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‘I shouldn’t start something I can’t finish,’ Bastien quipped.
Desperately flailing for something...anything...to distract her from the attack of self-loathing waiting to pounce on her, Lilah paused on her way to the door. ‘Is it all right if I bring my dog with me tomorrow?’
‘No pets. Leave the dog with your family.’
‘I can’t. My stepmother isn’t comfortable with dogs. He’s very small and quiet,’ Lilah assured Bastien, lying through her teeth because Skippy wasn’t remotely quiet once he got to know people.
Bastien frowned. ‘Write down its details. I’ll arrange for a specialist transport firm to handle the travel arrangements,’ he pronounced after a considered pause. ‘But once the animal arrives in France keep it away from me.’
‘France?’ she repeated in consternation.
‘We’re going to France the day after tomorrow.’
Lilah tottered back downstairs, shattered by the way she had succumbed to that single kiss. How could Bastien still have that effect on her? She hadn’t been prepared for that. Perhaps naively she had assumed that her disgust at the unholy agreement he had offered her would protect her. But it hadn’t.
Bastien had bought her acquiescence with a job for her father and the promised long-term prosperity of the reopened factory. Didn’t he see how wrong that deal was? That reducing her body to the level of something to be traded like a product made her hate him? Didn’t that matter to him?
But why should it matter to him? she questioned heavily as she informed Julie that she was leaving early. Bastien only wanted sex. He wasn’t interested in what went on inside her head or how she felt about him. He didn’t care... And neither should she care, she told herself defiantly. Being oversensitive in Bastien’s radius was only going to get her hurt and humiliated. He wouldn’t give her the kind of polite or gracious pretences that would allow her to save face. There would be no frills in the way of romance or compliments. He wasn’t about to dress up their connection by making it about anything more than sex.
Later that same evening, in the wake of a whirlwind of embarrassingly untruthful explanations on the home front and a great deal of packing, Lilah emerged from the cinema with Josh—a tall, attractive man in his twenties, with brown hair and green eyes—and two other couples, Ann and Jack and Dana and George. There was nothing like a good fright or two to dispel tension, Lilah acknowledged wryly as she laughed at something Ann said about the horror movie they had watched.
‘You’re making a wise move on the career front,’ Josh told her. ‘Doing HR at Moore wasn’t stretching you. Working for an international businessman will offer you much more experience.’
A shamefaced flush lit Lilah’s face, because her friends had swallowed her lies about going to work for Bastien hook, line and sinker—just as her family had. ‘I suppose so...’
‘Very bad timing for me, though.’ Without warning Josh reached for both her hands. ‘You’re leaving just when I was about to ask you out on a real date.’
‘What?’ Lilah’s voice was shrill with surprise.
Josh grinned down at her, ignoring Jack’s mocking wolf whistle. ‘I mean, you must have wondered at least once what it would be like if we got together.’
Lilah grimaced, not knowing what to say to him. Because she never had wondered.
Josh edged her back against the wall behind her. ‘Just one kiss,’ he muttered.
Lilah stiffened, wondering why she felt like a stick of rock with ‘Property of Bastien Zikos’ stamped all the way through her. ‘No, Josh,’ she said, her hands braced against his chest.
But because she couldn’t bring herself to actively push him away he kissed her, and she felt much as a shop window mannequin might have felt...absolutely nothing. Because while she liked Josh, and enjoyed his company, she had never fancied him.
‘While you’re away think about the possibility of us,’ Josh urged, stretching an arm round her to guide her towards his parked car.
‘I don’t think so,’ Lilah responded, wondering if there was a kind way of telling a man that you didn’t fancy him in the slightest and knowing that there wasn’t, and that the best response was probably for her just to pretend that absolutely nothing had happened.
