And since their wedding day?
There was the burn of hot tears at the backs of her eyes as she forced herself to face an even less bearable thought. The idea that once he had rejected her, he had replaced her with someone else—maybe more than one someone else. How soon after her broken-hearted departure had he brought a new woman into the house that was supposed to have been her marital home? How quickly had he found someone new to warm his bed, fill his days?
How many of them had there been since she had been driven away from him?
The tears that stung at her eyes welled up even more, fighting for release. And with grim determination Becca fought them back, struggling to force them down, refusing to let them fall. But she could only manage the control she needed by gritting her teeth, refusing to blink, swallowing as hard as she could.
‘Becca?’
She wished she could say something—anything to make him look away. Preferably something light and throwaway that would distract him, make him laugh, direct that too intent, too searching scrutiny somewhere else. How could she recover her composure, get back her self-possession when he was watching her as if she was some particularly fascinating specimen under a microscope? One he wanted to dissect and analyse completely.
She knew that her cheeks were burning painfully. The struggle to fight back the tears had added to the already embarrassed colour in her skin. Mortified beyond bearing, she lifted a hand and brushed it across her face, praying that the small gesture would at least break the focus of that concentrated stare.
‘You’re hot,’ Andreas said quietly, the note of concern in his words almost destroying her completely. ‘And no wonder when you’re wearing too much clothing.’
If there had been the slightest trace of a sexual intonation in what he’d said, anything that had made her think that he was deliberately putting a double edge onto the phrase, then Becca knew she would have totally lost control. But the note of genuine concern destroyed her composure in a totally different way.
‘Why don’t you put on a swimming costume and spend some time in the pool? You’re clearly not used to this sort of heat and the water would cool you down.’
It wasn’t the heat of the sun that was disturbing her, Becca admitted to herself. It was the subtler, more sensual warmth of his body so close to hers that she could smell the intimate, intensely personal scent of his skin, topped with the tang of the water that still clung to it. That and the heat of her own response, the honeyed sense of need that flooded her body, pooling moistly at the junction of her thighs.
A swim would be just what she needed. It would ease the burn of hunger, soothe the ache in her body. But there was one very practical problem.
‘I don’t have a swimming costume,’ she managed, casting a longing glance at the cool, fresh water as it lapped against the clean blue tiles of the pool. ‘I—never thought that I would need one when I came here. And to be honest, I never thought I’d stay this long.’
She could have bitten out her tongue as soon as she’d spoken, realising too late how close she’d come to giving away the truth that she was not really the person he’d believed her to be. But Andreas hadn’t noticed the slip, too intent on his own train of thought.
‘That’s not a problem. I can soon provide you with a costume. There’s one in the pool house over there.’
A wave of his hand indicated the small stone-formed building that provided a changing room and a shower for those who used the pool.
‘I saw it hanging up there when I went in this morning. It should fit you. Why don’t you go and try it on?’
And come back here, wearing it?
Becca’s mind quailed at the thought. Just the idea of sitting here beside him, lying in the sun or swimming in the pool close to him in some sleek, close-fitting Lycra costume made the tingling worse, bringing it close to the sensation of an electrical shock running over her skin. If someone had left it here then it was probably one of those mistresses he had spoken of. In which case, was it likely that the costume was anything more than a few skimpy pieces of material, precariously held up by a couple of shoestring straps?
And yet the idea of getting away for a moment, going into the pool house to be by herself, as she had hardly been at any moment over the last three days, except when she had retired to bed, suddenly seemed such an appealing idea. She could hide away there for a while, regain her composure, gather her strength. And then maybe she’d be able to cope much better than she had been doing until now.
‘I’ll do that,’ she said, fighting with herself to make sure that she got to her feet slowly, trying desperately not to make it look as if she was running away even though she knew deep in her heart that that was what she was doing.