Page 16 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

She knew that, beneath his charm and good looks, he was flaky and weak and damaged. But she didn’t date regular men who got paid and remembered your birthday and told you the truth about where they’d been.

And in the same way she had sensed that Chase was more than he appeared to be. To anyone else—her sister, for example—that would be a red flag, but she couldn’t help herself. The louder the alarm bells, the more she wanted to stay and make things right.

And yet she still felt played. Stupid. Small. Just hours ago it had felt as if she had unlocked a different side of herself with this man. And it had all seemed so real, but just like at the harbour he had been pretending to be someone he wasn’t. Her arms tightened around the bags she was holding. Their night together wasn’t a moment of truth. It was all a hoax, and now she felt like a fraud.

But she wasn’t about to tell Chase that. She had already shared too much of herself with this man. She wasn’t going to let him have anything else.

‘Sort things out? And how exactly are you going to do that?’ she said sharply. ‘Or are you a plumber as well as everything else?’

She was using that voice again, Chase thought, his eyes resting on Jemima’s face. The one that reminded him of the principal at his high school. Few, if any, people spoke to him in that way. It was one of the consequences of being a high-net-worth individual: people tended to fawn over him. They certainly didn’t use that dismissive tone or look at him as if he were some stray dog who had followed them home.

‘I can put you up in a hotel for however long it takes. You don’t believe me?’ he said coolly as her lip curled.

‘The first time we met you pretended to be working at the Cycle Shack, and last night you let me think you were a fisherman, so forgive me if I’m not inclined to believe anything you say.’

Reaching out, he took the bags from her arms and dumped them on what remained of the kitchen counter. ‘I fish.’

Her eyes flashed, the grey swallowing up her pupils. ‘But you’re not a fisherman.’

‘And you’re not staying in a hotel,’ he countered.

Her face stilled. ‘I didn’t say I was.’

‘No, but you let me think you were.’

‘That’s different.’

He heard the catch in her voice. It was. But it also wasn’t.

‘Was that even your boat?’ she said quietly after a moment of silence.

He frowned. ‘Of course it was.’

‘There’s no “of course” about it.’ She glanced past him, her lip trembling. ‘You know what, don’t worry about it. I don’t need your help. I can sort things out myself. And you, you can go back to living your “lives”.’ And before he had a chance to open his mouth, she had turned and stalked out of the door.

Staring after her, he felt a ripple of irritation. He wasn’t to blame for any of this. In fact, if she’d told him where she was staying he would have been able to postpone the work—again—and then none of this would be happening.

But it was, and somehow he was tangled up in it, tangled up with her.

His heart beat jarringly inside his chest. This wasn’t who he was. When it came to dealing with women he never crossed any lines, but Jemima and Joan had made it so that the lines were not just blurred but overlapping. He gritted his teeth. He wasn’t responsible.

Or perhaps, in a way, he was. He had seen Jemima in the bar but he could have left her alone. But he hadn’t, and one thing had led to another and he’d kissed her. And he could have, should have left it at that, only then she’d kissed him back and he’d been derailed, hot and horny as a teenage boy.

He found her down by the shoreline. She wasn’t crying but she was close. He could tell by the set of her shoulders and the way she was staring fixedly out to sea, her phone clutched in her hand. And he didn’t like how that made him feel.

But then he didn’t like feeling anything at all. For him, feelings, caring for someone, about someone, were in the past. Aside from the most impersonal version of lust, those feelings, like certain kinds of caresses, were something that were off the menu when it came to his interactions with women. He’d shut that part of himself down; he’d had to. He didn’t have it in him to take on someone else in that way. Only there was something about Jemima, a wariness in those beautiful grey eyes that he understood. As if she was expecting the ceiling to crack apart and fall on her head. Because it had already done so.

He knew that feeling well.

‘Who are you calling?’ he said gruffly.

‘A hotel. They don’t have any rooms.’ She breathed out shakily. ‘She said that it will be really difficult to find a room because of the boat parade.’

He swore silently. Of course. He’d forgotten it was this weekend. There would be twenty thousand extra visitors on the island.

‘So what are you going to do, then?’

She glanced up at him. ‘‘I’m going to do what I should have done in the first place. I’m going to go to the airport and change my ticket and get the first flight back home that I can.’

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