Milly had loved it. She had never felt more relaxed as she’d sipped hot coffee and told him all about her childhood, her love of sports, the football team she supported. She’d told him about being brought up by her grandmother, the way it made you feel vulnerable to being left by the people you love.
It was weird but she knew that if she had met him under more normal circumstances there was no way she would ever have approached him. But here, things were different. She was recuperating from the humiliation of a broken heart, and he was the objective listening ear who didn’t know her and so was not interested in tea and sympathy. In fact, he made no mention of Robbie except, when he could sense her drifting off, to tell her that the guy was a loser and she was better off without losers in her life.
‘Tough times make you stronger,’ had been his bracing observation when she had mentioned the uphill struggle of having to return to London to find work so that she could pay the rent on a house she couldn’t really afford unless she found another lodger pronto.
Everything about him was as sexy as hell and by the end of the day she had stopped trying to pretend that she didn’t want to just keep looking at him. She had stopped trying to figure out how it was that she could be broken-hearted and yet still open to his incredible, mind-blowing, raw animal magnetism...
Their joint love of skiing had banished her nerves. When she was moving on the snow, she was no longer the small, round red-haired girl who couldn’t hold a candle to the tall glamorous models men found attractive. No, when she was skiing, she was at the top of her game and bursting with self-confidence.
* * *
Lucas had planned to stay no more than two nights at the ski lodge.
It was all the time he could spare. His high-octane life did not leave room for impromptu holidays. The impulse to go to the ski lodge where the isolation and privacy would recharge his batteries had been a good one.
The unexpected presence of Milly, her freshness and openness, had turned out to be even better for recharging his batteries.
By the second day, he had already made up his mind to take a couple more days off.
What was the point in having highly paid executives in place if you needed to hold their hand every time a decision had to be made? They could all do without him for a few days. Some of them could definitely do with an injection of backbone.
The truth was that he was enjoying himself. He was even enjoying his self-imposed rule of looking but not touching. He liked the way she coloured when he occasionally flirted with her. He liked the challenge of restraint when, the more he saw of her, the more he wanted to see. He liked her openness and he liked the way she confided, her pretty face pink and open and earnest.
The joy of restraint, however, was the certain knowledge that it could be broken at any given moment in time.
She fancied him. He had picked that up with finely tuned antennae: the way she sneaked sultry, stolen glances at him; the way she stilled whenever he got within a certain radius, as though ordering her body not to betray what she was feeling.
Her attempts to keep her distance were like constant gauntlets being thrown down. His libido, jaded after a diet of the same type of woman, was being tested to its absolute limit.
It was invigorating.
It made him think that he had not faced up to any sort of challenge for a very long time. He had flatlined. He made money, more than he could ever hope to spend in a lifetime. He owned things and occasionally even enjoyed some of his possessions. And he had women. However many he wanted and whatever variety he chose.