The Royal House of Niroli Collection. Кейт Хьюит
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he didn’t answer her she closed the office door and came towards him, dropping her voice to a playfully soft tone as she told him, ‘Or maybe we could forget the going-out and the lunch. Remember, Marco, how we used to…What’s wrong?’ she asked him uncertainly.
Her smile disappeared and Marco recognised that he had left it several seconds too late to respond appropriately to her arrival.
Normally, the fact that his timing was at fault would have been his main concern. But, for some reason, he found that, not only was he acutely aware that he had hurt and upset Emily, he was also suppressing an immediate desire to go to her and apologise. Apologise? Him? Marco was astounded by his own uncharacteristic impulse. He never apologised to anyone, for anything.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he told her flatly, knowing that something was very wrong indeed for him to have felt like that. It couldn’t be that he was feeling guilty, could it? a traitorous, critical inner voice suddenly challenged, pointing out: After all, you’ve lied to her and you’re about to leave her…
She knew the ground rules, Marco answered it inwardly. That his own conscience should turn on him like this increased his irritation and, man-like, he focused that irritation on Emily, rather than deal with its real cause.
‘Yes, there is,’ Emily persisted. ‘You were looking at me as though I’m the last person you want to see.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I just wasn’t expecting to see you.’ He flicked back the sleeve of his suit—handmade, it fitted him in such a way that its subtle outlining of his superb physique was a whispered suggestion caught only by those who understood. ‘Look, I can’t do lunch, I’ve got an important call coming through any time now, and after than I’ve got an appointment.’ That wasn’t entirely true, but there was no way he wanted Emily to suggest she wait around for him whilst he spoke with his grandfather. For one thing, he had no idea just how long the call would last and, for another… For another, he wasn’t ready yet to tell Emily what she had to be told.
Because he wasn’t ready yet to deny himself the pleasure of making love to her, his inner tormentor piped up, adding mockingly, Are you sure that you will ever be ready? He dismissed that unwanted thought immediately but its existence increased his ire. ‘Mrs Lawson should have told you that I’d said I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ he informed Emily curtly.
She heard the impatience in his voice and wished she hadn’t bothered coming. Marco’s arrogance made him forget sometimes how easily he could hurt her, and she certainly had too much pride to stay here and let him see that pain.
‘Mrs Lawson wasn’t there when I came in.’
‘Not there? She’s my PA, for heaven’s sake. Where the hell is she?’
‘She’d probably just slipped off to the cloakroom, Marco. It isn’t her fault,’ Emily pointed out quietly. ‘Look, I’m sorry if this isn’t a good time.’ She gave a small resigned sigh. ‘I suppose I should have checked with you first before coming over.’
‘Yes, you should have,’ Marco agreed grimly. Any minute now the phone was going to ring and if he picked it up she was going to hear his grandfather’s most senior aide’s voice booming out as he tried to compensate for his own deafness, ‘Is that you, Your Highness?’ The Comte had never really accustomed himself to the effectiveness of modern communication systems and still thought his voice could only travel down the telephone line if he spoke as loudly as he possibly could.
Emily’s eyes widened as she registered Marco’s rejection and then she stood still staring blankly at him, the colour leaving her face. He was treating her as though she were some casual and not very welcome acquaintance.
‘Don’t worry about it. I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ she managed to say, but she could hear the brittle hurt in her own voice. Right now, she wanted to be as far away from Marco and his damn office as she could get! She was perilously close to tears and the last thing she wanted was the humiliation of Marco seeing how much he’d wounded her. To her relief, she could hear sounds from the outer office suggesting that his PA had returned, enabling her to use the face-saving fib that she didn’t want to have Mrs Lawson coming in to shoo her out. Emily opened the door and left, barely pausing to acknowledge the PA’s surprise at seeing her, Emily hurried out of the office, her head down and her throat thick with unshed tears.
What was it with her? she asked herself wretchedly, five minutes later as she hailed a taxi. She wasn’t a young girl with emotions so new and raw that she overreacted to every sucked-in breath! She was in her twenties and divorced, and she and Marco had been together for nearly three years, the intimacy of their sex life having given her an outward patina of radiant sensuality. It had been so palpable in the first year they’d been together, one of her clients had told her semi-jokingly, ‘Now that you’re with Marco you’re going to start losing clients if you aren’t careful.’
‘Why?’ Emily had asked.
‘Jealousy,’ had been the client’s succinct answer.
Emily remembered how she had smiled with rueful acknowledgement. ‘You mean, because I’m with Marco and they’d like to change places with me?’ she had guessed.
‘They may very well want to do that, but I was thinking more of their concerns that their husbands might be tempted by the creamy glow of sexual completion you’re carrying around with you right now, Emily.’
Emily remembered she had blushed and made some confused denial, but the client had shaken her head and told her wisely, ‘You can’t deny or ignore it. That glow shimmers round you like a force-field and men are going to be drawn to you because of it. There is nothing more likely to make a man want a woman than her confident wearing of another man’s sexual interest in her.’
She doubted that she still wore that magnetic sexual aura now, Emily admitted sadly. That was the trouble: when you broke the rules, it didn’t only make you ache for what you didn’t have, it also damaged what you did.
The taxi driver was waiting for her to tell him where she wanted to go. She leaned forward and gave him the address of Marco’s apartment. Marco’s apartment, she noted—for that was how she thought of it. Not as their apartment, even though he had invited her to make it over to suit her own tastes and had given her a lavish budget for its renovation. Material possessions, even for one’s home that evoked deep-rooted attachments, were nothing without the right kind of emotions to surround them. Why had it had to happen? Why had she fallen in love with Marco? Why couldn’t she have stayed as she was, thrillingly aware of him on the most intimate kind of sexual level, buoyed up by the intensity of their desire for one another, overwhelmed by relief and joy because he had brought her from the dark, wretched nowhere she’d inhabited after her divorce to the brilliant glittering landscape of unimaginable beauty that was the intimacy they shared together? Why, why, why couldn’t that have been enough? Why had she had to go and fall for him?
Emily shivered, sinking deeper into the seat of the taxi. And why, having fallen for him, did she have to torment herself by hoping that one day things would change, that one day he would look at her and in his eyes she would see his love for her? The hope that, one day, it would happen sometimes felt so fragile and so unrealistic that she was afraid for herself, afraid of her vulnerability as a woman who needed one particular man so badly she was prepared to cling to such a fine thread. But what else could she do? She could tell him, honestly, how she felt. Emily bit her lip, guiltily aware that she wasn’t being open with him. Because she was afraid in case she lost him…Why was she letting herself be dragged down by these uncomfortable, painful thoughts and questions? Why did they keep on escaping from the place where she tried to incarcerate and conceal them? What kind of woman was she to live a lie with the man she loved? What kind of relationship was it when that man stated openly that there was no place for love in the life he wanted to live?
The taxi stopped abruptly, catching her off guard. She didn’t really want to go up to the apartment, not feeling the way she was right now, but another person was already hurrying purposefully towards the taxi, wanting to lay claim to it.
Emily