Stranded With Her Rescuer. Nikki Logan

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СКАЧАТЬ to ask you to leave,’ he blurted.

      How embarrassing that her first response was to misunderstand him. She frowned and glanced back at the dogs. ‘The yard? I thought it would be okay to—’

      ‘Pokhara, Kitty. It’s time for you to go.’

      She blinked at him. ‘No, it’s not. I have nearly three weeks before it’s time.’

      And, boy, she was not looking forward to that day.

      ‘Marcella shouldn’t have invited you to stay the whole month. It’s…’ He gazed back at the mountains. ‘It’s too much, Kitty. Too long.’

      An awful kind of humiliation washed through her. That she had presumed he would be okay with it just because his wife was. Or seemed to be.

      ‘You said I was welcome,’ she breathed.

      In his own words, with no one twisting his arm.

      ‘That’s what you do say, in this situation, isn’t it?’

      When someone makes a horrendous presumption, did he mean?

      ‘So…’ Her head spun, and not just from the altitude. ‘Was I never welcome or am I no longer welcome?’

      She didn’t really want to know the answer, either way, but she absolutely wanted to hear it from his lips.

      ‘You’ve finished filming our rescue operation…’

      Part of the heat that rushed up her throat was because, to an extent, Will was right. She’d finished the main filming for the dogs, she’d been enjoying Pokhara and getting a feel for the country since then. Imagining what a fantastic piece it was going to make, visually.

      And spinning out her time with him.

      ‘And we’ve got too much going on—’

      ‘No, you don’t.’

      Marcella barely painted, never went out if she could avoid it; she lurked around their property alternating between long bouts of flat melancholy and excited bursts of energy. Meanwhile, Will trained every day but he had a comfortable routine that didn’t wear the dogs out. And only two emergency calls in the ten days she’d been here.

      His lips thinned as he stared at her. The first time he’d made actual eye contact.

      ‘Kitty—’

      ‘I pick up after myself. I went to the market on Monday to save Marcella the trouble.’ And—PS—paid for a carload of supplies. ‘So what’s the real issue?’

      Of course, a dignified person wouldn’t ask. A dignified person would just accept that things had changed and head off to start packing. Smiling, thanking them and giving her hosts a modest gift when she went. But there was nothing dignified about the panic that Kitty was starting to feel at Will’s decree, and not just because of the humiliation. Sometime between arriving and now, she’d realised that she was the happiest she’d ever been in Pokhara. Having that taken away was terrifying.

      And the thought of never seeing Will again only compounded it.

      ‘You can’t really want to stay,’ he urged. ‘Knowing we don’t want you here.’

      Something told her that ‘we’ was actually ‘I’, because his wife had clung to her since the day she’d arrived, and Marcella was too Southern and too well brought up to renege on a promise.

      ‘No,’ she snorted. ‘I don’t. But I’m not leaving without knowing what I did to get myself banished.’

      She had a sneaking suspicion, actually, and a whole new flood of shame went on standby, ready for his answer.

      For the first time, he softened, and it was so much worse than the hardened exterior he’d presented up until now. Because it was Will, not this icy doppelgänger.

      ‘You must know, Kit. You’re doing it right now.’

      She lost her grip on the humiliation and it flooded her face. For ten days she’d worked so hard to keep a lid on her inappropriate feelings. To pretend the emotions didn’t exist. But they had a habit of leaking out when she was with him. Any time she wasn’t totally vigilant. Talking, laughing.

      Or just standing very close, like this… Peering up at him.

      ‘I…’

      Really, what could she say? She knew she was feeling it, and she knew what she was feeling. She would be naïve to imagine she wasn’t showing that at all, but Will hadn’t let on before, or objected to the conversations, the shared space, the accidental body contact passing on the stairs.

      She’d even begun to think he might have enjoyed it. Just a little bit.

      Obviously not.

      ‘It’s okay, Kitty, I get it. We’ve been spending a lot of time together—’

      Her heart hammered.

      She wasn’t about to be condescended to like a teenager. If he’d picked up on her feelings, why had he indulged them? Why not just shut them right down?

      Shame ached through her whole body.

      This was him shutting them down.

      ‘I just think it would be better for everyone if you headed off to do your own thing,’ he said.

      Get the heck off his mountain, he meant.

      ‘We were friends,’ she said, numb and flat. Too hurt and too confused to even put any energy behind the accusation.

      His eyes darkened and swung away from her. ‘You must want to see the rest of Nepal.’

      No, not really. She’d been happy here, happier than any other time in her life. It was this mountain she loved, not just any Nepalese mountain. This town. This man.

      That was why she had to go.

      She could not love Will Margrave, and he certainly couldn’t love her, even if he wanted to, which—judging by the enormous tension in his body—he did not.

      ‘I’m married, Kitty.’

      Yes, to the woman who’d invited her into their home. Was this how she’d repaid Marcella’s kindness? By making her husband uncomfortable enough to ask her to leave?

      She dropped her eyes to the dark, rich earth. She’d caused this. She had to be the one to fix it.

      ‘Okay,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll go.’

      She stumbled away from Will without raising her eyes again. And she didn’t look at him as she wrestled her stuffed backpack down the stairs, or as she hugged a weeping Marcella, or as she closed the door of the aging taxi behind her.

      In fact, she didn’t raise her gaze until she was safely away from that Pokhara hillside, just in case he saw something there she would never recover from. Something worse СКАЧАТЬ