Her arms stilled in the struggle to get her jacket on; his perceptiveness sneaked into some very vulnerable part of her. He didn’t know the half of it. Her own family still didn’t know the half of it. They’d been as mystified and dismayed as the rest of the country at her behaviour. Something her husband had ruthlessly exploited in a bid to win as much sympathy as possible.
She broke eye contact with effort and finished the job of putting on her jacket. Finally she looked at him again. ‘I’d really prefer not to talk about my marriage.’
Pascal was tempted to push her, but could see her clam up visibly. She’d become more and more relaxed over the course of the meal. He’d had to restrain his eyes from dropping numerous times to the soft swell of her breasts under the fine silk of her shirt. He still had no idea why she seemed so determined to cover up as much as possible. But, instead of his interest waning, the opposite was true. He had to admit that was part of the reason he’d asked her out—some kind of bid to have her reveal herself to be boring or diminish her attraction—yet she was intriguing him on levels that no other woman had ever touched.
He was not done with this, with her. But he knew that if he pushed her now, he could very well lose her. This was going to test all his patience and skill, but the chase was well and truly on. So now he flashed his most urbane smile and just said, ‘No problem.’ And he called for the bill. The abject relief on her face struck him somewhere powerful.
Pascal wouldn’t listen to Alana’s protests. He insisted on dropping her to her house, which was only ten minutes from the restaurant. Tucked in a small square in one of the oldest parts of Dublin, her house was a tiny cottage. Pascal’s car was too big to navigate past all the parked cars at the opening of the square, and she jumped out. But he was quick, too, met her at the other side of the car and insisted on walking her up to her door.
She turned at the door, feeling absurdly threatened, but by something in herself more than him. Standing close together, her eye level was on his chest, and she looked up into his dark face. The moon gleamed brightly in a clear sky, and the February air was chill. But she didn’t feel cold. She had the strongest feeling that if he attempted to kiss her, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. And something within her melted at that thought. She blamed the wine. And his innate French seductiveness.
But then suddenly he moved back. Alana found herself making a telling movement towards him, as if attached by an invisible cord and she saw a flash of something in his eyes as if he, too, had noted and understood her movement.
Before she could clam up, he had taken her hand in his and was bending his head to kiss the back of it, exactly as he had the previous night in the hotel. His old-fashioned gesture touched and confused her. Her hormones were see-sawing with desires and conflicting tensions. And then, with a lingering, unfathomable look, he started to walk away down the small square and back to his car. Against every rational notion in her head, Alana found herself calling his name. He half- turned.
‘I just…I just wanted to say thank you for dinner.’
He walked back up towards her with an intensity of movement that belied his easy departure just now. For a second she thought he was going to come right up to her and kiss her. She took a step back, feeling a mixture of panic and anticipation, with her heart thumping, but he stopped just short of her. He reached out a hand and tucked some hair behind her ear. It was a gesture he’d made earlier in the car, and she found herself wanting to turn her cheek into his palm. But then his hand was gone. And his eyes were glittering in the dark.
‘You’re welcome, Alana. But don’t get too complacent. We will be meeting again, I can promise you that.’
He turned again and strode back to his car. He got in, shut the door and the car pulled away. And Alana just stood there, her mouth open. Heat flooded her body and something much worse—relief. She knew now that she had called his name and said thanks, because something about watching him walk away had affected her profoundly. She had an uncontrollable urge to stop him.
She had to face it—even though she’d been telling herself she wasn’t interested in him from the moment their eyes had locked at the match, she was. He was smashing through the veritable wall she’d built around herself since she’d married Ryan O’Connor and her life had turned into a sort of living hell. It was frightening how, in the space of twenty-four hours, she found herself in a situation where she was actually feeling disappointed that a man she barely knew hadn’t kissed her. Her famously cool poise, which hid all her bitter disappointments and broken dreams from everyone, even her own family, was suddenly very shaky.
By the time Alana was standing in her tiny galley-kitchen the next morning drinking her wake-up cup of tea, she felt much more in control. She only had to look around her house, in which she quite literally could not swing a cat, to feel on firmer ground. This was reality. This was all she’d been able to afford after Ryan had died. Her mouth tightened. Contrary to what everyone believed, she hadn’t been left a millionairess after her football-star husband had died in the accident.
She was still picking up the pieces emotionally and financially from her five years of marriage. And, while her emotional scars might heal one day, the financial ones would be keeping her in this tiny cottage and working hard for a very long time. The truth was that Ryan had left astronomical debts behind him and, because their divorce hadn’t come through by the time he’d died, they’d become Alana’s responsibility. The sale of their huge house in the upmarket area of Dalkey had barely made a dent in what had been owed to various lenders.
Alana swallowed the last of her tea and grimaced as she washed out the cup. Pride was a terrible thing, she knew. But it had also given her a modicum of dignity. She’d never confided in anyone about the dire state of her marriage, had never told anyone about the day she’d walked into her bedroom to find Ryan in bed with three women who’d turned out to be call girls. They’d all been high on cocaine. He’d been too out of it to realise that it wasn’t even his bedroom. By then, it had been at least three years since they’d shared a bed.
That had been the day that her humiliation had reached saturation point. The pressure of having to maintain a façade of a happy marriage had tipped over into unbearability. She’d left and filed for divorce.
But her wily husband had quickly made sure that it looked as though Alana had coldly kicked him out. She hadn’t suspected his motives when he’d sheepishly offered to move out instead of her. But she should have known. The man she’d married had changed beyond all recognition as soon as he’d started earning enormous fees and tasted the heady heights of what it was to be a national superstar.
Admitting that she’d failed at her marriage had been soul destroying. She hadn’t wanted to confide the awful reality of it to anyone. Even if she had wanted to, her father’s health had been frail, and her mother had been focused solely on him. And, around the same time, one of her elder sisters had been diagnosed with breast cancer. With her sister having three children, and Alana being the only childless sibling and suddenly single again, she had moved into her sister’s home to help her brother-in-law for the few months that Màire had spent getting treatment. Alana’s marital problems had taken a backseat, and she’d been glad of the distraction while the divorce was worked out. She’d kept herself to herself and shunned her family’s well-meaning probing, too heart-sore and humiliated even to talk about it.
