His Innocent Seduction

by Clare Connelly

  ‘I’m not...’

  ‘This—’ I gesture from her to me, cutting her off mid-sentence ‘—this is a real relationship. Sure, we skipped the dating part, and everything went fast, so fast, because we’ve had this deadline on it all, but none of that makes it less real. None of that makes a damned bit of difference.’

  She shakes her head but doesn’t dispute anything I’ve said.

  ‘I’ve slept with lots of beautiful, intelligent, interesting women, Millie. Women who make me laugh, women I have a heap in common with. And not once have I wanted more than that. Not once have I wanted to keep sleeping with them, to know everything about their lives, their futures and their hopes the way I do with you. I want all of you, Millie.’

  ‘This is the final boarding call for Air France flight eighteen-seventeen to Paris Charles de Gaulle. Would all remaining passengers please board the flight?’

  She looks towards the gate and panic flashes inside me. I lift her hand to my lips, kissing it, kissing her. ‘Look at me,’ I murmur, holding her hand there.

  Slowly, she turns her face to mine, her expression wary and raw at the same time.

  ‘Look at me and tell me you don’t ever want to see me again. Tell me some idea you had before you met me means more than this.’

  She sweeps her eyes shut and then pins me with her angry, defiant, desperate gaze. ‘The fact you can belittle my plans so easily shows exactly why I’m right to go.’

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  ‘I’m not belittling your plans...’

  ‘You’re implying they have no merit now I’ve met you. Like whoever I was before the great Michael Brophy doesn’t matter...’

  ‘No, I’m not. You’re doing it again—trying to find fault with me because you don’t want to bear the burden of making this decision.’

  She grinds her teeth, her frustration palpable. She’s not the only one.

  ‘You had a great plan; you promised your mum you’d see the world. You promised her you’d live your life, explore, have a grand adventure. And then you met me. Do you think this isn’t an adventure? You had a plan, but this happened, and now you need to look at what you want. Ask yourself if you really feel the same as you did when you left Australia.’

  She swallows, the column of her throat moving, her eyes haunted.

  ‘I’m going to Paris.’ It’s soft, yet determined. And, before my eyes, she straightens, looking at me without a hint of doubt. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because my plane is boarding.’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘Why are you going?’

  She lifts a hand to my chest and her voice wobbles. ‘Because I need to. If you care for me at all, you’ll understand that.’ Her eyes spark with mine and my heart drops to my toes. ‘I need to do this.’

  I’m screwed. Because she’s right. This was always going to happen. She needs to live her dream, and her dream isn’t me. She wants something else and I have to let her go, because I’m not my dad. Loving someone isn’t just telling them you love them. Loving them isn’t just words. You can’t love someone but act against their best interests.

  I love Millie. I love her with all my heart—and that means letting her go.

  I nod, scanning her face then lifting a hand, running my fingers lightly over her cheek.

  ‘If you ever need anything, I want you to call me.’

  She closes her eyes and sucks in a breath, breathing me in. ‘Okay.’

  We both know she won’t.

  ‘I have to go.’

  She steps backwards, away from my hand, out of my reach, turns her back on me and walks away.

  I watch her go. I stand there until she’s boarded. Until she’s on the plane. Until the plane takes off. I stand there, surrounded by milling people, happy travellers, and I have no idea where to go, what to do, or who the hell I am in a life post-Millie.

  I just know I made the right choice. The only choice I could have made.

  I let her go.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MY FRENCH HAS IMPROVED, but I’m still a long way off being fluent. I smile at the shopkeeper and hand over my euro. More than three weeks after leaving Dublin, and even the sight of freshly folded bank notes is enough to make my stomach drop with a blinding ache.

  Michael.

  I close my eyes and he is there, his tanned, powerful fingers peeling notes from his wallet and placing them on the bar. I’m holding his change on a silver tray, standing beside him. So close that if I sway forward just a little my knees would brush his...

  ‘Mademoiselle? You are okay?’

  I’m startled out of my memories, my longing, to find the middle-aged man selling me flowers is looking at me with bemusement.

  ‘Oui.’ I nod awkwardly, take the tulips and my change and step backwards, into the stream of people milling through these bright, fragrant and beautiful markets. Three Saturdays since I arrived and I have a routine and a rhythm.

  I know which vendors sell the best apples and raspberries, the best brioches and croissants, the creamiest butter and cheese, the driest wines, and tulips that will last almost a week, if I change the water and trim their stems.

  Somehow, this feels important. I’ve been in Paris longer than I was in a...whatever I was in...with Michael Brophy. A relationship. Why bother pretending it wasn’t? When did it move from ‘just sex’? Or was it always more than that?

  From the minute I propositioned him, did the playing field somehow begin to change without my knowledge, without my consent? No, that’s a cop-out. I was with him all the way. I consented to everything. I put boundaries in place when I needed to, and he respected them.

  He understood them.

  It was only at the airport that all those walls came crushing down, the walls I thought I’d built shook and fell.

  I carry the tulips around the corner, pushing into the small rental apartment without looking, without taking note of the surroundings. I climb the three flights of stairs and shoulder the door inwards, arranging the flowers in a vase, admiring them with the same half-hearted enthusiasm I have for life in general these days.

  My mother loved flowers.

  When she was dying, I spent hundreds of dollars each week so that her bedroom was overflowing with blooms. The fragrance was almost too much, but they made her smile, and all I cared about was making her smile.

  I run my fingers over the petal of one bloom and tears seep out of the corners of my eyes. I collapse onto the floor, my back pressed to the cabinet, and I cry. I cry for my mother, my beautiful mum, and I cry for Michael, who I hurt, who offered me so much, who I walked away from like that meant nothing.

  I cry for the life I think I want, that seems so far from where I am. I cry for the promise I made my mother, for the dream I thought we shared, that is slowly withering my soul. I cry for the broken reality before me and I sink lower, lying on the floor on my side, staring at the door to this apartment in Paris, this beautiful, historic apartment with its art deco furnishings and bistro right downstairs.

  It’s the strangest things that can trigger grief. I can think of my mum some days without flinching, and others, remembering the way she loved flowers almost rips my heart out.

  But there is disloyalty in my grief too, because I cry now with an overwhelming sadness, with a grief that encompasses everything that’s happened in the last six months.

  The weather has turned cold in Paris. Autumn is in full effect. Before long, my body is covered in goosebumps, my flesh ice-cold.

  I lie there as the sky darkens and rain begins to fall.

  Two years.

  It sounded so easy, back in Australia. I lay in bed beside Mum, holding her frail, paper-dry hand, telling her about my trip, describing in vivid detail all that I’d researched. And she listened intently, a smile on her face, and fell asleep, dream
ing of foreign places and adventures, dreaming of the life I would lead.

  The life she wanted me to lead.

  My chest compresses painfully, as though I’ve had a bag of cement pressed down on it. I stand up slowly and make myself a tea.

  Tea will help.

  The next day dawns with rain.

  I grab my leather jacket and head out early.

  I walk far. I walk in the rain, uncaring for how drenched I become.

  When I find myself in a part of Paris I don’t recognise, I head to the Métro and zip closer to home. I stare straight ahead, not making eye contact with anyone.

  But Paris is everywhere. Paris is this Métro and the art nouveau signage, the patisserie, the boulangerie, the people, the fashion, the food. I have dreamed of being here for so long and now I’ve arrived I feel like I’m in a bubble, unable to penetrate this city, this dream, this experience. I’m enduring it—that’s not how it’s meant to feel, right?

  I thought once I’d crossed the three-week mark it would somehow invalidate the time I spent with Michael, that I’d wake up and he’d be a distant memory.

  He’s not.

  Every day that passes brings him to the front of my mind.

  Every day that passes makes me ache for him, makes me crave him. Not calling him takes a monumental effort. His words, memories of his words, torture me.

  ‘I love all of you. I love spending time with you, talking to you, laughing with you, waking up beside you. I love your world view, your optimism, your determination. I admire you, I adore you. I am completely and utterly obsessed with you. So I’m standing here in the middle of this airport asking you—begging you—not to go. Please. Stay here with me.’

  My train stops. I hop off. People are everywhere. I jostle past them, pushing up the steps, emerging on the grey streets of Paris, looking around to get my bearings.

  I can’t find them.

  I have no bearings.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ A woman approaches me. ‘Est-ce que ça-va?’

  I’m crying. Great. I smile at her, shaking my head, then nod. ‘Je vais bien, merci.’

  She doesn’t look convinced, but she moves away from me. She’s right not to believe me because I’m not fine. I’m so not fine.

  I put a hand up on the side of the building, supporting myself, tethering myself to Paris, but my dreams are crumbled around me, in tatters.

  I promised my mum I’d travel. I promised her I’d do this. But it was never my dream. Not really. It was her therapy, her hope.

  ‘I’m asking you to accept that maybe this isn’t your dream. Maybe you want a new dream. Maybe that’s me. You and me.’

  I close my eyes and he’s there, so real, so clear, that I breathe in and swear I feel him, taste him. But when I open my eyes there’s only Paris. The city of my dreams.

  Except it’s not.

  It’s really, really not.

  * * *

  I know he’s a top defence barrister, and I’ve seen him in a suit. But I’ve never seen Michael Brophy like this. In barrister’s robes and wig, so impossibly handsome, so familiar, so achingly, utterly familiar, as though he’s a part of me and I am of him.

  I sit at the end of the corridor, watching him as he talks to another silk, his expression stern. He nods then reaches for the papers he’s holding and pulls something out. Hands it over.

  It’s killing me to sit here watching him, not speaking, not calling his name.

  I should have waited. I should have waited until tonight, gone to his apartment and sat on the step. I should have waited but I couldn’t.

  When I realised I needed to be here, with him, to speak to him, to tell him how wrong I was, I didn’t stop to think about anything except getting here. I booked the first flight I could, first thing the next morning, and I came straight from the airport to his chambers. Where else would I go?

  But now that I’m here, I’m conscious of two things.

  How much time has passed, and how utterly and completely I rejected him.

  What if he’s changed his mind? What if he’s done what I said and moved on, slept with someone else? Many someone elses? What if I’m a distant memory in his heart and his bed?

  He laughs, the sound barrelling down the corridor towards me, and I stand because I can’t not. My stomach is alive with butterflies, my knees are weak.

  His secretary slants a curious gaze in my direction—the woman who’s been sitting here for two hours, not speaking, not moving.

  ‘I’ll call you next week,’ he says, nodding, and then turns towards me.

  His eyes find me instantly and he stops walking, his expression shifting, his eyes sweeping over me then landing on my face, staying there accusingly, or curiously. And I stay where I am, still, watchful, waiting.

  He starts to walk again almost immediately, closing the distance between us, and I hold my breath.

  ‘Millie.’ My name on his lips is guarded. A thousand questions pass from him to me. He asks none, but I hear them anyway.

  ‘Can we talk? Privately?’

  His jaw is squared, his eyes like flint. He wants to say no. He wants to tell me to fuck off.

  I wait, my nerves tumbling over themselves. ‘I just need a minute.’

  His brow creases. ‘Are you okay?’

  Emotions bubble through me. I shake my head and then he puts his hand on my back, propelling me forward, through the corridor, towards a pair of wood-panelled doors. The room is lined with books and the furniture is heavy oak. It feels historic and intimidating.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say as he shuts the door.

  His head dips forward. He lifts the wig off, and then the robe. He’s Michael now—my Michael. My heart bursts.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ His voice is exactly as I remember, exactly as it’s been in my dreams every night.

  ‘I came to see you,’ I say simply.

  But it’s not simple. I hurt him. He offered me everything and I pushed him away.

  ‘How’s Paris?’

  My smile is weak. ‘Not what I thought.’

  ‘You don’t like it?’

  I shake my head, my throat throbbing with unshed tears. ‘It’s just...not what I thought.’

  He expels a breath and my chest heaves. I’m doing this all wrong. ‘I promised my mum,’ I say softly. ‘I promised my mum I’d do this, that I wouldn’t rush to settle down. She had so many regrets and she wanted to make sure I didn’t. She didn’t want me to make the same mistakes she did.’

  ‘I know that.’ He turns his face away from me, looking towards the window to his right.

  ‘But that’s not about Paris,’ I whisper. ‘It’s not about my medical career. It’s no one thing in particular. It’s an approach to life. She didn’t want me to miss opportunities. She wanted me to follow my heart, to listen to it, to indulge it. She wanted me to live fully, a rich life. And, above all, she wanted me to be happy.’

  I move to him, unable to keep my distance now, needing to make him understand, to get him to see... ‘She wanted me to be happy, Michael, and I can’t be. Not without you.’

  His head whips around to mine, his expression taut.

  ‘I went to Paris because I thought it was what I should do, but the second I got on that flight I felt like I was being ripped in two. And I was. Because I fell in love with you and, without me realising it, all my dreams, all my hopes, shifted away from what I thought they were.’

  He’s staring at me and his lack of response is making my tummy do backflips. ‘I know you’re probably still pissed. You delivered only the most perfect declaration of love ever and I acted like you’d asked me to wash your dirty socks or something.’ I let out a tight laugh and shake my head. ‘I know I stuffed up. I know I ruined everything. And I’m sorry.’ My voice quivers. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. You knew I’d
regret leaving you, leaving Dublin, and you still watched me walk away. You let me go and find this out for myself, even when that hurt you, and I’m sorry...’

  He lifts a finger to my mouth. ‘Stop apologising.’ He closes his eyes, then blinks them open seconds later. ‘You’re really here?’

  I smile and kiss his fingertip. ‘Yes.’

  But there’s still a sense of reserve to him. A sense of worry. As though I’m here for a weekend or something. Not for good. Not for keeps.

  ‘The thing is,’ I say, moving closer so our bodies touch. I feel his shuddering breath. ‘I have a new dream, and I’m hoping you’ll make it come true.’

  ‘I told you,’ he says gruffly. ‘If you ever need anything, all you have to do is ask...’

  ‘I need you,’ I say simply, wrapping my hands around his waist. ‘I need you, for always and for ever.’ I push up on my tiptoes, kissing his lips lightly and stifling a groan for how utterly perfect that feels. ‘That is, if the offer still stands?’

  His eyes flare and in response he presses his mouth to mine. It’s a kiss of passion and promise—a kiss of new beginnings. And, for the first time in a long time, I feel utterly, sublimely and simply happy.

  * * *

  If you enjoyed His Innocent Seduction,

  look out for the first installment in

  Claire Connelly’s Guilty as Sin duet!

  Her Guilty Secret

  Available now!

  Dare to read more sexy stories!

  Check out our other Harlequin DARE titles,

  available now:

  Make Me Need by Katee Robert

  Between the Lines by Lauren Hawkeye

  One Wicked Week by Nicola Marsh

  Also by Clare Connelly

  Off Limits

  Burn Me Once

  The Season to Sin

  Keep reading for an excerpt from One Wicked Week by Nicola Marsh.

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

  http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010003