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Trip was still lying on the bed. The book she had been trying to read for days now lay open in his lap.
‘Ms Lily Jane Dempsey. BA Amherst, MBA Oxon.’ Trip shifted against the pillows. ‘You have a lot of letters after your name.’
It was then that she realised he was holding out her invitation to the scholarship reunion dinner she had been using as a bookmark.
‘You have them too.’ He had been to Harvard.
‘True.’ She saw something flash across his eyes, too fast to catch, like a fish darting away from an unseen predator in an ocean of blue.
‘So did you have fun?’ His eyes were clear and blue and fixed on her face as if he cared, which seemed unlikely but today was turning out to be a day where little, if anything, made sense and so she simply shook her head.
‘I didn’t go. I had a lot on at work,’ she lied.
His gaze held hers, jaw tightening infinitesimally. ‘And that’s the only reason you didn’t go? Because of work?’
No, it wasn’t. The dinner had taken place the weekend after he’d come and ended things with her and, for days after he’d left her, her body had felt tired and achy as if she’d had flu. But there was no reason to share that with Trip now. No reason to ever share it with him.
‘Not completely. I was worried about you.’
‘But you wanted to go—’
She nodded. ‘I had a great time in England and I made friends there. I don’t often get a chance to catch up with them so, yes, I would have gone.’
‘Is that why you were going to London? You wanted a trip down memory lane?’
What she had wanted was to get away from him, this man sprawled on her bed, before he could take the wild rapture of their time together and turn it into something ugly. Before he made it so that all she could remember was that he had named her as his fiancée because he thought her dull and sensible enough to reassure his jittery shareholders.
‘You mean, the other day when you tricked me into coming here?’ She watched that mouth of his flex into something not quite a smile.
‘In part. But it’s also because England isn’t New York. London can be tricky but in Oxford it’s not that hard to have a normal life.’
‘You mean, no press?’
In short, yes. No press meant no photos, which meant no humiliation, no jeering headlines, no mocking memes.
She shrugged. ‘To an outsider, all students look pretty much the same so it’s easier to be anonymous.’
‘Easier?’ He frowned.
‘People think they can say things. Because of my father.’ She could feel his gaze, curious but a little baffled because, of course, what did he know about being belittled or deemed inferior? ‘And I know that how they talk about me, what they say, is because they’re angry, and that anger kind of spills out. But sometimes it’s hard—’
It had been bliss. For the first time in as long as she could remember she had fitted in seamlessly. And she had loved it. Loved the old stone buildings. The book-lined libraries. The seriousness of it all. She had felt accepted, felt safe.
It was one of the reasons why returning to the US fifteen months later had been such a shock. Suddenly she’d been back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. The brutality of it had left her winded, then angry, and angry people were vulnerable to manipulation. Which was why she hadn’t seen Cameron Carson for the danger he was. Why she needed to remember how that felt and not let herself get lost in a pair of blue eyes. She couldn’t be trusted. More importantly, he couldn’t either.
Suddenly she felt close to tears as she made a different, more painful journey down memory lane, back to when she had found Lucas on the floor of his bedroom, the pill bottle beside him. It was her fault that had happened. Blinded by her own neediness, she had placed her trust in someone who was a literal walking, talking red flag.
And this neediness she was feeling now meant that she couldn’t trust herself, trust her judgement. In fact, it was a reason to do the polar opposite of what she wanted to do. So there would be no more giving into that hunger that had stormed the barricades of her common sense and self-preservation out there in the woods.
And she would tell Trip that.
But it would be easier to have that conversation when he wasn’t lying on her bed as if he were her fiancé for real, rather than an ex she’d had sex with for reasons that frankly had made sense only in the heat of the moment.
Needing space from that thought, from him, she glanced down at her watch.
‘Is that the time? We should go down for supper. It’s past seven.’
Glancing across the table, Trip licked the spoon clean and rested it in his bowl. Something was different, he thought, his gaze leapfrogging from Lily’s shuttered grey eyes to the pulse beating out a staccato rhythm at the base of her throat.
