Page 47 of Contracted and Claimed By The Boss

‘Where are you going to go next, Paige? Antarctica?’

She flinched. He was so angry!

‘Amanda needs you,’ he said with quiet disgust, so her heart turned to ice. Amanda needed her. That was true, but it was also hurtful, because Paige wanted to be needed by Max too.

‘I know,’ she whispered, pressing a hand to her chest. I need her too. ‘But she has you. She’s doing better now. She’ll be okay.’

‘You tell yourself that if it’s what you need to believe, but the truth is you’re running away for your own selfish needs and, in the process, you’re letting down a little girl who relies on you.’

She gasped and staggered backwards, one step, so angry, so hurt, so desperately, achingly sore. ‘How dare you?’

‘How dare I?’ He glared at her. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

They stared at each other across the chasm of their emotions, the air pulsing with hurt, betrayal and a million unspoken words.

‘You are incredible,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t believe I ever thought—’ The words stopped. He frowned, silenced, mid-sentence.

‘You thought what?’ Everything hinged on his response. Anticipation stretched, desperate, intense, in the very centre of her chest. The noises of the forest took on an almost deafening quality—crickets, rain, whip birds, a stream.

‘That you were the answer to our prayers.’ He spun around and stalked out of the forest, but at the edge, he stopped, hands on hips, staring a little way in, evidently waiting for Paige, who could barely think over the cacophony of her rushing blood.

‘What does that even mean?’ she shouted, making her legs work, moving towards him. ‘The answer to what prayers?’

‘You were so good with her. So good for her. I thought—I thought you were a miracle-worker, but you’re just as selfish as her mother.’

Paige sucked in a sharp breath, her fingertips itching and then, before she could realise what she was doing, before she could stop herself, her hand lifted and struck his cheek, the slap loud even against the backdrop of the storm. Rain fell, drenching them, and they stared at each other, both shocked by what she’d done. His cheek changed colour, dark pink, and Paige’s hand stung. She pulled back, disgusted by herself, by what she’d allow herself to become, but she couldn’t apologise. She was too hurt, too angry.

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said quietly to herself, as a defensive mechanism, self-protective, because she didn’t want his charge to be true. She was putting herself first, though. Above him, and above Amanda, but only because she knew that if she didn’t, the loss would be impossible to bear. She would wither away if she didn’t go now.

‘I hate you,’ she said, surprised how satisfying that felt to say, when the truth was she loved him. Even then, in the midst of this, she loved him in a life-altering way, but she also hated him for what he was saying and for how he was reacting.

‘I think that’s mutual.’

Paige’s gut churned. Her words had been thrown out carelessly, seeking satisfaction, but Max’s? His, she believed.

She turned to face him, glad that it was pouring with rain, that she was saturated, glad because her tears were disguised by the raindrops. Only they weren’t disguised, not really. Her eyes were a perfect mirror to her sadness and shock, showing anyone who would look at her just how she was feeling.

Max though didn’t soften.

‘Pack your things. Reg will take you to the airstrip.’

She stared at him.

‘What?’ The word was dredged up from deep inside her chest.

‘You heard me. Go,’ he shouted, pointing to the house.

She shook her head, lifting a hand to her lips to silence the sobs. ‘I want to stay the week. I want to break this to Amanda. To say goodbye properly. To cook with her again, and explain—’

‘Do not stand there and act as if you give a flying—anything about her. She’s my daughter, and I’ll look after her, just like I always have.’ His features were like iron. She sobbed audibly now. ‘Go!’ he said again, voice rich with command and fury.

With her heart in shreds, Paige did exactly that, spinning on her heel and running back to the house, running so fast her feet kicked mud up against her legs, running, crying, utterly destroyed.

He shouted a curse word into the forest, closing his eyes as the last ten minutes replayed in his mind like some kind of horror movie. He’d set something in motion by coming out here when he was so angry, but he was still too angry to see that there was any alternative, to contemplate how to fix this. All he wanted was for Paige to go so he could concentrate on getting the hell on with his life. Without her.

The storm cleared in time for Paige’s flight to take off, as if the same hand of fate that had brought her here to Max was also paving the way for her to leave, perhaps realising that their magnetic poles really didn’t mix after all.

She stared out of the window of the light aeroplane at all of the things she’d come to love in her time here, at the scorched, orange desert now rendered dark brown by the rain, at the almost ethereal trees, dried out on the side of the dirt-track roads, no leaves, no life, and she felt a strange sympathy for them, a kinship, because she was sure that if there was a way to peer inside her soul, that was exactly what it would look like right now.

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