Page 39 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

He rolled over, taking her with him so quickly that she was on top of him before she had a chance to blink. ‘I was just happy to help,’ he said, and now he was moving his hands lightly down her back to the curve of her bottom, his touch making heat blossom deep inside her.

In another moment, she would lose the power to think, much less speak. It was something that had happened before, she realised, this reaching for one another. It was as if they had an unspoken agreement whenever there was a need to move away from tricky or unnecessarily personal topics of conversation. But why would he want to stop talking about those divers? Or the rays in the sub?

Gritting her teeth, she wriggled free and sat up. ‘But it must have been upsetting,’ she persisted.

‘For them, sure.’ His green eyes were dark with passion but as he reached up to cup her breasts with his hands, she could feel the tension in his body.

But why? She swallowed.

‘So it wasn’t your boat? Your divers?’

This time, he didn’t move a muscle. She knew because she was watching him so closely she could see him breathing. But his expression hardened minutely.

‘No, it wasn’t my boat or my divers. Why would you ask me that?’

Staring up at him, she felt a tingly shiver dart down her spine. He was telling the truth. But he was also holding something back. That was the thing about dating so-called ‘recovering’ addicts: you got pretty good at being able to separate out all the strands; you could pick out the lies of omission from the distortions of the truth; the half-truths from the lies they had told themselves so often it felt as though they were real.

And all of it was tangled up with their shame and your guilt for having failed them. She felt suddenly exhausted, just as she used to feel when her dad was trying desperately to hide the truth from her, from himself.

‘Because you seem so tense about it. I thought maybe—’

‘If I’m tense, Jemima, it’s because you’re putting two and two together and making five.’

He tipped her off his lap and shifted to the edge of the bed and she stared at his back, her heart beating shakily. Blaming the other person was something else addicts did when they were trying to cover their tracks.

‘That’s not what I’m doing—’ she protested.

But he cut her off. ‘Then maybe you should rewind what you just said, because it sure sounded like that to me. I think I’m going to hit the gym. While I’m gone you might want to brush up on your pillow talk.’

‘Pillow talk?’ she echoed.

He was yanking on his clothes. ‘Yeah, you know, the stuff people say to each other in bed in between having sex.’

People? Was that what she was to him? One of many. Faceless and interchangeable. The brusqueness of his words was like a slap to the face. ‘I know what pillow talk is, Chase.’

‘Apparently not. Or do you think all this is somehow going to make me horny?’

‘What are you? Fifteen? I don’t care if you’re horny or not,’ she said, grabbing at a T-shirt and yanking it over her head, her anger nudging past her shock at the sudden change in his mood. She felt as if she were driving a getaway car down a motorway. Her heart was ricocheting off her ribs, hands clenching so tightly that she thought the bones might shatter.

He stared down at her; the angles of his beautiful face looked as if they were cut from stone. There was a tiny, taut twist to one corner of his mouth. ‘Lucky for you. Because you throwing accusations around—’

‘I wasn’t throwing accusations around. I was trying to understand you.’

‘Then clearly you’ve missed the point of our arrangement, because I don’t want to understand you and I sure as hell don’t need you to understand me. Just to make things clear, this is about sex.’

The room went silent and still and for a second or two, Jemima just stared at him, her breath churning in her throat, his words echoing inside her head. She couldn’t feel her hands, her body. It was the first time he had made her feel like that, like her other boyfriends had made her feel. Diminished and stupid. But unlike with them, she felt no sense of failure. Just a sudden, fierce anger that left her breathless.

‘Yes, it is.’ She rose from the bed like Venus rising from the waves. ‘But you’re the one who’s missing the point if you don’t also know that it’s also about respect.’

There was a silence punctured only by the splintered sound of their breathing. She couldn’t remember ever speaking to anyone like that. For a moment, she just sat there on her bed, listening to her heart banging in her chest.

‘Mexico.’

His voice made her jump and she glanced over at where Chase stood facing her. There was no mistaking the tension in his body now. He looked as if he were bracing himself against the impact of some unseen, outsized wave.

‘What about Mexico?’

Another silence, longer this time.

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