‘Whoever said anything about ideal?’ Rafael murmured.
‘Okay. Maybe not ideal.’ Amy had turned around and was looking at him squarely in the face. ‘But the sort of woman you like. The sort of woman you date, go out with, have a relationship with, fall in love with…’ Amy didn’t know where all that had suddenly come from. She did, however, know that she would rather she had kept it to herself. She clapped her hand to her mouth and reddened.
Suddenly saving James from his fate, protecting him from a potential gold-digger, became an inconspicuous aim on the distant horizon. Rafael had a disconcerting moment in which he lost all sense of perspective. It was as if the ground had suddenly shifted from under his feet.
‘Go to bed,’ he said roughly. ‘And no. You won’t have to make your way back to the house on your own.’ He turned away, leaving Amy guiltily aware that her passing remark might have been one invasion too far of his privacy.
He was disgusted with her, she thought miserably. She had a long bath, washing away the effects of the evening, which had been going so well only to fall apart at the end. With the warm water covering her and foam concealing the few bits of her body that were exposed because she had tipped way too much of the bubble bath in, Amy closed her eyes and relived every minute of the day and night they had spent together.
She had accepted his offer to show her around Manhattan and, instead of being grateful because he had been doing her a good turn, had proceeded to give him the full, uninvited benefit of her mind. She had been unnecessarily sarcastic when she should have been thanking him for his attempts to distract her from her humiliation over James. How was he to know that her broken heart had been nothing of the sort? How was he to realise that her extreme reaction to him had stemmed from her inappropriate attraction, against all odds?
She squeezed the sponge and watched the water trickle out of it, making patterns on the surface of the bubbly white foam.#p#分页标题#e#
When she thought about it, she realised that she was either chattering to him senselessly and tediously about bits of her life he probably wasn’t in the least bit interested in, or else jumping down his throat for things he hadn’t said or done.
And then to have laid into him for not obliging her by returning her immediately and at his inconvenience to the house! She cringed and sank a little deeper into the bath water.
For a short while she wallowed in a bit of self justification as she remembered his jibe about being out of James’s league. Of all the nerve! And he of all people! But then, she thought with a pleasurable injection of spite, if he spent his time bedding the socialites he met through his employees, maybe he felt himself a bit further up the pecking order than her! Ha!
She decided that this train of thought was a lot more comfortable to deal with than the one that involved her beating herself up for being a fool.
She relaxed into a lazy recollection of all the hard work she had put in to become a caterer. Not to mention the parental disappointment she had had to face because both her parents had wanted her to go to university, maybe become a teacher. They had never had the opportunity for further education. They had been keen to instil its importance in all their children from a very young age. Amy had resisted all attempts to manoeuvre her into yet more time spent learning. The thought of years of exams and teaching classrooms of recalcitrant children had brought her out in a cold sweat. Huh! What had he gone through to get his gardening job? she asked herself piously.
Had he spent years training under some Head Gardener somewhere? Had he been made to fall into line with the rosebush pruning or else face a barrage of abuse? She thought not!
He had probably just turned up, stripped off his shirt to prove that he had the necessary brawn and got the job.
She let her mind wander dangerously over the image of him revealing that necessary brawn and yanked it back into line with a mental slap on the wrist.
Unfortunately doing so also made her pleasantly self-righteous moral high ground disappear like a puff of smoke and she was back where she started. Chastising herself for reacting like a spoiled kid.
It wasn’t so much a case of what had he been thinking, daring to tell her that James was out of her league. More a case of what had she been thinking to have jumped down his throat at the well-intentioned and probably very true observation!
With a groan of impatience with herself, Amy dried off and after a moment’s thought stuck on the white towelling robe very kindly provided by the anonymous firm that looked after the apartment. Or at least the woman who had kitted it out.
She wouldn’t waste time arguing herself out of an apology, she thought, making her mind up with her usual speedy impulsiveness.