CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
‘S TOP BULLYING ME , you jerk.’
Rene ignored the caustic tone when Melody did what she was told—for once—and snapped the belt into place.
Her subtle rose scent filled the car, reminding him of all the sleepless nights he’d had over the past four years, the phantom scent pulling him back to that night—which was not helping with his temper one little bit.
He flipped the switch on the dash which turned on the searchlights on the SUV’s roof. Twin beams illuminated the road ahead as they entered the forest.
‘Relax.’ He flicked a glance at her, strangely vindicated by her furious expression.
That makes two of us, then.
He’d known she was lying to him earlier—because Melody had always been a terrible liar, every single emotion she felt always visible on her face. But even so it had surprised him—after he’d had his garage staff woken up to question them—that she would risk her own safety just to avoid him.
He’d been waiting a good twenty minutes for her to put in an appearance, his fury and frustration, and that ache in his stomach—at the evidence of how much she despised him, which he hated even more—building by the second.
But right beside the fury was the kick of adrenaline. And awareness.
While Mel had always infuriated and antagonised him, he also admired her refusal to back down from a fight. It was unfortunate, though, that her temper and that scent still had a marked effect on his libido. Especially as they were now going to be stuck together for five hours.
Then again, no woman had ever excited him the way she did.
Why else would he have taken what she offered that night, even though he’d known it would not end well? And why else would he have found it so impossible to get over her?
Clearly, they needed to confront the fallout from that night, after four years of denial, so they could both move on. But he’d be damned if he’d confront it before he was good and ready. And as they now had all the time in the world, way too much time, in fact, he would let her stew for a change—the way he’d had to all evening.
‘Are you even legal to drive?’ she murmured. ‘How much have you had to drink tonight?’
He tensed at the accusation. How typical of her to poke at a wound which might never heal. But he’d be damned if he’d have her accuse him of endangering her life tonight, as well as his own, by driving under the influence when she had forced him to make this damn journey in the first place.
‘For your information, I haven’t had an alcoholic drink in four years,’ he snapped, then wanted to kick himself.
He didn’t need to defend his behaviour to anyone, and he didn’t want her figuring out his decision to sober up for good had been made as he’d been tiptoeing out of her student digs in London—barefoot, dishevelled, hungover and racked with guilt.
It wasn’t the increasingly brutal hangovers, though, which had messed with his head that morning after… It was the insane desire to wake her up and have her look at him again as she had the night before—as if he could hang the stars—which he had only narrowly managed to resist.
Fortunately, instead of figuring out the timing of his decision to stop drinking, she simply made a scoffing sound in her throat.
‘Who’s the liar now?’ she murmured. ‘If you haven’t had a drink for four years, why were you hungover at Isabelle’s wedding ten days ago?’
He hadn’t been hungover, he’d been sleep-deprived—the familiar nightmares returning—at the prospect of spending hours sitting beside her at the banquet. Which had proved to be a titanic effort, just as he had expected it would be, because when she wasn’t ignoring him, she had been giving him the evil eye.
One thing he intended to get across to her on this infernal drive was that her days of taking cheap potshots at him were over. She wasn’t eighteen any more, she was a grown woman, and he was through putting up with her temper tantrums, when his decision to leave her sleeping that morning, and to ignore her texts and calls over the days that followed, had been one of the few unselfish things he had done in his entire life.
Not only that, but he was damned if he was going to keep taking all the blame for what had happened between them four years ago.
She had come on to him, not the other way around. Maybe he should have resisted her artless flirting. With a bit more maturity himself that night, and a bit less of the Napoleon brandy they’d both had too much of after she and her friends had come up to him at the West End nightclub, he might have been able to.
But what was past was past. And it was time she got over it.
‘Believe what you like, but I am more than sober enough to drive,’ he said, determined to put an end to the conversation.
He did not want her to know exactly how their one night had changed him or she might start getting delusions again. Although, from the derisive glare she sent him, he doubted that would be a problem.
That she would always think the worst of him now made the ache in his gut twist, but he ignored it.
The harsh lesson he’d taught her, about not trusting him, not relying on him, not believing he was a good man, when he had always known he wasn’t—nor did he particularly want to be—was a valuable one, which she ought to thank him for.
‘I’d hazard a guess I also have a lot more experience driving this car on these roads than you do,’ he added, shifting into first as the road began to climb along the ridge overlooking the Castle.
She shrugged and turned away from him to stare out of the Jeep’s window. ‘If you think I’m going to thank you for kidnapping me, you can think again, Rene.’
Kidnapping her?
He laughed. He couldn’t help it. ‘I see you’re still as much of a drama queen as you were when I first met you,’ he murmured, remembering that belligerent ten-year-old tomboy with an odd dose of nostalgia.
She’d challenged him at every turn even then—because she had been brave and loyal and prepared to defend her new best friend. So, of course, being a sixteen-year-old boy who had never had a friend he could trust, it had been all but impossible not to torment her and Isabelle even more.
‘And I see you’re still as much of an overbearing bastard,’ she shot back.
‘Touché,’ he murmured, refusing to defend that troubled boy again.
He wasn’t proud of the way he’d behaved as a teenager, but dealing with his father’s volatile moods and violent outbursts over many years hadn’t left that boy with much ability to process compassion or empathy. As a result, he didn’t blame that boy too harshly for his antagonism towards other children—especially a girl like Mel, who he had been so jealous of at the time. Because she had a mother who loved her, a best friend who adored her, and she didn’t appear to have a father at all, ready to discipline her for every infraction and punish her for any sign of weakness.
‘Whatever it is you have to say about that night,’ she said, the tone sharp enough to slice through steel, ‘just…’ She paused abruptly. He glanced her way to see her face break into a huge yawn. ‘J-just say it,’ she finished.
‘Go to sleep. You’re exhausted. We can talk later,’ he said.
It was a cop-out, and he suspected she knew it from the way she stared back at him, her eyes narrowing.
But the truth was, now she’d put him on the spot, he wasn’t ready yet to have this conversation. Her snotty attitude towards him, at Isabelle’s wedding and last night’s ball, had antagonised him beyond bearing, and he’d lost his temper, but now he finally had her at his mercy, he needed time to figure out an approach that wasn’t going to make her even more difficult. Plus, her rose scent and the sight of her face, devoid of make-up, her wide blue eyes dazed with fatigue, wasn’t helping to diminish the uncomfortable spike of awareness which had been tormenting him for four years.
‘Seriously?’ she hissed. ‘You kidnap me so you can trap me into spending five never-ending hours in a car with you. And now you don’t have anything to talk about?’
Talking isn’t what we’re good at.
The thought popped into his head and pulsed in his groin.
He tensed—and forced his gaze back to the road.
Seriously, Gaultiere, what the hell is wrong with you?
Thankfully, the light snowfall gave him a way out. ‘I need to concentrate on my driving until we get through the pass,’ he said. ‘Consider it a reprieve. But if you really want to explain to me why you are still behaving like a woman scorned four years after our hook-up, I’m all ears.’
She let out an outraged huff. ‘A woman scorned?’ she replied, the scorn in her voice unmistakable. ‘You wish, Prince… Egomaniac.’
The insult might have had more heat if she hadn’t broken off in the middle of it for another jaw-breaking yawn.
‘Go to sleep,’ he said again. ‘Don’t worry, this argument will still be here when you wake up.’
‘You forget, I don’t take orders from y-you,’ she murmured, the fatigue slurring her speech when she yawned again.
‘Consider it a suggestion then, not an order,’ he offered.
She blinked slowly, her glassy eyes making the bright blue, lit by the searchlights reflecting off the dash, even more luminous than usual.
‘Go to hell,’ she muttered, but when she curled into the seat it took less than a second for her body to soften into sleep.
As the snow began to swirl and he concentrated on the road ahead, he was sure he could hear the murmur of her breathing above the rhythmic swish of the wiper blades. He took a steadying breath, only to inhale another lungful of her scent, the heady whisper of roses and female musk filling the car with too many memories…
And the heavy pulse in his groin got a whole lot more insistent.
Great!