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‘How can you be so...so...coolabout this?’ she cried.
‘Would you rather I descend into screaming hysteria?’
‘This is a catastrophe!’
‘It’s an inconvenience,’ Mateo ground out in response. ‘And one that will obviously be sorted, if not this instant, then certainly in the coming days.’
‘And how do we set about doing that?’ Maude demanded. She leapt to her feet but then remained rooted to the spot, glaring at him as the situation developed in her head in all its horrendous glory. ‘You don’t know my mum. This is what she’s been waiting for...forever! If we go down there and announce that we...that we’reengaged...then it’ll be all around her friendship group by this evening and there’ll be an ad in the local newspaper by lunchtime tomorrow!’
‘That’s surely a bit of an exaggeration?’
‘I’m thirty-two years old and she’s been desperate for me to get married since I was in my early twenties.’
‘You’ve really had to buck against the trend to develop your career, haven’t you?’ Mateo murmured, side-tracked by the image of a youthful Maude, digging her heels in and refusing to go down the prescribed route.
Strong, smart, feisty and a whole lot more.
He’d struggled to get where he was, had sacrificed a lot and had had to toughen up even more. They might have come from wildly different backgrounds, but in her own way she had faced her own struggles, and he admired her for that. That admiration was in his eyes as they briefly rested on her flushed face.
‘Yes, I have!’ Maude’s head was all over the place. This was exactly what happened when she jumped in the deep end without doing her due diligence! It had all seemed so simple when they had thought up the idea. She’d been in a tizzy because Angus had let her down, and in Mateo had stepped with what had seemed a perfectly sensible solution. One that worked for both of them and would involve no more than a couple of hours with them both playing a part.
In some insane part of her she had actually thought that it might benefit her chances at branching out into more client-facing work if he got a chance to see her away from the confines of an office environment!
It had all seemed so straightforward.
It hadn’t occurred to either of them that nothing in life was as easy as it seemed.
‘Like I said, this will get sorted, but...’ Mateo frowned, thinking. ‘It doesn’t have to be the end of the world.’
‘I’m going to change. You should go downstairs and...and...’
‘Break the news that it was all a misunderstanding? That, in fact, we’ve never had a relationship? It was all a case of smoke and mirrors?’
‘Well...’
‘Isn’t that going to lead to a flurry of questions? The main one being why you allowed everyone to think that we were an item in the first place?’
Maude hesitated. She tugged the robe tighter and glared. Shorn of the constraints of their normal working relationship, they were now two people, man and woman, without the divide of their established roles separating them.
It was just something else she had failed to predict.
His dark eyes roved over her, ponderous, lazy and doing all sorts of things to her body, making it respond in ways she didn’t like and didn’t trust.
She turned her back to him, rustled briefly in her chest of drawers, grabbing the first things that came to hand, and informed him with a toss of her head that she was going to shower and change and he was to wait for her downstairs.
She pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt. She would have to think about an outfit for lunch when she managed to get her head around what was going on.
She emerged from the bathroom to find Mateo still in the bedroom and as relaxed as he could possibly be on the bed, half-lying down as though he hadn’t a care in the world.
Before she could utter a word, he held up one hand and drawled, ‘I have a suggestion.’
‘You were going downstairs.’
‘Incorrect,’ he said gently. ‘I was staying right here until we hashed this thing out.’ He shrugged but there was amusement on his face as he held her gaze. ‘I’m just far too much of a gentleman to contradict you when you ordered me to leave.’
‘You’re...you’reimpossible!’ Maude snapped, moving towards the bed to stand at the bottom of it, arms folded. ‘Okay. I have no idea what your suggestion is going to be, but I might as well hear it.’
Mateo crossed his legs loosely at the ankles. Maude, arms still folded, tried not to watch compulsively because the man was just so compelling, so charismatic, so ridiculously addictive to look at.
