The Real Romero(73)

                In a short space of time, she had made inroads into the decor. The perfectly cool, bland apartment now bore just the sort of homey touches that should have warned him that she was settling into it, just as she was settling into him.

                Pictures on the mantelpiece. Scraps of paper with handy recipe titbits pinned to the stainless steel American-style fridge-freezer with jokey magnets. Lots of flowers because, she told him, it had always been her grandmother’s habit to fill the rooms with things from outside. Good Feng Shui, apparently. He had laughed and drily told her that he had lived quite happily without such touches in his own place. She had suggested some kind of water feature; he had firmly squashed that idea, but he suspected that its absence was only short lived.

                He had to wait for over an hour and a half before he heard the turn of the key in the door and, in that hour and a half, his mind had been everywhere but on work. For once, the joys of deal making had failed in its duty to distract him.

                ‘Where’ve you been?’ was his opening question as she entered the sitting room and Milly started, then smiled as her breathing returned to normal.

                He had been on her mind all evening. So she had told him, just blurted it out; she hadn’t been able to help herself. She had fallen in love with him and it had been just too big a deal for her to keep inside. She didn’t even know when the process had begun. Maybe the seeds had been sown in Spain, when she had glimpsed sides of him that were so curiously appealing. Certainly, she now knew that her fate had been sealed by the time they had fallen into bed together that first time and she had sunk deeper and deeper the longer she had spent with him.

                It was crazy, she had known that, but love was crazy, wasn’t it? It wasn’t something you could explain on a sheet of A4 paper, like a maths problem with a solution. If love made sense, she would never have fallen in love with Lucas. But she had. And, the minute she had told him, she had wished that she could yank the words back into her mouth and swallow them down. He had gone perfectly still, hadn’t replied, and when he had spoken it was as though he had chosen to ignore what she had said.

                And his eyes were grave now as she tentatively walked towards him.

                ‘We need to talk.’

                ‘Why?’ Milly smiled quickly. ‘You always tell me that there are far better things to do than talk.’

                ‘But, first, where have you been?’ That question hadn’t been on the agenda.

                ‘I told you, Lucas, that I was going out with some people from work.’

                Lucas scowled and tried not to let his imagination run away with thoughts of who those people were. She looked bloody amazing. Just the right side of tousled, her red hair trailing down her back, her tight jeans showing off every succulent inch of her body, as did the clingy long-sleeved top. The fact that she was wearing a pair of flat sneakers did nothing to detract from the look and he angrily felt himself harden in automatic response.

                He dismissively waved aside her explanation just in case she thought that a detour down that road was going to happen.

                ‘What’s going on, Lucas?’ As if she didn’t know. One sign of love and he was getting ready to bolt. Things were just fine as long as they were having sex. The charade was well in place then! But she had crossed a line; she had forgotten what he had told her about not getting involved and had committed the mortal sin of not only disobeying the edict, but of telling him that she had.

                ‘I think you know. And sit down; stop hovering.’

                ‘I’m not sorry I said what I said,’ Milly imparted with just the sort of driven honesty that he felt had landed them in this mess. ‘And I never said that I was asking you to love me back.’ But she was.