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The word reverberated around the room as she shook her head. ‘There is no us.’ There were just darkness and bodies and warm breath and damp skin.
The sudden force of her heartbeat made her reach out and grip the back of an armchair.
‘Not currently,’ he said after a moment. ‘But there could be. I want there to be.’
The bluntness of that statement made her feel hot inside, scalded almost. She felt her face grow warm and she knew that she was blushing.
‘And why would you want that?’ she said stiffly, hating him, but hating herself more for the shiver that ran over her skin.
He stared down at her, that mouth of his curving up. ‘Because we have a connection.’
That was one word for it. For a moment she saw herself on the bed upstairs, breathless with wanting him, arms stretched out above her head, wrists in his hand, her body arching to meet his, tilting her hips up, driving herself against him. And his face above her, eyes dark and bright with a heat that seemed to pour straight into her.
‘You’re unbelievable.’ She took an unsteady step backwards, anger blotting out the memory of their ‘connection’. ‘Seriously? Did you come all the way over here because you thought I might have sex with you? Because that isn’t going to happen.’ It shouldn’t have happened before.
She knew it then. Knew that she was playing with fire. Although truthfully it had felt more as if she were dancing around the mouth of an active volcano, because even when he wasn’t the focus of an international search and rescue, Trip made headlines. All those weeks playing hide and seek with the paparazzi had been part of the thrill of it, but if anyone had caught them, then what?
She shivered. And it would all be so much worse now.
Shaking her head, she met his gaze. ‘Look, what we had worked for a few months, but it ended and frankly I’m done sneaking around like some grounded teenager. Next time I decide to see someone it will be out in the open, public. Real.’
‘Real?’ He frowned. ‘You mean love?’
Did she? Like most people, she hoped love might happen one day. That someone would love and cherish and honour her. But given that the only time she’d imagined herself in love, she had been humiliated and deceived and made to feel like a fool, it was more an ideal right now than a likelihood.
It certainly wasn’t going to happen with Trip. There were just too many differences between them. She had ignored that with Cameron and her brother was still paying the price.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Not bitten...mauled, she thought, throat tightening as she heard Cameron’s voice. Why would any man settle for you?
Blanking her mind, she lifted her chin. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’
Unsurprisingly Trip looked baffled, but then it seemed unlikely that love, the true, everlasting kind, the sort that involved promises to be kept and commitments to be honoured, the ‘growing old and sick together’ variety, came high on his agenda.
‘Or something like it.’ She felt suddenly self-conscious. Why was she even talking about love with Trip Winslow? This was a man who had turned up on her doorstep hoping for an afternoon of sex without strings.
‘Something like it,’ he repeated slowly. ‘And what would it look like, that something?’
‘I don’t know.’ She glared at him. ‘Does it matter?’
‘It might. You see, in answer to your question, no, I didn’t come all the way over here because I thought you might have sex with me.’ He gave her a long, steady look, as if he was trying to see beneath her skin.
‘I came here to ask you to marry me.’
If he’d asked her to fly to the moon with him, she couldn’t have been more shocked. For a moment, she just stared at him, and then she gave a small, brittle laugh.
‘You think I’m joking?’ His eyes had narrowed.
‘Yes, of course. Obviously.’ Abruptly she sobered up. ‘Although it’s not a very funny joke.’
‘It’s not a joke at all. I want you to marry me.’
‘Have you lost your mind?’ She held up her hand as he opened his mouth to reply. ‘You don’t need to answer that. Clearly you have. Why else would you be asking me to be your wife?’
‘Because I have a problem,’ he said in that smooth way of his, all silk on the surface, but steel beneath. ‘I want it to go away and I think you can help make that happen. Just in the short term.’
‘By marrying you?’ She met his gaze. ‘Sorry to burst your bubble, but from where I’m standing that sounds more like a problem than a solution.’
