The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance 2016. Кейт Хьюит
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as much distance as she could and never, ever repeated the mistake she had made at the restaurant, when she had initiated that kiss and totally lost herself in it.
It was great that she was going to introduce him to what she did, because it was the one area in which he would be at sea—and that was something she would really enjoy watching.
‘You’re smiling...’ he leant in to whisper as footsteps were heard on the opposite side of the door. ‘Private joke or something you’d care to share?’
‘Private joke,’ she told him promptly.
She looked away as the door was opened and felt a lump in her throat, because she knew that she was going to miss the shelter beyond words when she disappeared off to London.
The prospect of the lifestyle awaiting her there made her want to burst into tears.
Not that he would ever understand.
She sneaked a sideways glance at him and, introductions made, took a background seat to watch the spectacle of the great Theo De Angelis fumbling awkwardly in a situation of which he would have had no experience.
He didn’t fumble. He charmed all the women there, Franca and Louisa and Marie and Ndali. He introduced himself to some of the women who came to them for practical and emotional help. He pried and prodded into all the rooms and asked so many questions that anyone would have thought that he was an expert on women’s shelters.
He talked finance with the guy who ran the place, and made a show of looking at the books. He even went so far as to make suggestions on how small improvements could be made!
She had hoped to watch him squirm, and instead he had dumbfounded her with lots of phoney interest.
‘So what exactly is your role there?’ was the first thing he asked when they were back outside an hour and a half later.
The work awaiting his attention would have to wait and he had resigned himself to that. Allowing work to take second place to anything was an alien concept to him, but he had watched her as they walked through the premises, watched her interaction with her colleagues, and the casual, friendly, concerned manner with which she had spoken to the some of the women waiting in queues to be seen or chatting to the other volunteers.
Everything about her had breathed open sincerity. Her laughter with her colleagues had been rich and infectious. Frankly, it was the sort of laughter that had been conspicuously absent between them, and he had been irked by that.
He had been tolerant of her hostility, even though he privately thought that she should have taken her cue from him and dealt with the whole unfortunate situation with a bit more aplomb—because why rail against the inevitable? And besides, it wasn’t destined to be a lifetime situation. He had gritted his teeth at the patently grudging reluctance in her responses to him and the ease with which she accepted as fact the thought that he was deplorable.
But here he had glimpsed a side to her that he hadn’t seen before.
It was rare for any woman not to respond to him. Even when he was uninterested in them they still tried hard around him. He had made exceptions for her because of the circumstances of their forced relationship, but only now was he accepting that her indifference was an offence to his pride.
On a more basic level, he wanted what he had seen of her at that shelter. It was human nature to desire the things that are denied. Fact of life.
Alexa was making sure to keep as much distance between them as was acceptable, considering they were supposed to be madly in love. People who were madly in love didn’t necessarily have to hold hands everywhere they went—and besides, no one in these streets knew who they were.
Niggling away at the top of her mind was the uncomfortable thought that she fancied the man, and that her plan of seeing him out of his depth and floundering in unfamiliar surroundings—which she had hoped might put the brakes on her stupid attraction to him—had spectacularly backfired.
She should have guessed. He could pull that charm out when it was needed like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
‘Are you really interested?’ she asked, then belatedly remembered what he had said about her arguing with everything he said. ‘Sorry,’ she apologised. ‘Even if you’re not really interested, it’s thoughtful of you to pretend to be.’
She was determined to stop letting him get under her skin and rattle her. If she could reach a higher plane of being cool and controlled when she was around him, then her wayward responses could be harnessed and quickly killed off. Fancying someone because of the way they looked was so superficial that it surely couldn’t last longer than two minutes.
‘And,’ she continued, ‘you put on a really good show of being interested in what went on there.’
Theo’s mouth tightened. Whatever he said or did, she was determined not to give him the benefit of the doubt and it was really beginning to get on his nerves.
‘So what exactly is your role there?’ he repeated, keeping his voice even and neutral.
They were heading back in the direction of the bars and shops and cafés, looking out for any passing taxis and walking until they could hail one. They had quickly left behind the insalubrious neighbourhood where they had just been, and the houses to either side of them now were well maintained but small and all exactly alike.
Theo realised that this was a part of town he had never actually visited. He wasn’t in the country a lot, and when he was his visits were fleeting, because he far preferred to import his father to London.
Having always considered himself a man of the world—widely travelled, the recipient of far more global experiences than most people could ever dream of achieving in a lifetime—he now wondered when and how he had managed to isolate himself so entirely in a very specific social circle that was accessible only to the very, very wealthy. He was delivered to and from places in chauffeur-driven cars, never flew anything but first class, always had the most expensive seats at the opera or the theatre...
Alexa, having come from a very similar background to his own, should have followed the same route—maybe without the high-powered career—but she hadn’t and that roused his curiosity.
‘It wasn’t quite the sort of thing I was expecting,’ he expanded truthfully.
‘And what were you expecting?’
She turned to him and was dazzled by the glare from the sun, which threw his lean, handsome face into a mosaic of shadows. She shielded her eyes and squinted against the sun. Overcome by a sudden feeling of vertigo, she took a couple of small steps backwards.
‘A soup kitchen and people waving begging bowls at you?’
She took a deep breath and told herself that sniping and bristling was just a symptom of the stupid attraction she felt for the man, against all odds. If she carried on like that he would begin to wonder why he got under her skin the way he did, and the last thing she wanted was for him to suspect that he got to her, that she was so horribly alert to him.
‘I guess shelter might be the wrong word...’ She fought to inject polite indifference into her words. ‘Most people do think of the homeless when they hear the word shelter. It’s more of an advice bureau. Women come to us with all sorts of problems. Financial, personal... Often we redirect them to other services, but there are people on hand who are really experienced at listening and getting the desperate off the path they’ve gone down. We also have contacts with companies who offer jobs wherever possible, to help some of them get back on their feet...’
What she had really wanted to show him, Theo mused, were the sort of people she liked. He hadn’t been able to help noticing that the men there had been a ‘type’.
Caring, soft-spoken, touchy-feely...
Had she subconsciously wanted to show him the sort of guys she liked—was attracted to? Had her intention been to draw comparisons, so that she could underline how far short he fell of her ideal? Just another way of reinforcing