Page 41 of Legacy of His Revenge
In due course, he might even jump through all the hoops and prove to be worthy of her trust, but that was something she would never find out unless she gave him a fighting chance.
Matias looked at her and wished that he could see what she was thinking so seriously about. She was staring back at him but her thoughts were somewhere else. Where? Never had the urge been so strong toknowsomeone, completely, utterly and inside out. He had never delved into what the women he dated thought about anything. He had wined and dined them and enjoyed them but digging deep hadn’t been part of the equation. Sophie made him want to dig deep.
‘So...?’ he murmured, with a shuttered expression.
‘So we don’t have to get married...’ Sophie breathed in deep and prayed that she was doing the right thing ‘...but we can live together...’ That was called giving him a chance, giving him an opportunity to prove that he could once more be trusted before she opened up that part of her he knew nothing about.
Matias greeted this with a lot more equanimity than he felt. Live together? It wasn’t the solution he was after, but it would have to do. For now...
* * *
Matias got the call as he was about to leave work.
‘I’m sorry.’ Sophie was obviously moving in a rush. Her voice was tight and panicked. ‘I’m going to have to cancel our dinner date tonight. Something’s come up, I’m afraid.’
‘What’s come up?’ Already heading to his jacket, which was slung over the back of the cream sofa that occupied the adjoining mini suite in his glasshouse office, Matias paused, returned to the desk and grabbed the little box containing the diamond bracelet he had ordered three days previously and had collected that day as a surprise for her.
He had taken to surprising her every so often with something little, something he had seen somewhere that had reminded him of her.
Once, it had been an antique book on culinary art in Victorian times, which he had quite accidentally found while walking to his car after a meeting on the South Bank. The bookshop had been tucked away next to a small art gallery and he had paused to glance at the offerings in painted crates on trestle tables outside.
She had smiled when he’d given it to her and that smile of genuine pleasure had been worth its weight in gold.
Then he had bought her a set of saucepans specially made for the stove in the new house, because he had found one of her house magazines lying on the sofa with the page creased with an advertisement on their lifetime guarantee and special heat-conducting values. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
And again, that had hit the spot.
The diamond bracelet was the most expensive item he had bought thus far and he sincerely hoped that she wouldn’t refuse to accept it. She could dig her heels in and be mulishly stubborn about things that were beyond his comprehension and for reasons he found difficult to fathom.
Matias knew that he was shamelessly directing all his energies into getting what he wanted because the longer he was with her, the more unthinkable it was that she might eventually want to cut short theirliving together to see how it goesstatus and return to the freedom of singledom, free to find her soul mate.
He shoved the box into the inside pocket of his jacket, which he had stuck on without breaking the phone connection.
Her voice, the strained tenor of it, was sending alarm bells ringing in his head. She had been fine when he had seen her the day before. They had met for breakfast because she had gone to help Julie and he had wanted to see her before he headed off to Edinburgh, where he was taking a chance on a small pharmaceutical company that was up for grabs.
‘Where are you,querida?’ he asked, doing his utmost to keep his voice calm and composed.
‘Matias, I really have to go. The taxi is going to be here any minute and I have to get a few things together before I leave. In fact...wait...the taxi’s here.’
‘Taxi? Don’t you dare hang up on me in the middle of this conversation, Sophie! What taxi? Why are you taking a taxi somewhere? What’s wrong with the car? Is it giving you trouble? And where are you going, anyway?’
‘The car is fine. I just thought that, in this instance...’
Her voice faded, as though she had dumped the phone on a table because she needed to do something.
What?
Matias was finding it impossible to hang onto his self-control. She sounded as though she was on the verge of tears and Sophie never cried. She had once told him that when things got tough, and there had been plenty of times in her life when they had, then blubbing never solved anything.
It had been just one more thing he had lodged at the back of his mind, something else that slotted into the complex puzzle that comprised her personality.
And now she was on the verge of tears for reasons she would not identify and she didn’t want to talk to him about it. He had done his damnedest to prove to her that she had been right to take a punt on him. He had not batted an eyelid at the very clear nesting instincts that had emerged when she had begun decorating the house. He had also gone light on her creep of a father in the wake of the company takeover, allowing him to salvage some measure of self-respect by not sending him to prison for being trigger-happy with the pension pot, although Carney was much diminished by the end of proceedings, which had afforded Matias a great deal of satisfaction.
He had even deflected an immediate visit to see his mother, because, while she was recovering nicely, much spurred on by news of a grandchild on the way, he had wanted to protect Sophie from the inevitable pressing questions about marriage. The last thing he’d wanted was to have her take fright at his very forthright mother’s insistence on tradition and start backing away from the arrangement they had in place.
But even with all of this, it was now perfectly clear that there were parts of her that still bore a lasting resentment because of the way their relationship had originally started.
Why else would she be on the verge of tears and yet not want to tell him why?
