Page 41 of Emergency Engagement

‘Sure, we could go back over there, and we could go into a lengthy explanation about Victoria and Clement and pretending to be the couple we weren’t at the time. Shall I tell you what your mother would think of that?’

‘Can I stop you?’

‘Any time you like.’

‘Tell me. What would Mum think if we showed up and told her the truth, now that you seem to have a crystal ball?’

‘She’d think that after everything she’s told you, after every word of warning she’s issued over the years, you’ve let yourself be seduced into a lie by a guy who messes women around.’

‘I’ve told her that you’re not the man Victoria described.’ Sammy broke eye contact, but he’d made a point, and it was one she hadn’t considered. Of course her mother would be disappointed, and would think that she had rushed headlong into lust with the wrong guy. She’d remember Rafael the youthful rebel, the boy who had led Colin astray, and all her defences would shoot into position.

Sammy had truthfully told her mother that Rafael wasn’t the guy Victoria had made him out to be; that he wasn’t the guy the tabloid papers portrayed who moved from woman to woman, picking up and putting down like a spoilt kid in a toy shop.

She uneasily ran through the sincerity in her voice as she’d waxed lyrical about Rafael to her mother, persuading her out of her anxiety and persuading herself into the dawning realisation of something she must have known for a while. The realisation that she had fallen for a guy who hadn’t returned the favour—not when it came to love, which was so very different from passion—and that she’d gone and done the very thing she’d always told herself she would never do.

A sick feeling swirled inside her.

Forget about her mother and her disappointment if they rushed back to England so that they could spill the beans on the little game they had set in motion—one look at her and Caroline Payne would know that her daughter had fallen for Rafael. So much for all her teachings.

‘What did you tell her?’ Rafael asked her curiously.

‘That Victoria was a woman with an axe to grind and that she would do anything to make sure you paid the price for dumping her—woman scorned and all that stuff.’

‘Hmm.’

‘But I see what you mean.’

‘That it’s better for us to stay here for a bit until things flatten out?’

‘It would be an opportunity for me to slowly begin to tell Mum that perhaps I got carried away by being out here...that lust got the better of me, but that everything she’d ever said about using my head when choosing a guy was right, because bit by bit I could see that you weren’t the one for me.’

‘Not dull enough,’ Rafael murmured in agreement.

‘In the end, common sense would win through and by the time I return to Yorkshire Mum would be fine with it all.’

‘And you haven’t thought of the other upside to us remaining out here.’

‘Which is what?’

In her head, she had been dealing with the rollercoaster ride of emotions that had swamped her without even really realising: she was in love with Rafael.

She loved everything about him, from the way he laughed to the way he touched her, to the things he said that made her think and the way he teased her until she was laughing at herself with him.

‘That we exhaust this,’ he said.

‘This?’

‘This crazy passion we have for one another. It’ll subside. Crazy passion always comes with a sell-by date. But, if we were to walk away from it before it naturally goes, then both of us would always be left with a want that hadn’t had a chance to be satisfied, an itch still waiting to be scratched. We stay here two weeks, perhaps even a bit longer, and we see this throughto the end. No dissatisfaction left because that itch hasn’t been scratched.’

Sammy nodded, lost in her own thoughts and sadly thinking that, whereas her feelings for him ran too deep to quantify, his feelings for her were best summed up as an itch to be scratched.

But she needed time, and a couple more weeks here would give her the time she needed.

Rafael strolled through the glass sliding doors of the villa that gave out to the landscaped gardens at the back. To the right the swimming pool was lit up with lights that were cleverly strung between swaying palm trees and threaded through some of the dense foliage. The blue of the pool was very dark, a dappled swirl of shadows casting stripes across the flat, still surface.

The veranda here was very wide and circled the entirety of the back, wide enough for clusters of chairs, tables and potted plants. Beyond the lit section the landscape disappeared into tropical darkness, which was dense, and pierced here and there with fireflies and the gentle swoop of bats diving in search of food.

Sammy was in the kitchen. Standing out here with a glass of wine in his hand, he smiled to himself at the thought of her shooing him away, telling him that she wanted to surprise him with a special dinner. He liked the way she’d been pink from the heat of the kitchen, her whole body radiating satisfaction at doing something she enjoyed.

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