The Real Romero(62)
‘Robbie was the cutest boy in the class. Floppy blond hair, gift of the gab. Plus, he would actually take time out to chat to me. It felt like love, so when he showed up in London and asked to meet up I guess I remembered what I used to feel and somehow transported it to the present day and decided that those feelings were still there, intact. He was still cute, after all. He brought back memories.’
And he had known how to manipulate her weaknesses to his own benefit but, in the end, it took two to tango. He had made inroads into her common sense because she had allowed him to.
‘But what was I saying...?’ She gulped back the temptation to cry just a little.
‘You were saying...’ Lucas’s voice from behind her made her temporarily freeze ‘...that you got suckered in to a dud relationship with some guy who was never suited to you in the first place.’
He had been standing by the door, unnoticed by both his mother and Milly, and he couldn’t quite understand just why it gave him such a kick to hear her finally admit what he had suspected all along.
She had not been occupying Heartbreak Hotel, as she had fondly and misguidedly imagined. Of course she had known that, he had seen it on her face when he had chosen to point it out to her, but it was still gratifying to hear her admit it.
Not, he hurriedly told himself, that it mattered in any way that was significant. It didn’t. She might be amusing, feisty, way too open for her own good...in short, all the things he never encountered in his relationships with women...but that didn’t make her available. She had been available to a simple ski instructor but to the man he was? No.
But, hell, it was getting more and more difficult by the second. He always made sure that temptation was safely out of the way by burning the midnight oil in front of his computer, although he knew that his mind was only partly on work. Too much of it, as far as he was concerned, was preoccupied with visions of her in that bed—and those visions were all the more graphic because he knew how she slept, sprawled in sexy abandon with the duvet tangled about her body.
He’d bet all his worldly possessions that that was not the way she started out. No. He imagined that she tucked herself tightly underneath those covers, swaddled herself in them, but somewhere along the line, when she was happily gambolling about in deep REM, her body had other ideas on how it was most comfortable. And that was not wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy.
Twice she had gone to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning, tiptoeing past the sofa in such slow motion that it had taken all he had not to burst out laughing.
Her sleepwear would be a passion-killer for most men, but the baggy T-shirt with the faded logo, reaching mid-thigh, did crazy things to his system, sent it soaring into the stratosphere. She might wear the least flattering outfits known to womankind, but her body was luscious and sexy, the jut of her full breasts promising more than a handful, the shapeliness of her legs tempting him to find out what lay between them.
He flushed darkly now as he recalled the rigid erection those thoughts had induced as he had showered.
He wondered, with some irony, whether this was what happened when the guy who could have it all was denied the one thing he found he wanted.
The sooner this charade came to an end, the better. Not least because his mother appeared to have fallen in love with the woman and that had not been on the agenda. But they were going out tonight, just the two of them, and he wouldn’t mince his words.
The time for pulling the plug had come.
He was sick of waging war with his libido. He had to return to the land of the living, his offices in London. His mother was getting far too involved in their pretend love affair for his liking. And, anyway, who knew whether Milly was getting a little too accustomed to the good life? That was a consideration that had to be taken into account. Surely. Wasn’t it?