A faintly mocking smile touched his mouth as he got up and stood looking down into her tense, rebellious features. ‘You really think we can?’
The heaving muscles beneath his shirt assured her of just how much she affected him. His lids were heavy with the weight of his desire for her and there were slashes of deep colour infusing the taut skin across his cheeks.
He was right, Magenta thought. How was it ever going to be possible when their mutual chemistry was like two magnetic fields that splintered all reasoning and the most basic instincts of self-preservation, resisting anything in the way of their powerful and destructive collision?
But she had to resist whatever it was that made her so physically in tune with this man. Because if she allowed herself to get too close to him she would unequivocally wind up getting hurt. And, worse than that, on the way to her own self-imposed heartache she’d feel duty-bound to tell him the truth about her son. And if she did that, and he tried to hurt her by taking Theo away from her, she would never be able to bear it. No pain in the universe could ever be greater than that.
‘I resisted death,’ she reminded him, ignoring the way her body still ached for his touch. She had to drag herself away from him, and with her voice cracking from the effort as she started to move away she added hastily over her shoulder, ‘It’ll be a doddle resisting you.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘IS THERE ANYTHING else you aren’t telling me?’ Andreas enquired from behind his desk the following morning.
‘Like what?’ Magenta responded, jolted out of her wild speculation as to what it might have been like if she’d wound up in bed with him yesterday to face his unexpected and startling question.
A broad shoulder lifted beneath an immaculate jacket. ‘You tell me.’
The way Magenta’s heart was racing was making her legs go weak. ‘N-nothing you need to know,’ she told him, slipping a folder back into its alphabetical place in the tall metal filing cabinet. Had he noticed the way her voice was shaking? She sincerely hoped he hadn’t.
‘Magenta, look at me,’ he commanded softly.
He had said the same thing in the garden yesterday and it had nearly been her undoing. Nevertheless, after pushing the drawer closed on its runners, she did as he had asked.
‘I think we should do something to help your memory,’ he said, surprising her, because that wasn’t what she had been expecting at all.
Her sidelong glance at him was wary. ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘Nothing specific.’ He put down the pen with which he’d been idly tapping his fingers. ‘And certainly nothing like you’re imagining.’
‘You don’t know what I’m imagining,’ she countered, her mouth going dry.
‘Don’t I?’
He rose to his feet and came around the desk, starting warning bells clanging in Magenta’s head.
He was going out this morning and was dressed to kill, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off the superb lean lines of his physique, enhanced by the equally superb cut of a light beige suit.
‘I told you last night,’ she reminded him, thinking back to the conversation they had had over dinner, after that disconcerting episode in the garden. ‘It’s only specific things I don’t seem to remember now, and even they are coming back...gradually.’
‘Even so,’ he maintained, ‘I’d like my doctor to take a look at you. He’s quite a specialist in the field of psychology.’
‘You think my problem’s psychological rather than physical?’ she suggested, rather sceptically.
Andreas shrugged in a way that suggested he was keeping an open mind.
‘I don’t need a doctor,’ Magenta argued. ‘I’ve seen enough doctors to last me a lifetime and they’ve all said the same thing. That anything I haven’t retrieved might not come back at all. If it’s going to, then I have to be patient. That’s all. As I said, things have started coming back....’
‘That’s good. But it isn’t only your loss of memory that concerns me. You haven’t been eating properly. You’re passing out—’
‘I passed out once!’ she reminded him emphatically.
‘Nevertheless, I think you’ve come close to it on more than one occasion, and it could happen again. Anywhere. Any time. On the underground. Walking downstairs. When you’re crossing the street. And next time it could be when you’re on your own.’
‘No, it couldn’t.’
‘Oh?’ He was frowning down at her from his superior height, an authoritative figure, in command of himself and everything around him. In fact everything she wasn’t—or didn’t feel as if she was just at that moment. ‘What makes you so sure?’