too much.”
“He gave me the distinct impression that you’d been wounded in London. He intimated that you were skittish, single, and still smarting from an emotional hit you’d suffered overseas.”
She was going to throttle Bill the next time she saw him. “He tried to set me up with his grandson a couple of times,” she said, lifting her chin as she kept her expression unruffled and calm. “When I refused, he must have assumed the worst.”
Black lashes drifted over his probing blue gaze. “Assumptions are the damnedest things, aren’t they?”
She steeled her features and stared at him without blinking. She didn’t dare catalog the simmering intensity of his question, didn’t dare acknowledge the climbing heat in her veins. “Do you have a point?”
A smile, lazy and far too seductive, tipped to claim one side of his mouth. “I always have a point.”
“Then please make it so I can leave.”
“Right. I forgot.” He tossed her an enigmatic look. “Things get a little uncomfortable, a little personal, and rather than face it you run.”
“I don’t run,” she protested, while nervousness beat against her throat. “I leave. There’s a difference.”
“Then explain it to me.” He moved to bracket her shoulders between his powerful braced arms. “Explain how dropping everything—your job, your life and your lover—and disappearing across the Atlantic without a word to anyone isn’t running.”
“I didn’t leave without a word,” she said, while panic coiled low in her gut. He was too close. Too big and imposing and distracting. “I told you I wanted out. And you said you understood.”
“You also agreed to wait until I returned from Paris.”
She stared at him in desperate, defiant silence, refusing him the explanation she couldn’t risk giving.
He dipped his mouth even closer and murmured, “Explain why, if you weren’t running, you couldn’t wait two weeks for me to come back.”
Awareness winnowed through her, bringing a flush of heat to her face, her neck, her breasts. “Maybe I just decided there were more important things to do than while away the hours in bed with a man,” she said.
He obviously didn’t believe her, and the knowing glint of fire in his blue eyes made a reciprocal flare of heat coil deep in her belly. “Used to be you couldn’t spend enough time in my bed,” he reminded her.
“Yes, well, I was young and foolish,” she insisted. “I’ve grown up since then.”
“Tell me.” His tone, laced with sarcasm and a hint of bite, told her she’d insulted him. “What precipitated this amazing foray into maturity?”
Becoming a mother to your daughter.
His gaze trapped hers and the silence stretched out between them, a palpable weight in the air. “Did I wound you, Colette?” he taunted.
Her chest felt tight and a knot of pain she’d thought long buried thickened her throat. “Of course not. I’m the one who left, remember?”
“Yes, I do remember,” he said, and his focus tracked the line of her neck before returning to her face. “It’s you who wants to forget.”
She shifted from beneath his accusatory gaze, pressing back against the sturdy support of the door. “Do you blame me?”
“You realize, don’t you, that memories of our passion will intrude whether we wish it or not?” His eyes, heated and heavy lidded, dipped to her mouth. “All those nights and days and hours spent worshiping each other’s bodies won’t just disappear because we want them to.”
She licked her lips while her pulse gathered speed in her chest, her belly, her hands. “It doesn’t mean I have to acknowledge them.”
“You think?” he asked as his fingers slowly rose to graze her brow. “Because when I saw your file and realized we’d be working together again, I was worried. Worried about how you’d respond once you realized I was here. And the necessity of keeping things on a professional footing became undeniably clear.”
She swallowed, the glancing touch of his fingertips against her bare skin sending a shiver along her spine. “There’s no need to worry. I can keep things professional.”
“But I didn’t know that, did I? That’s why we needed to speak privately.” He stared at her from beneath hooded eyes. “Without the other employees overhearing. I needed to set the parameters of how we’d act together so there’d be no confusion.”
She maintained a tenuous hold on her composure. “I’m not confused.”
“Good.” His thumb grazed the sensitive transition from brow to cheek. “Because I can’t afford for our past to interfere with the plans I have for the Renaissance and its future.”
Flames licked low in her belly and