That rollo with Kitty Quested shouldn’t have happened. Normally he was so careful, so considered, plus she was an employee. But something had started out on that road...a spark had been struck.
His muscles tensed as he remembered. Not the impact of metal hitting gravel, but the moment when he’d looked up and she had been running towards him, that incredible red hair flying behind her like a comet’s tail. She’d looked so small and fragile, but she had been moving with the same fierce determination as the waves that rode in to La Setenta beach.
He’d felt her panicky fear, had seen it too, for she’d been shaking. Only then she’d started scolding him, and he’d realised that it wasn’t fear but anger, and all at once he’d been angry with her for lecturing him and being so impossibly, maddeningly righteous.
But mainly for having that incredible enticingly pink mouth.
And suddenly they had both been shaking. Only not with anger.
Replaying the moment again inside his head, he frowned. At the time there had been so much going on, but of course there was a perfectly logical explanation for that strange weave of tension.
Feelings had been running high.
An accident, anger, and confusion over their respective identities had obviously acted like emotional gunpowder, and his own spiking adrenaline was the spark which had ignited that intense, reluctant attraction he’d felt.
An attraction that he’d confidently expected to fade by the time he walked out of her villa.
Only he’d been wrong.
And that was why he needed to see her again.
His fingers twitched against the keyboard.
Last time he’d had no choice but to leave—to flee, really. Not just from Kitty, but from the past that haunted him, from a weakness he had thought he could only escape by keeping himself away from temptation.
And she had been a temptation. More than that, she had been a compulsion, and he’d been shocked and scared to discover that he still had that same weakness inside him—the weakness that had caused him and his family so much pain.
He’d had no choice. In Cuba, with her so tantalisingly close, there would have been a chance that he might give in to temptation. Clearly he’d needed to put some distance between the two of them—not just to remove the risk of that happening but to get his head in order.
Only that hadn’t happened. He’d flown to Florida, then to New York and across to San Francisco. But all those thousands of miles had made no difference. She had got inside his head so that he couldn’t think about anything other than her, and it was then that he’d realised that he’d made a mistake.
By leaving so swiftly he’d basically gone ‘cold turkey’. His body was suffering withdrawal symptoms. He wanted more, and he was denying himself. Worse, he’d turned her into some kind of forbidden fruit—an illicit, off-limits pleasure—so of course he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her.
Seeing her again would make her real and attainable, and her power over him would simply disappear. Then he would take a new lover, someone who neither worked for him nor lived on his doorstep, and his hunger for this red-haired Englishwoman would be forgotten. Kitty Quested would be just a name on a payslip.
Feeling calmer, he settled back against his seat. The sky was beginning to turn pink and the brash, modern hotels were giving way to grand palm-filled squares and roads crammed with almendróns—iconic vintage American cars in a mouthwatering array of pick-‘n’-mix colours. The SUV slowed, bumping over the cobbled streets of the Habana Vieja, and he leaned forward, his gaze drawn to the view outside the window.
It was a typical Friday night in his hometown. The streets seemed to swell with noise and laughter, and everywhere there were people. Beautiful, smiling people, chatting, dancing, holding up their phones to take photos. He scanned their faces, remembering how it had felt to be that carefree, so unquestioning of his right to happiness.
And then his gaze snagged on something teasingly familiar.
Hair the colour of damp beech leaves and the curve of a cheekbone, pale and luminous in the fading light.
He frowned. It couldn’t be. Not in that dress. Or those heels.
But then she turned and he felt shock break over him like a wave. It was her. He watched as Kitty nodded to the dark-haired woman following her, her lips parting in a smile that made his vision go watery at the edges, and then, turning, she ran as lightly as a dancer up the steps into a bar.
It took his brain approximately ten seconds to go from mute disbelief to a memory of her as she had been that evening, arching against him, the curve of her back beneath his hand—
His shock was forgotten and instead he was tensing, his body reduced to nothing more than a swirling mass of instincts and hormones.
‘Stop the car.’
‘I’m sorry, sir?’
He heard the surprise in Rodolfo’s voice but igno
red it. ‘Just pull over.’