‘No, not there,’ she said quickly. It was too small. Too intimate. And there was a bed there, wasn’t there? She didn’t want to be anywhere near a bed. She didn’t trust herself not to make a fool of herself one last time. What if she found herself begging him to hold her close, so that she could feel his hard body warm against hers? Maybe she might even be weak enough to have sex with him one last time. ‘There’s a little place, near here. Down by the harbour. We could go there.’
He nodded and pressed a button so that the interconnecting glass slid open and Catrin leaned forward and gave directions to the driver.
The light changed as they approached the quayside and she could see the bobbing of the boats in the distance. It was another reason why she had come back to work in this area. Putting her mother’s illness aside, living here was no hardship. A cheap little Welsh seaside town she’d once visited on a school trip and which she had never forgotten.
She remembered that it had been a day when, for once, she’d felt just like any other child. She had eaten ice cream and paddled in the sea and the water had been so cold that her legs had turned blue. But she recalled her exhilaration and the sense of freedom, and she’d held onto that memory for a long, long time. The people who still came here on holiday didn’t have lots of money to spend, but Catrin still liked it here. The sea was the sea wherever you went, and she thought the small harbour was as pretty as any Murat had taken her to in Europe. It was certainly a much cheaper place to buy a cup of coffee.
‘Let’s leave the car up here, out of sight,’ she said as they got out into the drizzle and she pointed down the steep road towards the glitter of the waves.
‘Why?’ questioned Murat.
She shrugged. ‘Because this is a small town and I don’t want people wondering what I was doing in a car like this. They might draw their own conclusions—some of them not very nice—and I’d rather they didn’t.’
Murat reflected that this was the first time in his life when his credentials hadn’t been paraded in an attempt to obtain some reflected royal glory. He turned to look at her, noting that her skin was pale and her eyes smudged by shadows, and suddenly it felt as if an iron fist had been clamped around his heart. He wanted to cradle her and to hold her close. He wanted to kiss her hair and her eyes and her lips. But he knew that he couldn’t keep taking from her and giving nothing back.
‘But you’ve been ill,’ he said harshly. ‘I don’t think you should be walking anywhere.’
‘I’m fine. Your Dimdar worked like magic, and, besides, what would the alternative be? Are you proposing to carry me down there?’
‘If you like. I’d carry you in an instant, Cat,’ he said. ‘You only have to say the word.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, but she knew he meant it. Murat came from the kind of world where men were definitely men, and would scoop up a woman into their arms if the need arose. She realised that he was as much a protector as a king. And all these things made her love him more.
And I don’t want to love him. It hurts too much to keep loving him.
It was one of those cold September days which gave a chill foreshadowing of the winter to come. A thin wind whipped the leaves from the trees and her ponytailed hair flew behind her. As they approached the small harbour she could see the cascade of frothy white waves and hear the mournful cries of seagulls as they circled overhead.
The café was very basic. The mugs were thick and the tea too strong. What usually sold the place to Catrin was the view, but today it was difficult to get enthusiastic about the water outside, or the clouds billowing like smoke in a gunmetal sky.