Page 45 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

‘That’s great,’ she managed. Her voice hardly sounded like hers, but he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Yeah, he sent photos.’ He held out his phone and she took it, and scrolled through the pictures, feeling giddy and faintly sick. ‘It looks amazing. Joan will be thrilled. They must have worked really hard to get it all done so quickly.’

‘They work fast but they do a good job.’ He hesitated. ‘So when do you want to be dropped back?’

It was a question that needed answering but her head was still full of how he had just reached across the table and kissed her. Hungrily. Deeply. It was a kiss that made the world tilt sideways and yet it was also a kiss that meant nothing.

Nothing in the sense of feelings and permanence, because this relationship was always going to end when the builders finished at the beach house. Only now that moment was here, it was hard to imagine leaving him. Harder still to picture waking up the next day without Chase beside her.

She felt an ache in her chest but ignored it. That was what they’d agreed and it was what she wanted, she told herself. There was no point in being disappointed. No point in pretending this was more important than it could ever be.

‘Whenever is easiest for you.’ She fought to keep her voice light and careless, balling her hands, trying to keep the emotion inside her. ‘I’ll work around your schedule. Are you thinking now or tomorrow?’

‘I have that engagement I told you about in New York tomorrow evening.’ His face was completely expressionless as he looked across the table, but there was a note in his voice she couldn’t place. ‘Have you ever been?’

She had forgotten about his trip to New York. Not that it mattered now.

‘To New York?’ She shook her head. ‘No, this is my first time abroad.’

There was a long silence. ‘Why not come with me, then? Get your first bite of the Big Apple.’

Jemima stared at him. Was he being serious? It seemed like a step away from the ‘just sex’ rules of their fling.

‘I know that’s not what we agreed,’ he said as if he’d read her mind. ‘But I feel like yesterday things changed. I changed them.’ As a gull wheeled across the sky, he glanced upwards, his jaw tightening. ‘This is your holiday. I promised you fun, and diving.’

‘And you kept your promise,’ she protested, and she was shocked to realise that out of all the men in her life, aside from her brother, Chase was the only man ever to do that. ‘Lots of people make promises, Chase. Like my exes. They were great at promising all kinds of things. But there’s a difference between saying you’re going to do something and actually doing it.’ Beneath the table, her fingers knotted. ‘I’ve had a lot of fun.’

‘Not last night, you didn’t. You had to sit and listen to me unpack a load of emotional baggage and I shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t fair. You didn’t sign up for that. But I thought maybe a trip to New York might go some way to making it up to you. I have this event, but aside from that my time is my own. I could show you around.’

As she pictured the gleaming skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, and Chase’s hand wrapped around hers, her limbs felt as if they were filling with light.

It was so, so tempting, but... ‘You’ve already done so much for me. You don’t need to do that.’

‘I want to do it,’ he said softly. ‘I want to show you where I live.’

She stared at him dazedly. An impromptu trip to New York was the kind of thing couples did. Only they weren’t a couple. They were lovers who weren’t in love. Friends with benefits who’d only met a week ago and would go back to being strangers when she left Bermuda.

Her nails were cutting into her hands now. The thought of leaving Bermuda, of leaving Chase, made her feel as if she were drowning and, taking a deep breath, she counted to ten inside her head. ‘Then yes, I’d love to go to New York with you.’

It was breaking all the rules. But this was her holiday, her rules, she thought defiantly, and she leaned in and kissed him because kissing was so much easier than trying to address any of the conflicting and contradictory emotions squeezing her heart.

At some point she was going to have to say goodbye, but not yet. Not until after New York.

New York. New York. So good they named it twice.Maybe that was why his heart felt as if it were beating at twice its normal rate, Chase thought, gazing down at Central Park from the window of his penthouse triplex apartment.

They had flown up late at night, arriving in darkness and to a flurry of seasonal snowflakes. His gaze drifted back down to the lights below. When he couldn’t sleep he often stood here watching the traffic, taking comfort from the fact that he wasn’t alone.

But he wasn’t alone any more, he thought, glancing over his shoulder to where Jemima lay sleeping, her blonde hair splayed across the pillow, her naked body silvery in the moonlight.

He felt his own body harden, and his pulse gave a betraying twitch.

It wasn’t the city that was making his heart beat at twice its normal rate. It was her, because, despite having told Jemima, toldhimself, that this arrangement was just a mutual interlude of pleasure and satisfaction, when he had heard Marcus say that the beach house was ready for her to move back in, he had been so paralysed with panic it had felt as if his spine had turned to ice.

It was understandable, of course. He and Jemima had hardly spent a moment apart since that day when he’d gone to her cabin to confront her, and it had been a long time since he’d spent the night with anyone, much less shared so much of his life.

Including the moment when it had imploded.

His chest tightened. For the best part of a decade he’d held it all together, pushed the grief and chaos and despair to the farthest, deepest parts of his mind. And then Jemima had called him out, demanded a respect that he should have given her automatically, and it had shocked him that he had become a man like that. A man who had to hurt others to hide his own pain.

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