CHAPTER FOUR
THEREWASA slight bump that made the cabin shudder as the plane touched down and Trip was momentarily pressed back against the seat as the pilot reversed the engine thrust. Almost immediately, he heard the bark of the hydraulics balancing the steering and air pressure.
It had taken quite a few phone calls and several conversations during which he’d had to distort some of his motivations and intentions to get to this moment, but it had been worth it, Trip thought, gazing down at Lily’s pale, stunned face.
‘You did what?’
Her voice was frozen with shock or fury, he couldn’t tell which. But then it didn’t matter either way, he thought as he met her narrow-eyed gaze.
‘I told the pilot to fly us to Italy.’
Glancing over at her, he saw that she was spluttering with fury, which in and of itself was immensely satisfying. He had never seen her lose control before.
His body tensed. At least not outside the bedroom.
He could still remember how stunned he’d been that first time they’d had sex.
He hadn’t planned to.
They had gone for a drink at some bar with one of those huge screens showing some boxing match and nobody had even looked at them as they’d walked in. And perhaps it was that shared anonymity or maybe it was that she had looked to him to save her, but he’d forgotten that she was not his type, or that he even had a type, and they’d ended up back at her apartment, in her bed.
Eventually.
The first time they had barely got through the front door.
Before that evening, he’d thought he had her all figured out. But she had been a revelation. The sex had been a revelation. Tentative at first, then fast, urgent, clumsy almost, then hesitant again. Real, in other words, and all the more exciting for being so unscripted, so instinctive.
Watching her lose control like that had been the single most erotic experience of his life, but all he’d been to her was a pretty face.
‘How dare you do that?’
He shook his head slowly. ‘You deserved it—’
Her grey eyes were silver with fury. ‘You’re such a child,’ she said after a quivering pause.
She wasn’t used to losing her temper. He could tell by how she was holding herself and the tremor in her voice and he didn’t like how it made him feel, knowing he was responsible. It stung that she thought he was acting out some petty vendetta.
Like so many people in his life, she had made the mistake of not taking him seriously. But now she did.
‘It was your idea,’ he said, making no attempt to soften his tone. ‘You said you wanted to be with a man who can solve his own problems.’
She was looking at him as if he had sprouted horns.
‘And you think this is the best way to do that? By playing some stupid trick?’ she said in a withering tone. As if he were extraordinarily stupid. ‘Well, if you’ve quite finished your magic show I’m going to go and speak to the pilot and ask him to fly me back to—’
But he was done with being scolded and made to feel as if he were a fool.
‘That’s not gonna happen,’ he said quietly. ‘You see, this is my plane, my crew and they are not going to be flying you anywhere any time soon.’
Lily was still for a moment and he could see her fitting his version of the facts against hers and testing it. Now, she was shaking her head. ‘No, this is my father’s plane. I asked my mother if I could borrow it—’
‘You did. But then I spoke to your mother and I told her that we had got engaged secretly several months ago and that was why you’d been upset. Because you’d been so worried about me, only you’d had to hide how you were feeling.’ He paused and his gaze narrowed on hers in a way that made her breath go shallow. ‘I explained that I thought we needed time alone together. That you were struggling to deal with everything that’s happened but were too stubborn to admit it.’
‘That’s not true—’ The fury in her voice gave it a huskiness he felt in all the wrong places, and he wanted to touch her so badly he didn’t even realise that he had lifted his hand to touch her cheek.
‘She was very sympathetic.’
Their eyes locked for one frozen second and then she jerked her head away from his fingers, the movement exposing the underside of her throat, the pulse beating there at a rapid pace that matched his own.
‘So it’s not just the trustees who think we’re engaged now. Your parents do, too. In fact, your mother was all for me taking you away. She said it would be like a pre-moon.’
He was needling her as much to see her draw herself up in outrage as for any other reason. And because he liked the flush of pink it brought her cheeks and the way it made her voice grow husky. She was the only woman he’d met who was as stubborn as he was, and even though her refusal to simply accept the inevitable was frustrating as hell right now, he found himself admiring her.
Catching sight of her narrowed gaze, he felt his heartbeat start to drum inside his head. She found him equally frustrating.
And he wondered if there was something wrong with him, that he should like it so much. Like getting under her skin.
Her chin jerked up and her voice was very quiet, very furious then. ‘But it’s not, because that would imply we’re getting married and we absolutely are not.’
Settling back against the leather upholstery, he gave an exaggerated shrug, mostly so that he could see the pulse in her throat accelerate. ‘I don’t want to argue on our pre-moon, so, if it makes you happier, let’s just call it a holiday.’
He watched her clench her fists, nails digging into the palms. ‘It doesn’t make me happy, and I don’t want a holiday.’
‘That’s what people who need a holiday always say,’ he murmured. ‘It’ll be good for you to step off the merry-go-round for a while, and the villa is a great place to relax and unwind. You can swim or sunbathe or go for a ride. Or if you want to go out there are some great restaurants in Siena, or we can take in an opera in Florence.’ His eyes dropped to the pulse now beating frantically in her throat. ‘Italy is a playground of the senses, so we could also just make our own entertainment—’
‘I won’t need entertaining because I won’t be staying,’ she said tightly.
Wrong, he thought, watching a spray of goosebumps spread along her bare arms. Now that she was here, there was no way he was letting Lily out of his sight until she had agreed to be his wife. Of that he was certain.
‘That’s what this is to you, isn’t it?’ Her eyes arrowed in on his face. ‘Entertainment. Some kind of game. Well, it’s not one I’m interested in playing. So I suggest you get your pilot back in here and tell him to take me back to New York.’
‘That’s not going to happen. And you’re wrong, Lily. This isn’t a game for me. It’s my life. My business. My future. Which is why I released a statement announcing our engagement shortly before we left New York.’ He held her gaze. ‘Did you really think I’d just told your parents?’
‘I don’t believe you. You can’t have done that—’ Watching the colour drain from her face, he felt a pang of remorse. But what choice did he have? None of this was his choice. It was just the tail end of one careless decision.
‘You left me no choice.’
He watched in silence as she scrolled down her phone with trembling hands. ‘At least here...’ he softened his voice ‘...you won’t have to deal with the paparazzi.’ She had never said as much, but he knew she had a fear and a distrust of the media, so in a way bringing her to Italy was an act of mercy.
‘You have to change this. You have to call someone, tell them that you made a mistake. I can’t marry you—’
The horror in her voice scraped against his masculine pride and he felt his temper flare.
‘I’m not calling anyone. It’s done, okay. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can both go back to living our lives. Separately.’
He didn’t know what he expected to happen. He knew what he wanted to happen, which was that she would give in, capitulate to his not unreasonable demands and agree to marry him. He felt a twinge of guilt. Okay, maybe what he had trapped her into doing was a little unreasonable, but it wasn’t as if he were asking her to do something that she hadn’t done a version of before.
His body hardened with predictable speed as he pictured what that version looked like, as Lily folded her arms in front of her quivering body and glared at him.
‘I’m not leaving this plane.’
‘One way or another you will,’ he said softly.
He watched the slow rise of colour on her cheeks. ‘So now you’re threatening me. This is turning into quite a day for you. And for me too, seeing all these new sides to your character.’
His jaw tightened. ‘It wasn’t a threat. More of a point of information.’ He met her gaze. ‘You see, as your host I have a duty of care—’
‘Did you just say duty of care?’ Her grey eyes grew saucer wide. ‘You’re abducting me, Trip.’
Later, he would wonder what had possessed him in that moment. Maybe it was the derision in her voice or the ice in her eyes or just the fact that she didn’t seem to realise how much this mattered to him, but before he realised what he was doing, he had scooped her into his arms and was walking swiftly down the aisle.
‘Put me down.’
She was twisting against him, but he was already moving down the staircase towards the SUV that was waiting on the runway. Without so much as blinking, the driver stepped forward and opened the door and Trip placed her into the back seat before following her smoothly.
‘Have you lost your mind?’ Face burning, Lily edged to the far side of the car. ‘You’ve no right—no right—’
She reached for the door handle, but the SUV was moving now and she looked over at the driver, not because she was expecting him to leap to her defence, but expecting some kind of reaction, shock maybe, or horror.
But the driver’s eyes were fixed calmly on the road as if he was used to his boss carrying women to his car like some caveman. Maybe he was. Maybe what she called an abduction was just an ordinary day to him.
‘You couldn’t stay on the plane.’ His voice was taut. ‘And you could just give in gracefully for once. This has been a very long day.’
The headache that had started on the flight was spreading now and she pressed a thumb against the pain building at the hairline.
‘You’re right. Frankly, I can’t wait for it to end.’
‘Such urgency,’ he murmured. ‘So some things haven’t changed.’
Looking up, she caught the glint in his eyes and felt her belly backflip as heat suffused her face and body, skin prickling with anticipation and need and fear. Fear at how easily her body could betray her, and, despite there being so much more bad to choose from, how stubbornly it continued to remember the infinitesimal amount of good.
And she could remember it all too well.
Each time they had ended up in bed it was supposed to be the last time. But then she would catch sight of him at some function or at a restaurant and it would be all she could think about.
Like that night when she’d met up with some girlfriends at Piatto for dinner.
Trip had been there with his father and, though she hadn’t gone over to talk to him, just knowing he was there had made the restaurant floor feel as if it were on an angle and she’d had to press her chair down into the floor to stop it sliding towards him.
He’d left the restaurant first, but he had been outside, waiting for her just as she had waited for him that first time. She felt her pulse fluttering, remembering the throb of the blood in her veins as they’d walked on opposite sides of the street, not looking at each other but so intensely aware of every step the other took that it had been as if they were joined by an invisible thread.
As they’d turned the corner, he had abruptly crossed the road and she had pulled him against her, the dark impatience in his eyes and the feel of his mouth on hers unleashing that hunger that shivered inside her, a hunger that she should have resisted because she knew the risks, particularly with a man like Trip.
But looking into his eyes, she had been sure he wasn’t pretending. That he felt what she did.
Until he didn’t, and then he’d ended it, and now he only wanted her because she was safe and dull. And because her parents believed in love, the head-over-heels kind that made you act like a fool and risk everything, and because they wanted her to be happy, they had accepted his lies.
They didn’t know he was faking it.
But she did.
Shifting her body towards the car door, she stared helplessly into the fading light. So why did she still want to lean closer to him? To touch, explore, caress, kiss...
She felt flushed with the heat of it, and her voice was scratchy when she replied. ‘Everything’s changed. Except you. You never change. Which is why you’re in the mess you’re in.’
The blue gleam of his gaze made her breath catch.
‘You know what your problem is? It’s all this thinking in absolutes. Everything. Always, never—it’s exhausting. No wonder your parents think you need a break.’
Her shoulders were aching, muscles tensing from the effort of holding in the scream of frustration that was building inside her. Balling her hands, she inched closer to the door. ‘If I’m exhausted it’s because of you, because of this.’
She was lucky. She had a family she loved and who loved her. A job she adored. A small but close group of friends. A beautiful, spacious apartment and enough money to never have to think about money.
So why had she spent so much of her life living in the shadows?
Not all her life. Trip had been sunlight on her face, and she had basked in it greedily, gratefully, even though she knew that sunlight couldn’t be trusted. That looking into it left you blinded and dazed so that you couldn’t see what was right in front of you.
Like with Cameron.
He wasn’t as traffic-stoppingly beautiful as Trip, but he was cool and edgy and popular and she had been flattered by his attention, intoxicated with the entirely new sensation of being one of the in crowd, so that it had only been later that she’d realised he couldn’t be trusted.
By then the damage had been done. She had put her brother in harm’s way, encouraging him to drive them all back to the city even though Cameron had told her weeks earlier that he didn’t own a car. But it hadn’t seemed important until she’d heard the police sirens.
She’d tried to explain, but the fact was the car had been stolen. By the time her father had arrived at the police station, Lucas couldn’t stop shaking and he was crying too hard to answer questions. And the worst part had been that both her parents were so understanding.
No, actually the worst part had been Lucas going to the clinic in Geneva.
Her heart was beating in her throat.
It had taken a long time to forget the terror and misery of that night. But sometimes even now if they heard a police siren she would see Lucas’ hands shake and his face stiffen with panic and she would want to cry. He had always been highly strung and shy and struggled with debilitating anxiety, but now he was reclusive.
As for her...
Over the years, all the sneering remarks about her appearance had left her cautious around people in general, and men in particular, but she had thought Cameron was different. That he had seen her inner beauty whereas, in fact, with one cool, assessing glance he had spotted the lonely girl who lived inside her who wanted someone to notice her. Talk to her. Think she was special.
The interior of the car shuddered in and out of focus as if she were sitting inside a snow globe and someone were shaking it. Her face felt hot with shame.
Which was why sleeping with Trip had been such a crazy thing to do. At least the risks she’d taken had not impacted anyone else. And nobody had been there to see how easy he’d found it to abandon her. As she remembered his haste to be gone, her breath felt ragged.
She felt his gaze on her face.
‘And I don’t have any problems,’ she lied. ‘Except you,’ she added. ‘You’re my problem.’
‘That’s progress,’ he said softly. ‘Yesterday I wasn’t your anything.’
He shifted against the leather upholstery and every single nerve ending in her body twitched in unison and it was so intense that she had to stop herself from pulling off her seat belt, throwing open the car door and leaping onto the road as they did in the movies.
She turned her face towards the window, seeing nothing, body taut with frustration, furious with herself for telling him what she was going to do and thereby giving him an opportunity to set this ‘plan’ in motion.
When he’d broken up with her, she had thought he was self-centred, arrogant and entitled, but this was a whole new level of impossible to process behaviour. He had lied to her parents, lied to her, tricked her into thinking she was on her way to London when all the time he was bringing her here.
Her gaze fixed on the distant hills with their patchwork fields of green and gold.
‘Exactly where are you taking me?’ she demanded, turning towards him.
‘Villa Morandi. My father’s villa. Mine now, I guess.’ He seemed almost surprised, as if that thought had only just occurred to him, and there was an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.
She had met Henry on a handful of occasions. Outwardly, Trip resembled his father in the broadest strokes. The height, the fine, straight nose and the blue eyes. But their personalities could not be more different. Henry had been all about planning and projections. He had been autocratic, disciplined and focused on the prize. Whereas Trip brought the energy and excitement into any room. He took chances—or risks, depending on your perspective.
But Trip was still his son, and for many boys, their father was a guide into manhood. Was that why he was acting like this? Because he had lost his polestar? She wanted to ask, to reach out and smooth that rigidity from his shoulders, but that would mean having to touch him and it would be beyond stupid of her to do that.
‘And what would he think about you doing this?’ She made her voice neutral, in the way she’d learned from watching her own father deal with political opponents and critics. ‘I spent time with your father. He didn’t act on impulses. He thought things through, and he left you in charge of his business so I’m guessing he wanted you to step up. To grow up and be a worthy successor. I’m certain he didn’t expect you to marry someone against their will.’
He was watching her blandly, but now the light in his gaze sharpened in a way that made her breath go shallow and she knew she had landed a blow.
‘Fine, so break up with me. Here, you can use my phone.’ He tossed it across the seat. ‘Make it official. Call your father. I should warn you, though, there’s a fair amount of blood in the water, so the sharks are already circling. You tip in some chum, and it’ll turn into a feeding frenzy real fast. Because it isn’t just my image that’s going to be affected by our splitting up.’
She stared at him, her heart beating out a drumroll of panic against her ribcage.
He was right. Headlines involving words like ‘senator’s daughter’ and ‘break-up’ would make people sit up and take notice. Add in a photo of Trip looking louche and sexy stepping off a plane after his miraculous return from the dead and the story could run for days, weeks, months in the summer’s slow news cycle.
It would be the ultimate clickbait.
Despite her attempts to stop it, a shiver ran down her spine as she imagined the trolling that would start the minute the story broke.
What fun they would have. Imagine, they would say, that Lily Dempsey thought she could enchant a man like Trip Winslow. Because it wouldn’t matter what statement they put out, everyone would assume she’d been dumped. All the old pictures would be rolled out. The ones that made her want to curl into a ball beneath her duvet. No place had been beyond the intrusive reach of their lenses. No topic was taboo. Not her hair or dress sense. Not even her weight or the straightness of her teeth.
But she could cope with that, had been coping with it since she was nine years old and her father’s career had apparently made her public property.
‘But hey, you know that though, don’t you?’ Trip said then. ‘You and your family know all about managing reputation and image. Why else would the world think your brother was learning musical composition at the Conservatoire in Paris three years ago, when in fact he was in Switzerland?’
Lily’s eyes flew to his and everything inside her lurched as if the car had hit a pothole in the road. She knew she had gone white. Could feel the blood draining away. Nobody outside the family knew about Lucas’ time in the clinic. Their father had driven him there himself.
‘You don’t know anything—’
He made an impatient sound. ‘No, I don’t. And neither do those photographers and reporters who are currently sleeping in their cars outside my apartment. But knowing things that other people don’t know is how they make their living. Once they find a loose thread, they keep pulling on it until it unravels. Or snaps.’
There was a different note to his voice now. A kind of quiet firmness. Like a door closing that couldn’t be opened from the inside.
Lily felt sick. Outside the sunlight was too bright to look into directly, but there were shadows beneath the trees and she could feel the darkness outside seeping towards her.
She had been thinking about herself.
Only it wouldn’t just be her, it would be her family, too, who would be caught in the net. That was fine for her parents. Her father had chosen his career and her mother had chosen her father knowing who he was and where his ambitions lay, but Lucas...
Picturing her brother’s face, she felt her ribs tighten.
He was the polar opposite of Trip. Shy, self-effacing, sensitive, not at all comfortable in his beautiful skin.
Not that Trip knew or cared about that. And in some ways, it was irrelevant now that their engagement was official. Trip had been the big news story for the last twenty-four hours, and the revelation that he and Lily were secretly engaged would be catnip to the press packs.
Picturing them jostling for position on the stoop outside her apartment, she shuddered. She hated being in the limelight, but Trip had made that an inevitability. So, she had a choice, if you could call it that. Stay engaged and hope the media focused on the upcoming wedding and the bridal excesses of the Upper East Side. Or break up with Trip and wait for the sky to fall on her head. Because it would. And not just her head. The impact of ending things with someone so high profile would be impossible to contain.
Being caught in the wake of the media madness that would follow her ‘dis-engagement’ would be horrendous for Lucas, but if someone pulled on one of his loose threads...
Thanks to her last doomed decision to trust someone, he was still fragile, more so even than was usual.
She couldn’t risk him unravelling again. Or worse.
There was a beat of silence, then another.
Clenching her hands so tightly that her nails dug into her palms, she lifted her chin. ‘How long would I have to do it for? Be married to you, I mean.’
There was a short, pulsing silence.
‘I hadn’t really got that far. A year, I suppose. Maybe a little longer.’ She had assumed Trip would be elated. This was, after all, his moment of triumph, but as his gaze moved from her face to her tightly closed fist, she could see a muscle working in his jaw. ‘Does it really matter?’
No, not at all, she thought, turning towards the darkness, letting it swallow her up and blot out the panic in her chest and throat. If she could survive a day, she would survive any number and she would survive. She had to.
‘What matters is that we broke the news of our engagement to suit our agenda. You see, there’s a way to do these things. Announcing it when all this other stuff about my “return” is dominating the news means that people are going to concentrate on the positives. That’s good for you too, Lily.’
Was it? She stared at him dully, not even caring that he so casually used ‘we’ and ‘our’ as if this were some carefully negotiated agreement instead of a unilateral ambush.
Because now she knew what mattered. Not her feelings. Not the trajectory of her life. But was that so surprising? She already knew there was a perceived association in most people’s minds between being attractive and being important. Although they had started before she was a teenager, the years of being mocked and being made to feel inferior because her nose had a bump on it and her hair wasn’t smooth and glossy were not some distant memory.
It hurt to have confirmation that Trip felt that way about her. To know that he had found it so easy to break up with her and just as easy to now manipulate her into this charade of a marriage.
She didn’t know how long the rest of the journey took. It felt endless. Felt as if time had stopped and she was simply reliving the same moment over and over again. Finally, the car took a little twist to the left onto a road that led onto a drive edged with cypress trees.
And then she saw it.
Framed by the Tuscan countryside, the Villa Morandi looked like an enchanted palace from a fairy tale. Her heartbeat accelerated as the driver slowed the car, then turned off the engine and walked around to open her door. Stepping out onto the driveway, she gazed up mutely at the villa, her eyes moving appreciatively over the sun-faded walls and dark green shutters.
‘What do you think?’
Trip’s voice snapped her thoughts in two and she turned to face him. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said truthfully. She had wanted to hate it, but it felt wrong to lie.
Wrong to lie? Her heart began to race again. What was wrong with her? Trip had not just lied to her, he had misled the trustees and manipulated her parents and was forcing her into a marriage of his convenience for which he had shown zero contrition. She needed to toughen up, and fast, or she was never going to survive this.
Lifting her chin, she gave the villa another cursory glance, then shrugged. ‘But if you’ve seen one Italian villa, you’ve seen them all. I mean, they all look the same. Their owners do, too. Let’s hope I don’t get you mixed up with some other self-absorbed, manipulative billionaire.’
‘That would complicate things.’ His blue eyes glinted in the sunlight and she felt his gaze sweep over her. ‘But given that we spent most of our time together naked, perhaps we should just take off all our clothes. That way there would be no confusion.’
There was no answer to that, and she turned away from the house.
Now that the shock of being there had faded a little, her senses felt as though they were being bombarded. A hot, dry breeze was caressing her skin and she could smell the earth and the grass and the cypress trees and, beyond the trees, she could hear...
Nothing.
Her body tingled. She was surrounded by silence, and she had a feeling she’d never had before. Of being far from civilisation, because she didn’t need a map to know there was nothing for miles in every direction.
She shivered. There was nothing here except forced intimacy with the man standing beside her, and that thought made the darkness and the heat and the silence press in on her so that it was suddenly difficult to breathe.
A slight middle-aged woman with long, greying hair in a ponytail stepped forward to greet them with a smile on her face. ‘Buongiorno, Signor Winslow, Signorina Dempsey,’ she said. ‘I hope you had a pleasant flight.’
‘There was a little turbulence, wasn’t there, darling?’ Trip turned to her and gave her a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘But nothing we couldn’t handle.
‘Lily, this is Valentina. She’s the housekeeper and estate manager. Anything you need or want, start with her. Except tonight.’ He turned towards the older woman. ‘Thanks, Valentina. I can take things from here.’
As they walked through the hall, Trip turned towards her. ‘I’ll let you get settled in and then we can have something to eat.’
Eat? How could he think about eating?
Lily stared at him blankly, suddenly light-headed. In the car, when she had agreed to marry him, it hadn’t felt real. But now it did. It was actually happening, only this was just the beginning.
‘I’m not hungry,’ she said coolly. ‘I want to lie down. And don’t for one minute think that you’ll be lying beside me.’
He raised an eyebrow but all he said was, ‘I’ll show you to your room.’
Heart pounding with misery and exhaustion, she followed him upstairs, her pulse accelerating wildly as he led her into a charming bedroom with a beautiful carved four-poster bed.
‘This is where you’re sleeping.’
She froze as he turned to face her. There was enough space between them to park a car and yet the taut, masculine power of his body was too close for comfort.
‘There’s a bathroom through there, and this is the dressing room.’ As he stepped forward a light clicked on softly overhead and her eyes narrowed, not on Trip, but on a jacket hanging from the rail. She had one just like it—
Her breath caught in her throat as she stared at the other clothes that had been neatly folded and hung.
‘Where did you get these?’
‘Your mother had them sent over to my apartment before we left.’
Another betrayal. Wincing inwardly, and needing distance from his disturbingly piercing gaze, she backed out of the dressing room into the bedroom and walked towards the floor-to-ceiling picture window.
The drapes were open and she stared through the glass. Her eyes felt hot. It was strange to think that this was the same sun that she had watched set in New York yesterday afternoon. It seemed so much brighter, like a sun in a dream. Her fingers bit into the skin of her wrist. If only she could pinch herself awake from the nightmare that was engulfing her.
‘You know it’s not just me, Lily.’
Trip was standing behind her. She could see his reflection in the window, but she would have known he was there even if she’d been blindfolded. That thread again.
Their eyes met in the glass and she saw his pupils flare, felt it like a flicker of heat low in her belly, impossible to ignore, imperative to resist.
‘Everyone wants this for us. You wanted it too. Wanted me.’
She felt something rough-edged scrape inside her and she wanted to back away, hide in the dressing room, but there would be no point. She couldn’t hide from the truth, from that heat pulsing across her skin and the tightness inside her. And it was true. She had wanted him.
More than wanted him.
In those hours when they had been alone in her apartment he had been essential to her. Like air and water and sunlight. It had been beautiful too and even though she’d known it would end, could never be anything more than it was, it had been hers, and it had worked, the raw sensuality, that hunger, being wanted like that. Only now he was making the memory of it ugly.
‘The idea of it, yes,’ she said coolly, without bothering to turn around. ‘But most women have any number of romantic fantasies in their head and the trouble with fantasies is that they’re always a bit of a let-down.’
For a moment he didn’t reply, and then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, square box.
Her heart gave a little jerk as he opened it and she stared down at the huge marquise diamond surrounded by smaller sapphires. ‘But this isn’t a fantasy. It’s a means to an end. We need to be engaged. Both of us. Which is why, from now on, you need to wear this.’
He held out the ring and as if hypnotised, she took it and slid it onto her fourth finger.
Trip was staring at her hand. ‘Does it fit okay?’
She nodded and she wondered briefly how he knew what size to choose. ‘It feels strange,’ she said stiffly.
His gaze lifted to her face, the blue of his irises one shade darker than the stones in her ring.
‘You’ll get used to it.’ He hesitated as if he had something else to say, but then he turned and she watched him walk away. He stopped at the door to remove the key and then he was shutting the door and she waited for the click of the lock, but she heard nothing.
Because he didn’t need to lock her in. She wasn’t going anywhere and he knew it, and it was all too easy to hate Trip then. Only hating him didn’t change anything. He might have lied to her, tricked her, abducted her and blackmailed her. But she was still going to have to marry him.