‘I came to find out how you were and I wish I hadn’t bothered, to be perfectly honest.’
‘What did you expect?’ Rafael’s voice was cold and dismissive but he could feel the anger building up inside him and he was annoyed with himself because he didn’t want to feel angry. He wanted her to stay in the box he had made, somewhere at the back of his mind. A nice, safe distance away, somewhere he could label ‘history’. He could control the situation then. ‘Did you expect the red carpet to be rolled out in your welcome?’
‘No, but a little politeness might have been nice!’ Shrieking again, Amy thought. What was it with this man? ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’
‘How did you know that I had decided to stay on?’
‘Claire. Claire told me. Remember her? She came out to the Hamptons on that company trip…’ She had a vivid burst of memories and had to drag herself back to the present and back to the intransigent man sitting in front of her. It was one thing to think about fighting for the person you loved, but it was quite a different matter when the person in question didn’t want the fight. In fact, just wanted to be left alone.
‘Company spy.’
‘Hardly.’
‘You mean you asked her about me?’
‘No! She just sort of mentioned it in passing…’ She hoped she wasn’t in the process of landing her friend in a mess, but confessing to reading about him in the newspaper would entail her having to explain that she knew that he was involved with someone, and there was no way she intended letting him know that she had quizzed his brother either. No way.
‘I was curious, that’s all. To find out why you had decided to stay on.’
‘Because you thought that I had made a trip to London specifically to pursue you?’
‘I never thought that! Anyway…I’ll be off.’ She turned around, defeated, and headed back towards the door. If she had sat down like a normal person and thought her crazy idea through instead of just rushing in on impulse, she realised she might have predicted its outcome. She had turned him away and he wasn’t just going to forgive and forget. His ego had probably been wounded and, even if the damage had been temporary, he would still have been hard-pressed to forgive her because men notoriously had very fragile egos. And a rich man’s ego would be particularly fragile, she guessed, because he would be so unaccustomed to having it wounded.#p#分页标题#e#
‘I’d been thinking of branching out for a while.’ Rafael arrested her in her flight towards the door. ‘London seemed a more controllable market than the US, with more scope of innovation, hence the trip over here.’ He wanted to make that perfectly clear, even though it was a complete fabrication. He had actually planned to return to America immediately, but in the wake of her outraged reaction to his duplicity he had found himself temporarily rudderless, and into the unaccustomed vacuum the idea had taken root and solidified as something very much worth doing. It also, strangely, allowed him to prove to himself that his movements weren’t going to be dictated by some woman he had happened to meet by chance and with whom he had had an ill-advised fling.
That would have been pretty hard for him to swallow!
‘Oh. Good,’ Amy said vaguely, as always losing interest the minute any talk of finance reared its head.
‘Yes. Elizabeth thinks so as well…’
‘Elizabeth?’ She marshalled her thoughts and tried to sound as though the name meant nothing to her at all. ‘Who’s Elizabeth?’
‘The woman I’m going out with.’ Rafael couldn’t help the little kick of satisfaction at Amy’s reaction. Of course he was an adult and a serious one at that, not one to play games, never had been, but he had to admit that embellishing his story was tempting. ‘I knew her over in New York. Went out with her for a while, as a matter of fact, then we decided that we both needed space from one another.’
‘Which was when you met me?’
‘Yes.’
‘And now you’ve had your fling with me, you’ve decided that it’s time to get back together with you ex.’ The fighter in her kicked in. She remembered that she was here to try and win him back because without him her life was empty. She nodded sagely and edged towards the chair. Okay, he had told her not to make herself comfortable because she wouldn’t be staying long, but she wasn’t going to have an emotional conversation standing up.
‘What does that nod mean?’ Rafael asked suspiciously.
‘Can I interest you in a drink somewhere? Or something to eat? If you haven’t eaten already?’