Page 49 of The Boss's Forbidden Assistant

‘You leave tomorrow,’ he pointed out, voice unmoving.

‘Yes. I think we both took some kind of assurance from the end date we’ve been moving towards. It saved us from having to have any conversations about what we wanted, about when and how and why this would end.’

A slight frown shifted his lips.

‘Haven’t we discussed that?’

She ignored the question. He was pushing hard. She should have expected it. Even knowingwhyhe was like this didn’t soften the feelings of hurt. She inhaled and exhaled, her breath a little shaky.

‘I think that what we have is really good, Salvador.’ She cleared her throat, eyes stinging, but she refused to give in to tears. ‘I don’t want it to end yet.’

She saw his response. Something shifted in the depths of his eyes, and his throat moved as he swallowed, but he didn’t speak. Not at first. He was pulling his thoughts together, sifting through what he felt and wanted, and what he wanted to say.

‘You’re leaving in the morning,’ he pointed out again with the appearance of calm.

‘But what if I didn’t?’ she asked with more urgency, because he was making this so damned hard. If he was going to reject her, she wanted to just rip the plaster off now. She came round to him, putting a hand on his shoulder to draw his attention up to her face. He hesitated and then looked into her eyes. She shivered, because he was holding onto his willpower with the strength of a thousand men.

‘What if you didn’t what, Harper?’

‘Leave. Tomorrow.’ She moistened her lower lip then continued, even as she was pretty sure what was going to happen. ‘What if I stayed here with you?’

He stood abruptly, placing his coffee on the table, the sudden movement an indication that hewasfeeling something in response to this conversation.

‘For how long?’ he asked, the words reverberating with barely contained anger.

She closed her eyes against the wave of pain. ‘I don’t know.’ It was an honest response. ‘For as long as it felt right.’ Harper knew for her that would be for the rest of her life, but she was too scared to admit as much now.

‘But that’s the problem,’ he said slowly, eyes like stone when they met hers, none of the golden light shining for her. ‘This doesn’t feel right to me. It’s everything I swore I didn’t want.’

‘Which is what?’ she asked, trying to ignore her own pain and sadness to concentrate on the logic of his statement. ‘Utterly alone?’

He compressed his lips. ‘You knew this about me.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed unevenly. ‘But then there was Prague.’ She frowned, shaking her head. ‘That’s not right. It was before Prague. It was the first moment we met. You felt it too, I know you did, and it only got more and more obvious the more time we spent together.’

‘Felt what?’

She reached across and pressed her hand to his heart. ‘This connection.’ She blinked up at him, so much hope in her face.

‘Desire?’ he countered. ‘Is it any wonder? I’ve been celibate for two years. Since that one damned night with Anna-Maria. And then you arrived, so willing, and naturally I responded. Don’t mistake sex for anything more.’

She gasped. He’d said something like this before, but now it cut her deep to her soul. She tried to hold onto her certainty that he was pushing her away because he couldn’t cope with the things he felt, the emotions coursing through his veins. But at some point she had to hear his words and realise that, whatever reason he had for issuing them, he was a grown man capable of conveying what he wanted to convey. And, right now, that was a huge, ‘no thanks’ to Harper’s suggestion.

She pulled her hand away, spinning so she could regain her breath and mind and control the tears that were making her throat sting.

‘Just to be clear,’ she said unevenly—because she knew she’d need to recall this later when she was wondering if there was more she could have said or done, if maybe she’d misunderstood him. ‘You’re saying that what we shared was nothing special. That, if any other woman you were halfway attracted to had been here on Ilha do Sonhos with you, you’d have slept with them, because it’s been so long since you’ve had sex. That’s what I was to you?’

She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t turn, so didn’t see the way his features tightened, the way he recoiled a little at her words.

‘It was sex,’ he said finally. ‘Great sex. But I was clear with you all along, and no amount of sex is going to change who I am.’

Sex. Just sex.Great sex, she thought with an angry tilt of her lips, tears sparkling on her lashes.

‘Okay,’ she said after a pause. ‘Good to know.’

Harper could have changed her flight—she had the ability to make all the arrangements herself—but leaving work, even one day early, was something her pride wouldn’t allow her to do. So she sat at her desk and went through the long list of things she’d wanted to check before Amanda’s return the following day, ensuring she left clear notes of what she’d done and why, explaining anything that was still to be resolved.

It was painstaking work, because her mind was in shards, and because Salvador sat in the office next door, near but so far. Because he could see her and she refused to allow him to know how much she was hurting, so she worked without a break, without looking up from her computer screen. But as the day drew on and she recognised the end was in sight, that she’d almost got through the long list of jobs on her list, she knew she couldn’t stay on this island a moment longer than was professionally necessary.

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