Daring to Date the Boss / The Tycoon Who Healed Her Heart: Daring to Date the Boss / The Tycoon Who Healed Her Heart. Melissa James

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СКАЧАТЬ continued even through an hour-long tramp along one of the marked nature-trails. Sweating through the layers she had to wear for her anonymity hadn’t bothered her until today.

      But there were three things she didn’t and wouldn’t do: check email, check her SMS’s or watch TV. The first two were easily traceable if Pete paid an expert enough, and watching TV was a reminder of the woman she used to be. The longer she stayed here, the more she wondered if she should ever have been that person at all.

      So who was she now, and what did she want from life?

      For someone who’d lived her entire life on aspiration, always going forward to the next goal, this inactivity, this waiting—and especially this temporary dependence on a man she didn’t know—felt as if she’d said goodbye to her most trusted instincts and even her brain cells. She didn’t know who this alien being was that opened her mouth and said yes to everything Armand proposed, but she didn’t trust her an inch.

      CHAPTER SIX

      ‘I’M NOT coordinated. I’ll fall and hurt myself. I can’t do this, Armand, and especially not in the dark!’

      The absolute panic in Rachel’s voice was more than the natural trepidation at trying something new. Holding her close, steadying both their snowboards by keeping his at a ninety-degree angle to hers, Armand kept his voice low and soothing. ‘You can’t know that. We haven’t even gone ten feet yet.’

      ‘I can’t even ski. How can I do this? I have no stocks. I’m going to fall. I know I will. Don’t you understand? I can’t go to hospital!’

      He looked at her in the deep night, lit by the warmth of bagged fires on poles reflecting off the new fall of snow in small, glittering jewels. But she hadn’t noticed either the night’s beauty or even the fact that he’d had his arm around her waist for ten minutes. If she felt the same kind of half-amazed awakening of body and soul he experienced every time he touched her, especially since their dance and half-kiss, she wasn’t showing it. She was staring down at her booted feet on a snowboard and was literally shaking.

      ‘Have you had a bad experience in hospital as a child?’ he asked gently.

      She didn’t even make an acid comment about his trying to psycho-analyse her, which told him her fear was very real. ‘I can’t be found until the divorce is final and made public. If it happens, he’ll find a way to blackmail me into coming back to the show. The restraining order won’t stop him. He’s been losing ratings hand over fist since I left. The public now knows it was me that gave him his empathy, and that I was feeding him the answers people needed to hear. I know him—he’ll be desperate by now. But he’ll have a plan to win me back into his life. He’s addicted to fame, and he’ll do whatever it takes to make me come back.’

      Now, at last, Armand got it. Really, he didn’t have much choice but to understand. She was babbling her secrets in fear, secrets she’d kept chained inside her heart like a hated treasure. They’d been housemates nearly ten days now, and all this time he’d tried to get her to talk, with no success.

      His arousal faded in a fit of protectiveness like a lightning-bolt, all but knocking him off his feet. His suspicions had been confirmed in a flash, and he wanted to knock Rinaldi flying—flying right off the damned planet.

      Stop it. You’ll terrify her. He knew that from bitter experience. He’d seen the terror on his sisters’ faces on the rare times he’d been allowed home from boarding school and his father had walked in with that look on his face …

      Aching to ask if she’d contacted her parents in the past few weeks, he forced himself not to reply to her secrets at all—she’d only hate him later if he did. Instead he asked, softly but in clear challenge, ‘What would you say to a patient that refused to try a new experience before even attempting it?’

      At that, she stilled. Slowly, she mumbled something he couldn’t hear.

      ‘I have you safe with me,’ he went on, still gentle, persuasive. ‘I won’t let go.’

      She gave a little, almost plaintive sigh. It was answer enough, since he could feel her disbelief beating from her, as strong and sure as her racing pulse.

      Armand wondered if anyone had ever stayed the distance, not with her but for her. Had anyone ever put Rachel’s needs first?

      ‘Look around, Rachel,’ he murmured to distract her. ‘See how beautiful it all is.’

      A small quiver ran through her. ‘I can’t. My eyes …’

      With tenderness foreign to him until now, Armand lifted her face from the terrified contemplation of the snowboard and saw her goggles were totally fogged. ‘Are you so cold?’ Or worse, he thought to himself, had he frightened her into crying and not even noticed?

      ‘I’m from Texas. It reaches freezing there in winter.’

      Her semi-defiant tone, and the way she pulled her face from his hold, filled him with relief. She was a fighter, all right. ‘And how long has it been since you visited in winter? LA’s climate hasn’t reached freezing probably since the last ice age.’

      She turned away. ‘Good point,’ she said lightly enough, but something in her voice disturbed him.

      ‘How long has it been since you visited Texas at all?’ he asked quietly.

      For a moment she neither moved nor spoke. Then she said, ‘How long has it been since you visited your father’s grave?’

      She’d hit him with the carelessness of a drive-by shot into a crowd. How could he possibly have expected a wound so sudden and deep from a woman that until now had seemed as empathetic as she was helpless? And how could she possibly know?

      Answer: she couldn’t. Just as he didn’t know anything about her. They were two people forced into a strange proximity, knowing only what they saw—strangers in the night, each giving the other something they needed. And that was how it had to stay. He should have known the ‘defenceless kitten’ thing was only part of her woman’s repertoire. Her segment of the Dr Pete show proved she had far too much perception for any man’s comfort.

      ‘Interesting question,’ he said, his voice calm and steady, not even a tremor to betray him. ‘Now, shall we continue, or are you going to let your fears win … Dr Rinaldi?’

      Her back tightened, notch by notch, even in the heavy ski jacket. ‘My name,’ she said with slow, deliberate disgust, ‘Is Chase.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t certain which of your current names to call you,’ he retorted in the blandest tone he’d ever used, injury added to insult. ‘So has Rinaldi served its purpose? You can throw it away without regret?’

      She wobbled on the snowboard as she turned fully back to him, hanging onto him for balance. Yet it didn’t seem funny at all. ‘The name Rhonda Braithwaite got me out of LA without his PI finding me. From Paris, I changed to Rachel Chase.’ With a heavily gloved hand she pulled the goggles from her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, watery, but she faced him from her ten-inch disadvantage with quaint dignity. ‘If you’d ever had your wrist and ribs broken by someone you’d once trusted and loved, you’d know why I want to leave his name behind me—why it hurts so much to hear it. But believe me when I say I will never forget, no matter how many names I take on, or how many times I reinvent myself.’

      It СКАЧАТЬ