Page 46 of Emergency Engagement

And however warm the laughter, stimulating the conversation, tender the touches...

He closed his eyes and breathed heavily. She’d left yesterday and it felt like a lifetime ago.

The conference room at the hotel should have been his sanctuary. Work had always been his go-to, but now, with his laptop in front of him and a string of emails to deal with, he just couldn’t focus. His chest hurt. His eyes hurt. Hisbrainhurt. In his mind’s eye, he saw her thinking, reflecting, remembering. She would remember everything—the way she had walked into love and the way she had proudly told him how she felt, even though it must have been daunting for her, given everything he had said in the past about not believing in love.

Would she already have been to see her mum? Or would she be bracing herself, buying some time before she launched into a smiling, self-deprecating, eye-rolling speech about what an idiot she’d been, and thank God she’d seen the light before it was too late?

And in her heart? In her heart, she would remember the good things they’d had, but in her head, he would crystallise into the sort of guy she knew she should have stayed away from. If she forgot the way she’d confessed her love, then she would never forget the way he’d rejected her.

How fast could love harden, only to be replaced by hate and then eventually indifference? She would look back over her shoulder and curse herself for her foolishness in falling for him.

Rafael surrendered to his thoughts and snapped shut the laptop. Through the bank of windows, he could see the endless stretch of blue sky, and in the distance the streak of turquoise ocean turning dark as it meshed with the horizon. It was not yet four in the afternoon. He felt he could keep sitting right here, staring through the window, until that blue sky turned violet and orange and then finally inky black. The swirl of his thoughts paralysed him. He’d led a nomadic life when it came to the opposite sex. But Sammy...

He pressed his thumbs against his eyes and felt sick. Always able to see problems clearly, Rafael was caught in the unusual place of not knowing what to think or what was really going on. He had a pounding headache.

He poured himself a glass of whisky. It wasn’t going to help, but he downed it anyway. He scowled at the empty glass in his hand and all over again succumbed to the second-guessing he’d been trying to keep at bay.

In love with him... She’d told him that he was the last person she could ever fall for. She’d said that she went for a type and he wasn’t that type. She had her checklist! Had he been at fault for taking her at her word and believing what she had said? Or had he been so busy enjoying her that he’d steered clear of asking questions to which the answers might have proven unpalatable?

But she was gone, and she would thank him for turning her away; would thank him for putting her back on the path to finding the sort of guy she deserved. He wasn’t that guy. He wasn’t a guy who did love. How many times had he made that clear? A thousand! Yet she had defiantly ploughed ahead, ignoring what he had told her. She was someone who forged forward. That was just her trademark. She braced herself and fearlessly went where angels feared to tread. He should have taken that into account! Sammy was a law unto herself.

His stomach tightened again and he felt a stab of pain deep inside.

Well, as it stood, whatever love she had would sour quickly...but again that thought twisted something inside him. Looking at the bigger picture, though, it would still be for her own good! He would end up being the fall guy in a big way but that was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He’d actively volunteered to be the fall guy.

Rafael paced the room as the evening wore into night, barely seeing anything, aware of the darkness outside getting thicker and denser until the Technicolor tropical landscape outside became shadowy shapes and forms.

Where was she now? He felt haunted by the memory of her face and those green eyes resting on him, seeing deep into him in a way no one else ever had.

He called his PA. He would accelerate his flight back. He needed to leave immediately. There were things to do...no, memories to be contained...and they couldn’t be contained here. That done and sorted, Rafael eyed the whisky, reluctantly dismissed the temptation for a top up and instead scooped up his laptop and headed out of the hotel, back to his villa.

Maybe he could leave the thinking behind there. It worked for the length of time it took him to get back to the villa, and only because he had to concentrate on the dark, twisty roads, only sporadically lit, the sort of roads where one small mistake could land his car a little too close to a coconut tree for comfort.

But, the second he was inside his villa—which felt as empty as a wedding venue after all the guests had left and the band had packed up and gone—he sat down in the conservatory and let loose a groan of hurt and despair.

He barely recognised the sound. He leant forward to bury his head in his hands and then, like a swarm of insects released from the safety of a box in which they had been convenientlycontained, his thoughts rushed to attack him. He remembered every tender touch, every glance, every smile, every wicked, teasing grin... He could recall how he’d felt when he’d been with her: complete, happy. In no rush to go anywhere, do anything or even think too hard.

She’d reminded him about how they’d talked. He’d responded thattalkinghadmeant nothing, that it was just a fact that they’d got along, andgetting alongwasn’t love.

But he’d done much more than talk to her. He’d opened up. He’d let go of the restraints that had kept him prisoner all his life. He’d confided and shared all those little bits of him he’d become used to keeping to himself and he hadn’t even noticed that he’d been doing it.

How could he not have clued in to the obvious? It all added up now: that lazy urge to hold on to what they had; the cold feeling of desperation when he’d thought of her walking away from him; and then, this evening, this sickening horror at a vision of life slipping between his fingers.

Because a life without her in it was no life at all. He’d been so busy polishing the armour he’d spent a lifetime putting in place to protect his heart that he hadn’t seen what would have been obvious to an idiot: he’d fallen in love with her.

He couldn’t say when or how but he just knew that he had...and now? Now, she’d be busy unravelling what they had built, toughening up and hardening her emotions. She’d be building walls he would never be able to break down, building them with disillusionment and bitterness.

He had to see her. The time between this decision and the flight he had booked, which was just a matter of a handful of hours, felt like a lifetime. If he could have arranged for his private jet to swing by and pick him up like a handy taxi service, he would have, but he still had to pack anyway.

He still had last minute things to do. One of those things was to text her and tell her that he would be coming to see her. He had to know that she would be in, although he would just have gone and waited for as long as it took.

He didn’t say why. He simply said that something urgent had come up and that he would have to see her face to face to discuss it. He’d said he would meet her at her house, or she could come to his office—anywhere that suited.

So he was meeting her at his office, and her reply suggested that as far as she was concerned the office was the place for a business discussion. Reading between the lines of her cool, brief response, he got the impression that she had already shut the doors on him and that only the hint that it might be work-oriented had motivated her to agree to see him.

He’d take that.

He couldn’t relax. The adrenaline was surging through him and it only began to abate when the plane touched down the following day. He’d asked if she could swing by his office at five-thirty. There would still be people around, of course, but that was okay, because he didn’t want her to feel nervous, to feel that there would be just the two of them. If she now hated him, then the last thing he wanted was for her to see an empty office, turn skittish and run away, work talk or no work talk.

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