Page 43 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

‘Is that your thing?’

Jemima blinked. ‘My thing? You mean am I some kind of groupie?’

He shrugged. ‘Plenty of women like pouty guys with guitars. That’s probably why so many men play them,’ he added drily.

‘No, that’s not what it was about.’ She was shaking her head without even realising that she was doing so. ‘I didn’t even really like his music.’

She felt Chase’s narrowed gaze slowly inspect her.

‘So why did you date him?’

Because he was a mess, and I thought I could fix him.

For a moment, she imagined saying that sentence out loud but surely that came under the heading of Too Much Information, for a fling anyway. And yet as she looked up, it felt almost as if he knew what she was thinking.

‘Was he rich?’

Frowning, she shook her head again. ‘The opposite. He was always skint.’

‘Skint?’

‘It means having no money. But it wouldn’t have mattered if he was rich. I wouldn’t date someone because of their money.’ Quite the opposite, in fact. The more impoverished, the more hopeless they were, the better, she thought, thinking about exes. That was what they had in common.

He stared down at her, and there was no reason why she should blush at that moment, but she did anyway.

‘So what, then?’ She saw him swallow, saw his jaw tighten. ‘Is he good-looking?’

Objectively he was, despite what Holly and Ed said. And yet when she pictured Nick’s face, the face she’d once thought so mesmerisingly handsome, she could only see the weak chin and his perpetually sulky expression. ‘I thought he was,’ she admitted.

The sunlight was behind him so that his face was in shadow. After a moment, he reached out and touched her cheek, lightly. ‘You deserve better.’

But I don’t, she wanted to tell him. She didn’t deserve to find love and happiness.

And yet, she did feel happy. Here. With him.

But of course that was the inherent paradox of the holiday fling. There was this outside-the-lines recklessness to the whole thing that was incredibly exciting and sexy. And because you were on holiday from the usual rigmarole of your day-to-day life you felt calmer, more in control.

Closer.

But a holiday fling was expressly finite. Keyword: holiday.

It didn’t matter what happened in the movies, in real life holiday romances came with a built-in expiry date. There was no point in blurring lines between the now and the future. If it worked on the beach, it almost certainly wouldn’t work in real life; Holly and Ed had drilled that into her back in England.

And having heard Chase talk about his marriage last night, she had realised something about herself. That whatever it was she had felt for her exes, it was certainly not the kind of love he had described to her. She wasn’t sure she knew how to love like that.

Or if she ever would.

She blinked. ‘I agree. But I’m not looking for anything serious.’ Reaching up, she pulled a book off the shelf. ‘Right now I’m happy with Mr Rochester.’

Not as happy as she usually was, she thought an hour later as she shifted position on the sunlounger. That was no reflection on the book. She lovedJane Eyre, both the character and the plot. Charlotte Brontë’s story of an ordinary woman overcoming the obstacles in her life to find love and lasting happiness with the man she loved was a classic for so many reasons and she had read it countless times, but today she couldn’t seem to follow the words.

Telling herself that the sun was too dazzling to read, she shut the book. But it wasn’t the sun that was making it difficult to concentrate, it was him.

She glanced over to where Chase lay beside her, his muscular body gleaming in the sunlight. Unlike her, he wasn’t attempting to read. Instead, his eyes were closed and she gazed at him greedily, grateful for the opportunity to just stare and stare.

That was what she needed to focus on. His beauty. His skills as a lover. But it was hard not to think about everything he had told her. Everything that had happened to him. Losing his baby. Losing his wife. They were huge life-transforming events and now that she had heard the pain in his voice, she couldn’t unhear it. On the contrary, she could feel it reaching out to her.

But she was going to resist it.

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