The Real Romero(75)

                Naturally she wouldn’t have been fine with that and her brief hesitation had given him all the answer he had needed.

                But what if she had agreed? What if she had buried her feelings under the sort of hard veneer that he would have been able to deal with? What if she had taken up his proposition and shut away the side of her that had wanted more, that would always want more? Would that have been a better decision than the one she had made? She wouldn’t have spent the past week and a half thinking about him whilst staring at the walls of his apartment and thinking that she would have to move out sooner rather than later.

                She almost, but didn’t quite, regretted that she hadn’t thrown his stupid job and his stupid free apartment right back in his face but common sense had thankfully kicked in because she would have been in an even worse position than she was now. She would have been hurting emotionally, and positively haemorrhaging financially, because a cursory glimpse at the ads for jobs in the catering industry had told her that there were no jobs to speak of. She would have been on the first train back to her grandmother, and there would have been no jobs there either, so she would have ended up doing something and nothing just to make ends meet.

                It had left a sour taste in her mouth because the last thing she had wanted to do was to accept the terms and conditions of the proposal that had so roundly backfired in her face. But sometimes pride just had to take a back seat, and she was very glad that it had, because she loved her job and loved living in the heart of London, such a far cry from her former digs.

                Her friends had all been mightily impressed as well, although she had omitted to tell them the details of how she had landed up where she had.

                She had simply said that she had been lucky enough to have found herself in the company of a guy who had felt sorry enough for her to have lent her a helping hand. It was bad luck to have found herself at the ski chalet without the job she had anticipated, but it had been extremely good luck to have found herself there in the company of the guy who actually owned the ski chalet, along with a whole load of other stuff; a guy who had heard her unfortunate story and had been kind enough to lend a helping hand.

                Ha. She had nearly choked when she had expanded on his kindness. She had turned him into a benevolent, avuncular, father-figure type, which couldn’t have been further from the truth!

                If they had been a little curious as to why she had suddenly decided to become the stay-at-home type who no longer needed to talk incessantly about her misfortunes, they had not said anything, and she knew they figured that she was just experiencing the aftershocks of what had happened with Robbie.

                In time, she would confess all, but right now she needed time out from...everyone.

                She had just showered and climbed into a pair of baggy joggers and an even baggier T-shirt—because she had lost the desire to wear tight and sexy clothes now that she was back to being on her own—when she heard the ring of the doorbell, and she froze, because there could be only one person who would ring that doorbell, having got past Eddy, the porter who manned the desk downstairs.

                Lucas.

                He had a key to the apartment, which made sense bearing in mind it belonged to him, but he always used the doorbell, only letting himself in if he knew that she wasn’t going to be in.

                Her mouth went dry and she gulped in deep breaths because the thought of seeing him again filled her with pleasure and trepidation at the same time.

                In the length of time it took her to traverse the wooden floor from sitting room to door, she had dissected, dismissed and re-dissected a hundred possible reasons for this unexpected visit.

                In the starring role on her wish list was the tiny ray of hope that he had miraculously decided that they were suited after all, that he had made a terrible mistake. Or even, she was ashamed to concede, that he had missed her and would she climb back into bed with him? She would say no, she was pretty sure of that, but it would do her a power of good just to think that he, in some small way, missed her as much as she was desperately missing him.