The Return Of Her Billionaire Husband. Melanie Milburne
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threw its hands up in defeat and walked off the job.
Juliette’s heart was beating so fast she thought she was having some sort of medical event. ‘Don’t do this, Joe...’ Her voice didn’t come out with anywhere near the stridency she’d intended.
He nudged her nose with his—a gentle bump of flesh meeting flesh that sent a wave of longing through her body. ‘What am I doing, hmm?’ His lips touched the side of her mouth, not a kiss but so close to it her lips tingled all over. He brushed her cheek with his mouth and the graze of his stubble made something hot and liquid spill deep and low in her core.
Juliette’s lips parted, her lashes lowered, her mouth moved closer to his but then a stop sign came up in her head. What was she doing? Practically begging him to kiss her as if she was some love-struck teenager experiencing her first crush? She drew in a sharp breath and stepped back, glaring at him.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Nothing like a bit of projection to take the focus off her own weakness.
His cool composure was an added insult to the tumultuous emotions coursing through her body. ‘I would only have kissed you if you’d wanted it. And you did, didn’t you, tesoro?’
Juliette wanted to slap his face. She wanted to claw her fingernails down his cheeks. She wanted to kick him in the shins until his bones shattered. But instead her eyes filled with stinging tears, her chest feeling as if it were being squeezed in a studded vice. ‘I h-hate you.’ Her voice cracked over a lump clogging her throat. ‘Do you have any idea how much?’
‘Maybe that’s a good thing.’ His expression went back to his signature masklike state. Unreadable. Unreachable. Invincible.
Why wasn’t she shrugging off his hold? Why wasn’t she putting distance between their bodies? Why was she feeling as if this was where she belonged—in the warm protective shelter of his arms? Juliette slowly eased back to look up at his face, her emotions so ambushed she couldn’t find her anger. Where was her anger? She needed her anger. She couldn’t survive without it pounding through her blood. She blinked back the tears, determined not to cry in front of him.
‘I don’t know how to handle this...situation...’ She swallowed and aimed her gaze at his shirt collar. ‘I don’t want to ruin Lucy and Damon’s wedding but sharing this suite with you is...’ She bit her lip, unable to put her fears into words. Unwilling to voice them out loud, even to herself.
Joe inched up her chin with his finger, meshing his gaze with hers. ‘What if I promise not to kiss you. That will reassure you, sì?’
No! I want you to kiss me.
Juliette was shocked at herself. Shocked and shamed by her unruly desires. She stepped out of his hold and wrapped her arms around her body before she was tempted to betray herself any further.
‘Okay. That’s sounds like a sensible plan. Let’s decide on some ground rules.’ She was proud of the evenness of her tone. Proud she had got her willpower back into line. ‘No kissing. No touching.’
Joe gave a slow nod. ‘I’m fine with that.’ He walked over to the sofa and sat down, hooking one ankle over his muscular thigh.
He was fine with that?
Everything that was female in Juliette was perversely offended by his easy acceptance of her rules. Surely he could have put up a little bit of resistance? But maybe he had someone else he wanted to kiss and touch and make love to now. Maybe he was tired of being celibate and was ready to move on with his life. It had been fifteen months after all. It was a long time for a man in his sexual prime to be without a lover. A tight pain gripped her in her chest and travelled down to tie tight knots in her stomach. Cruel twisting knots that made it hard for her to breathe. If she didn’t pull herself into line, her grey-blue eyes would turn green. She had no right to be jealous. She had left their marriage. She had divorce papers in her bag, for pity’s sake.
‘Good.’ Juliette’s tone was so clipped it could have snipped through tin. ‘But of course, that leaves the tricky problem of what to say to Lucy and Damon when they realise we’re sharing a suite.’ She walked over to the bar fridge and took out a bottle of water, unscrewing the cap and pouring it into a glass. She picked up the glass and turned to face him. ‘Any brilliant suggestions?’
Joe’s expression was still inscrutable but she could sense an inner guardedness. His posture was almost too casual, too relaxed, too calm and collected. ‘We could say we’re trying for a reconciliation.’
Juliette took a sip of water before she gave in to the temptation to throw it in his face. She put the glass down on the counter with a clunk. ‘A reconciliation? For a marriage that shouldn’t have come about in the first place?’
A knot of tension appeared beside his mouth, his eyes locked on hers in an unblinking hold. ‘I wasn’t the one who left our marriage.’
Juliette stalked over to the windows overlooking the white crescent of the sand and the turquoise water of the beach below. She took a shuddering breath. ‘No, because you weren’t fully in it in the first place.’
The silence was so long it was as if time had come to a standstill.
She heard the rustle of his clothes as he rose from the sofa. Counted his footsteps as he approached her but she didn’t turn around. He came to stand beside her, his gaze focused like hers on the beach below.
After a long moment, he turned his head to look at her, the line of his mouth bitter. ‘If you were to be truthful, Juliette, you weren’t fully in it either. You were still getting over your ex. That’s why we hooked up in the first place, because you couldn’t bear to spend the night he got married to one of your so-called friends, on your own.’
Juliette wished she could deny it but every word he said was true. She had been shattered by Harvey’s betrayal. They had been dating since their teens. His affair with Clara had been going on for months and Juliette hadn’t had a clue. The night she’d thought Harvey was going to propose to her, he’d told her he was leaving her. Harvey Atkinson-Lloyd, her parents’ choice of the perfect son-in-law for their only daughter. The daughter who, unlike their high-achieving sons Mark and Jonathon, had failed to do anything much else to win their approval.
Juliette ground down on her molars, torn between anger at Joe for pointing out her stupidity and anger at herself for making a bad situation worse by falling into bed with him that night.
She turned to face him, chin high, eyes blazing. ‘So, what’s your excuse for hooking up with me that night? Or do you regularly sleep with perfect strangers when you’re working in London?’
An emotion flickered across his face like an interruption in a transmission. A pause. A regroup. A reset. ‘It was the anniversary of my mother’s death.’ His tone was flat, almost toneless, but there was a stray note of sadness under the surface.
Juliette looked at him blankly. ‘But I don’t understand... I thought you told me your mother had emigrated to Australia. Wasn’t that the reason she wasn’t able to come to our wedding?’
‘She’s my stepmother. Both of my parents are dead.’
Had she misheard him back when they were together? She tried to think back to the conversation but couldn’t recall it in any detail. She knew his father had died a few years back but he had barely mentioned his mother. She’d got the sense it was a no-go area for him, so she hadn’t delved any further.
They hadn’t done much talking about each other’s family backgrounds, mostly because he was away such a lot. Their brief passionate reunions when he came home between trips were physical catch-ups, not emotional ones. She had wanted more than physical intimacy but hadn’t known how to reach him. Every attempt to get closer to him had failed, with him leaving for yet another work commitment. It was as if he sensed her need for emotional connection and found it deeply threatening. But, to be fair, she too had been pretty sketchy with her own issues to do with her background, not wanting him to know how out of place she