The Real Romero(30)

                She had sat in stony silence on their trip back, head averted, back rigid as a plank of wood as the cable car had carried them back up the slopes. There had been no pleading for him to listen to her and no trying to tempt him out of his foul mood. He had been spoiled by women who tiptoed around him. Despite her open, chatty nature, she was as stubborn as a mule.

                ‘Perhaps I should have been a little less...insistent,’ Lucas drawled, pushing aside the file he had given up on and watching the way she was deliberately avoiding eye contact with him. ‘But you don’t know this area and you don’t know how fast and how severe these snow storms can be.’ This was the closest he was going to get to an apology and it was a damn sight more than he would have offered anyone else.

                ‘Is that your idea of an apology?’ Milly asked, finally turning to look at him.

                He must have showered during the time she had been upstairs, taking as long as she could in the bath without shrivelling to the size of a prune. His dark hair was slicked back and still damp, curling at the nape of his neck, and he was in loose grey jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt that managed to achieve the impossible—it was baggy and yet announced the hard muscularity of the body beneath it. He hadn’t shaved and his jaw was shadowed with stubble.

                He looked insanely gorgeous, which made her feel even more of a fool for having been sucked into thinking that he was Mr Nice. Since when were insanely gorgeous guys ever nice?

                ‘Because if it is,’ she continued, folding her arms, ‘Then it’s pretty pathetic. I told you that I was sorry for not having paid sufficient attention to the weather, but I left very early this morning so that I could do a little skiing before I went into town and, yes, it was snowing, but nothing like it’s snowing now...’

                Had she just told him that his apology was pathetic?

                ‘I’m not going to waste time discussing whether you should or shouldn’t have been on the slopes in bad weather.’

                ‘And...’ she carried on, because she wasn’t ready to pack in the conversation just yet. They were going to be spending at least another night under the same roof and she might as well clear the air or else they would be circling one another like opponents in a boxing ring, waiting to see who landed the first blow.

                ‘There’s more?’

                ‘You had no right to storm into that café and start laying down laws as though you’re my lord and master. You’re not.’

                ‘I never said I was.’

                ‘I’ve been taken for a mug by my ex and I haven’t come over here for a complete stranger to pick up where he left off!’ Okay, so some exaggeration here but, the more Milly thought about her idiocy in actually thinking that Lucas was a nice guy, the angrier she became. She thought of the high-handed, autocratic way he had delivered his command for her to follow him or else find herself stuck trying to get into a hotel—because she wouldn’t be able to make it back to the lodge, presumably because he would have had no qualms about leaving her to her own devices, having made sure grudgingly that she hadn’t died on the slopes...

                Lucas was outraged at that suggestion. She had somehow managed to swat aside the small technicality of her rashly having ventured out without due care and attention because she had wanted to have a little ‘early-morning ski’ before ‘dashing to the shops for something and nothing and a cup of hot chocolate’. While he had been worried, imagining her skiing round and round in ever decreasing circles in a wilderness of unfamiliar white, she had been gaily sightseeing! And, when he’d run her to ground, not only had she expected an apology but she had the barefaced nerve to compare him to an ex-fiancé who had made off with her best friend!