‘And when they worsened, you intended to stay put, drinking hot chocolate and waiting for things to blow over?’ Lucas turned to her, jaw clenched. ‘I don’t do rescue missions, so if you want to risk life and limb do me a favour and wait until I’ve vacated the lodge. Then you’re more than welcome to take your life in your hands.’ Not a very fair remark, but damn if he was going to retract it. When you went out to ski, you had to have your wits about you. One false move and you could end up endangering not just your own life but someone else’s life, as well.
‘I’m not responsible for you while you’re out here,’ he continued coldly.
‘And I never asked you to be!’ Her eyes flashed but he was right. She should have known better. That said, she had apologised, and he hadn’t been big enough to accept it.
She turned away and stared off into the distance. What was it about her that was so poor when it came to reading men? Lucas had shown her a funny, charming side to him and she had been instantly captivated and disarmed. She’d have thought that experience, very recent experience, might have toughened her up a bit, made her just a little more jaundiced when it came to believing people and their motivations, but not so.
Apparently, he was fine when it came to her cooking for him and tidying up behind him like a skivvy. And if she wanted to chatter on inanely about herself, then he was happy enough to listen, because really, what choice did he have when he happened to be in the same room as her? But woe betide if she was stupid enough to think that any of those things amounted to him actually liking her.
She took people at face value. She always had. Growing up in a small town in remote Scotland where everyone knew everyone else had not prepared her for a world where it paid to be on guard. How many learning curves did one person need before they realised that having a trusting nature was a sure-fire guarantee of being let down? Especially when it came to the opposite sex?
Once back in the lodge, Milly stalked off to have a shower and get changed. The relaxed atmosphere between them had changed just like that after a silent trip back. She took her time having a very long bath and then changing into a pair of jeans and a comfortable cotton jumper. Her hair had gone wild in the snow and she did her best to tame it with the blow drier in the bathroom but in the end she resorted to tying it back in a loose braid down her back. Wisps and curly tendrils escaped around her face, but too bad.
For a few seconds, she looked at the reflection staring back at her in the mirror.
She couldn’t remember ever having been envious of any of her friends when she had been growing up. They had been interested in cultivating their feminine wiles and getting with boys, and she hadn’t. Not really. She hadn’t been interested in make-up or skimpy clothes and she had been amused at how much time and effort some of her friends had devoted to their looks and to attracting boys. It had all seemed a bit of a waste of time, because they had all been in and out of relationships, spending half their time hanging around waiting for a text to come or else putting everything on hold because they were ‘going steady’ with a boy and somehow that left no time for anything else.
She was pretty sure that those girls would have matured into women who would be savvy enough to spot someone like Robbie for the fraud that he was—and would certainly have spotted Lucas for the arrogant kind of guy who thought he could say what he wanted and do as he pleased with the opposite sex.
He didn’t do jealousy and he didn’t do rescue missions and there were probably a million other things he didn’t do. What it came down to was that he was someone who just did whatever he wanted to do and he didn’t really care if he trampled on someone’s feelings in the process.
It was not yet lunch time and the snow had already picked up a pace. Lucas was in the kitchen when she finally went downstairs, sitting at the table with a pot of coffee in front of him. Cut off from the outside world thanks to the snow storm, he had given up on trying to sift through paperwork he had brought with him.