pool. ‘I’ll see you later.’
He could feel her eyes following his movements all the way to his own hut.
* * *
Emily assumed she would spend the evening in her hut alone as she had the night before. The clean-up was still ongoing, with most of the staff concentrating on clearing the felled trees and other manual jobs.
When Pascha turned up at her hut not long after sundown, he looked more relaxed than she’d ever seen him, the lines around his eyes and mouth softened. Even his clothes were casual, dressed as he was in faded jeans and a white T-shirt. She would never in a million years have guessed he owned a pair of jeans. Or that they would fit so well...
‘We’re eating on the beach tonight,’ he said, not bothering with any preamble.
On the beach...
Had it really only been three days since they’d eaten on the beach, her first night on the island?
It felt a lifetime away. She felt a lifetime away.
She’d placed the dress she’d spent the afternoon making on a hanger. It wasn’t quite finished; it was missing embellishments she wanted to add to it. But...it was done. A little rough, considering there was no mannequin or model for her to use, but it was done—the only item of real colour in the room.
She was fed up of the dark.
‘Give me a minute,’ she said, yanking the dress off the hanger and diving into her bathroom. In no time at all, she’d stripped off the black vest and black shorts and donned her creation.
She turned before the mirror, staring critically at her reflection.
Deviating from her original sketch, she’d made it sleeveless, the bodice smocked and elasticated to hold it in place, the skirt flaring out into a ‘V’ that fell to her knees. She plucked out a couple of loose threads from around the hem then pulled her tortoiseshell comb loose—really, why did she bother with it? Her hair always fell out.