‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Nothing like a bit of projection to take the focus off her own weakness.
His cool composure was an added insult to the tumultuous emotions coursing through her body. ‘I would only have kissed you if you’d wanted it. And you did, didn’t you, tesoro?’
Juliette wanted to slap his face. She wanted to claw her fingernails down his cheeks. She wanted to kick him in the shins until his bones shattered. But instead her eyes filled with stinging tears, her chest feeling as if it were being squeezed in a studded vice. ‘I h-hate you.’ Her voice cracked over a lump clogging her throat. ‘Do you have any idea how much?’
‘Maybe that’s a good thing.’ His expression went back to his signature masklike state. Unreadable. Unreachable. Invincible.
Why wasn’t she shrugging off his hold? Why wasn’t she putting distance between their bodies? Why was she feeling as if this was where she belonged—in the warm protective shelter of his arms? Juliette slowly eased back to look up at his face, her emotions so ambushed she couldn’t find her anger. Where was her anger? She needed her anger. She couldn’t survive without it pounding through her blood. She blinked back the tears, determined not to cry in front of him.
‘I don’t know how to handle this...situation...’ She swallowed and aimed her gaze at his shirt collar. ‘I don’t want to ruin Lucy and Damon’s wedding but sharing this suite with you is...’ She bit her lip, unable to put her fears into words. Unwilling to voice them out loud, even to herself.
Joe inched up her chin with his finger, meshing his gaze with hers. ‘What if I promise not to kiss you. That will reassure you, sì?’
No! I want you to kiss me.
Juliette was shocked at herself. Shocked and shamed by her unruly desires. She stepped out of his hold and wrapped her arms around her body before she was tempted to betray herself any further.
‘Okay. That’s sounds like a sensible plan. Let’s decide on some ground rules.’ She was proud of the evenness of her tone. Proud she had got her willpower back into line. ‘No kissing. No touching.’
Joe gave a slow nod. ‘I’m fine with that.’ He walked over to the sofa and sat down, hooking one ankle over his muscular thigh.
He was fine with that?
Everything that was female in Juliette was perversely offended by his easy acceptance of her rules. Surely he could have put up a little bit of resistance? But maybe he had someone else he wanted to kiss and touch and make love to now. Maybe he was tired of being celibate and was ready to move on with his life. It had been fifteen months after all. It was a long time for a man in his sexual prime to be without a lover. A tight pain gripped her in her chest and travelled down to tie tight knots in her stomach. Cruel twisting knots that made it hard for her to breathe. If she didn’t pull herself into line, her grey-blue eyes would turn green. She had no right to be jealous. She had left their marriage. She had divorce papers in her bag, for pity’s sake.
‘Good.’ Juliette’s tone was so clipped it could have snipped through tin. ‘But of course, that leaves the tricky problem of what to say to Lucy and Damon when they realise we’re sharing a suite.’ She walked over to the bar fridge and took out a bottle of water, unscrewing the cap and pouring it into a glass. She picked up the glass and turned to face him. ‘Any brilliant suggestions?’
Joe’s expression was still inscrutable but she could sense an inner guardedness. His posture was almost too casual, too relaxed, too calm and collected. ‘We could say we’re trying for a reconciliation.’
Juliette took a sip of water before she gave in to the temptation to throw it in his face. She put the glass down on the counter with a clunk. ‘A reconciliation? For a marriage that shouldn’t have come about in the first place?’
A knot of tension appeared beside his mouth, his eyes locked on hers in an unblinking hold. ‘I wasn’t the one who left our marriage.’
Juliette stalked over to the windows overlooking the white crescent of the sand and the turquoise water of the beach below. She took a shuddering breath. ‘No, because you weren’t fully in it in the first place.’
The silence was so long it was as if time had come to a standstill.
She heard the rustle of his clothes as he rose from the sofa. Counted his footsteps as he approached her but she didn’t turn around. He came to stand beside her, his gaze focused like hers on the beach below.
After a long moment, he turned his head to look at her, the line of his mouth bitter. ‘If you were to be truthful, Juliette, you weren’t fully in it either. You were still getting over your ex. That’s why we hooked up in the first place, because you couldn’t bear to spend the night he got married to one of your so-called friends, on your own.’
Juliette wished she could deny it but every word he said was true. She had been shattered by Harvey’s betrayal. They had been dating since their teens. His affair with Clara had been going on for months and Juliette hadn’t had a clue. The night she’d thought Harvey was going to propose to her, he’d told her he was leaving her. Harvey Atkinson-Lloyd, her parents’ choice of the perfect son-in-law for their only daughter. The daughter who, unlike their high-achieving sons Mark and Jonathon, had failed to do anything much else to win their approval.
Juliette ground down on her molars, torn between anger at Joe for pointing out her stupidity and anger at herself for making a bad situation worse by falling into bed with him that night.
She turned to face him, chin high, eyes blazing. ‘So, what’s your excuse for hooking up with me that night? Or do you regularly sleep with perfect strangers when you’re working in London?’
An emotion flickered across his face like an interruption in a transmission. A pause. A regroup. A reset. ‘It was the anniversary of my mother’s death.’ His tone was flat, almost toneless, but there was a stray note of sadness under the surface.
Juliette looked at him blankly. ‘But I don’t understand... I thought you told me your mother had emigrated to Australia. Wasn’t that the reason she wasn’t able to come to our wedding?’
‘She’s my stepmother. Both of my parents are dead.’
Had she misheard him back when they were together? She tried to think back to the conversation but couldn’t recall it in any detail. She knew his father had died a few years back but he had barely mentioned his mother. She’d got the sense it was a no-go area for him, so she hadn’t delved any further.
They hadn’t done much talking about each other’s family backgrounds, mostly because he was away such a lot. Their brief passionate reunions when he came home between trips were physical catch-ups, not emotional ones. She had wanted more than physical intimacy but hadn’t known how to reach him. Every attempt to get closer to him had failed, with him leaving for yet another work commitment. It was as if he sensed her need for emotional connection and found it deeply threatening. But, to be fair, she too had been pretty sketchy with her own issues to do with her background, not wanting him to know how out of place she felt in her academically brilliant family.
‘I’m sorry...’ she said, frowning. ‘I mustn’t have heard you correctly when you told me that when we were living together.’
His lips moved in a grimace-like smile that didn’t involve his eyes. ‘My father remarried when I was a child. But when he died ten years ago, my stepmother and two half-siblings emigrated to Melbourne, where she has relatives.’
‘Do you have much contact with them? Phone? Email? Birthdays—that sort of thing?’
‘I do what is required.’
Juliette was starting to realise she didn’t know very much about the man she had married in such haste. Why hadn’t she tried a little harder to get him to open up? Her shock pregnancy had thrown her into a tailspin. And when she’d finally worked up the courage to call him and tell him, he had flown straight to her flat in London with a wedding proposal. A proposal she had felt compelled to accept in
order to mitigate some of the shame she had caused her parents in getting herself ‘knocked up’ after a one-night stand.
She looked at him again, wondering how she could have been so physically close to someone without knowing anything about him. ‘How old were you when your mother died?’
Joe glanced at his watch and muttered a soft curse. ‘Isn’t there a drinks thing soon?’
‘Shoot.’ Juliette gave a much milder version of his curse. ‘I’m not dressed and I haven’t done my hair.’
He picked up a tendril of her mid-brown hair, trailing it gently through his fingers. ‘It looks beautiful the way it is.’ The pitch of his voice lowered and his eyes were a bottomless black.
Juliette swallowed and tried hard not to look at his mouth. ‘Ahem. You’re touching me. Remember the rules?’
He released her hair and stepped back from her with a mercurial smile. ‘How could I forget?’
CHAPTER THREE
JOE DROVE A hand through his own hair once Juliette had retreated to the bathroom. No touching. No kissing. Sure, he could abide by the rules. But he hadn’t realised it would be as difficult as this. It had been hard enough trying to erase the memory of her touch when he was living thousands of kilometres away. But sharing a suite with her this weekend was going to test his resolve in ways he wasn’t prepared for.
He hadn’t expected the chemistry to still be there. He hadn’t expected the hot, tight ache of desire to grip him so brutally. He hadn’t expected to feel anything other than guilt about how things had panned out between them. The guilt was still there, spreading cruel tentacles around his intestines like a poisonous strangling vine. Tentacles that crawled up into his chest and wrapped around his heart and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed like a savage fist.
Truth was, he’d been almost relieved when she hadn’t answered his texts and emails. It meant he didn’t have to face the train wreck he’d caused. The further along her pregnancy went, the longer he’d stayed away on business. Business others under his employ could have easily seen to. But no, he had wanted—needed—to throw himself into the distraction of work, because watching Juliette growing with his child had secretly terrified him. What if she died during childbirth? What if, like his mother, she had a complication and no one could save her?
Had he caused the loss of their baby by not being there? Had his absence caused Juliette unnecessary stress? Hindsight was all very well, but he had thought he was doing the right thing at the time. They weren’t in a love relationship. They had married for the sake of the baby and Juliette had seemed okay with that arrangement. Providing stability and security had been his focus.
His focus since their separation had been channelling his efforts into fundraising for a stillbirth research foundation. It had been his way of dealing with his own grief. He considered it far more productive than falling into a heap like his father had done. Joe wanted the money raised to help others, to prevent others from experiencing the devastation of losing a child at birth. Research was expensive and counselling services were always seriously underfunded. But that was changing as a result of his efforts. His own regular large donations along with the fundraising programme he had orchestrated would hopefully reduce the number of stillbirths across the globe.
Joe changed into his fresh clothes and unpacked the rest from his small travel bag and hung them in the wardrobe next to hers. He touched the silk sleeve of one of her tops, lifting it to his nose to smell the lingering scent of her signature perfume. For months after she’d left, he couldn’t go into the bedroom they had shared. He’d got his housekeeper to move his things into another room. A room without memories and triggers.
He slid the door closed on the wardrobe, wishing he could lock away his desire as easily. He’d wanted to kiss her. No doubt about that. His lips still burned with the need to feel the soft press of hers. Joe knew he was wrong for Juliette. He was relationship poison. He couldn’t seem to help destroying those he cared about. But seeing her again made him realise there was unfinished business between them. Was that why he hadn’t made more of a fuss about the booking mix-up? Yes, he’d been concerned about upsetting Damon’s young cousin, Celeste, but he might have found some way to resolve the situation even if he had to stay on the other side of the island. And, truth be told, he could have refused the invitation to be Damon’s best man in the first place and no one would have blamed him.
But he hadn’t because on some level, be it conscious or subconscious, he wanted to be here for the weekend on Corfu with Juliette. On neutral ground. Somewhere where there were no triggers and tripwires to the heartbreak of their past. It suited him to be in close proximity to her, to reassure himself he hadn’t totally destroyed her as well as their relationship.
A relationship that might have had a better chance if their baby had lived.
A tight ache spread through his chest when he thought of that lifeless little body. His baby girl with her little wizened pixie face, her tiny feet and hands, her permanently closed eyes.
Was there some sort of curse surrounding him and birth? His own birth had brought about his mother’s death. His birthday—the day in the year he dreaded more than any other—was the anniversary of his mother’s death. The very same day he had met Juliette in that London bar that had changed both their lives for ever.
The bathroom door opened and Juliette came out with her hair fashioned in a stylish knot on top of her head. ‘Bathroom’s all yours,’ she said, avoiding his gaze.
Joe swept his gaze over her candy-pink calf-length dress with its waist cinched in with a patent leather belt and her matching high heels that showcased her slender ankles. He had never met anyone who could look so effortlessly elegant. Whether she was wearing track pants and a sweatshirt or designer wear, she always took his breath away. And when she was naked he forgot to breathe at all. ‘You look stunning.’
Her creamy cheeks pooled with colour. ‘Thank you.’ Her gaze flicked away from his and she moved past him to get to the wardrobe. ‘I’ll just get my evening purse.’
Joe had to clench his hands into fists to stop himself touching her. The suite wasn’t large enough to keep a safe distance. It needed to be the size of a small nation for that. The suite was mostly open-plan with a king-sized bed dominating the bedroom area, with no door between that and the lounge area. No more than a metre or two from the bed was a sofa and single armchair and coffee table and there were minibar facilities near the windows to maximise the view over Barbati Beach. The en suite bathroom was luxuriously appointed but was hardly what anyone would call spacious. For a honeymoon, it would be ideal.
But they weren’t on a honeymoon.
Juliette opened the wardrobe and took her purse from one of the shelf compartments. He watched as her eyes went to his clothes hanging next to hers. Saw her teeth sink into her bottom lip and a small frown pull at her forehead.
‘Is that against the rules?’ Joe asked, leaning against the wall near her. ‘To have our clothes touching?’
She stiffened and then shut the wardrobe with a little more force than was necessary. Her cheeks were a fiery red, her grey-blue eyes reminding him of a storm-tossed sea. ‘We wouldn’t need rules if you would stop looking at me like that.’
‘How am I looking at you?’
She pursed her lips and put her chin up at a haughty height. ‘Like you want to touch me.’
‘I do want to touch you but the rules are the rules.’ Joe wanted to touch her so badly it was all he could do to keep his hands under control.
She swallowed and her blush deepened. She dropped her evening purse on the bed and adjusted the belt around her dress. ‘I should never have slept with you in the first place. It was totally out of character for me to do something like that.’
‘I know it was,’ Joe said, pushing himself away from the wall to approach her. ‘That’s why that night was so memorable.’
She frowned.
‘Are you saying...you found it special?’
He gave a crooked smile and, before he could stop himself, he stroked a lazy finger down the curve of her cheek. ‘I’d never met someone like you before.’
‘Because I wasn’t madly in love with you like most women are?’ Her eyes glittered with sparks of cynicism.
He traced the outline of her lush mouth, knowing he was breaking the rules but unable to resist the temptation. ‘You weren’t interested in my money or my status. You just wanted to be distracted from a bad day, just like I wanted to be.’
Her tongue swept over her lips and she gave another audible swallow. ‘Joe, we’re going to be late for the drinks thing.’
Right now, Joe didn’t care if they never made it to their friends’ wedding. Being with Juliette—breathing in her scent, feeling the softness of her lips under his fingertip—made his blood pound with longing. A slow drag began pulling at his groin—a primal need he had shut down, ignored, blocked out with work, pulsed to vibrant and undeniable life. He slid his hand to the nape of her neck, meshing his gaze with hers. ‘Why aren’t you telling me to stop touching you?’
She gave a shuddery breath and her gaze dipped to his mouth. ‘I—I don’t know...’ Her voice was whisper-soft.
He brought up her chin with his finger and locked her gaze with his. ‘I’ll tell you why, cara. Because deep down you want to be touched by me. You think a bunch of silly rules is going to damp down the explosive chemistry we still share?’ It certainly wasn’t damping down his. Not one little bit. He could feel the electric energy passing between them like a hot fizzing current. He could see it reflected in her eyes—the flicker of her eyelashes, the dart of her gaze to his mouth, the quick sweep of her tongue over her lips.
But then her gaze hardened and she placed her hand around his wrist and pulled it away from her face, shooting him a laser-like glare. ‘There is no chemistry. I don’t feel a thing where you’re concerned. Not a damn thing.’
The Return 0f Her Billionaire Husband (HQR Presents) Page 3
