Loving Our Heroes. Jessica Hart
I don’t suppose we do,’ he agreed, his voice rather more curt than he had intended.
And they didn’t. Tilly was right. They had absolutely nothing in common.
It hadn’t taken Campbell nearly as long as he had expected to adjust to civilian life. He had always been too much of a maverick to fit that comfortably into naval life, even within an elite unit. An unorthodox approach and a relentless drive to succeed at whatever cost came into their own on special operations, but were less of an advantage in the day-to-day routine.
He hadn’t regretted leaving all that behind. Lisa hadn’t intended to change his life for the better when she’d walked out, but he was grateful to her in an odd way for making him so determined to prove that he could make twice as much money as her new husband that he had gone into business. It had turned out that he was made for the ruthless cut and thrust of corporate life. Campbell didn’t do emotions, or talking or any of the things women thought were so important, but he knew how to make money, and that was what counted.
When it came down to it, Campbell believed that everybody was motivated by money at some level. Tilly wouldn’t agree, he was sure. That was another thing they didn’t have in common.
‘We just have to get along for a fortnight with nothing in common,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be gone.’
Thanks for the reminder, Tilly thought, piqued in spite of herself. It was all very well deciding not to get involved with him, but quite another thing to be hit over the head with the fact that he was planning to leave the country soon. She had a nasty feeling he had done it to make sure that she got the message that he wasn’t available. Why didn’t he just hang up a sign saying ‘don’t bother’?
Not that she had any intention of letting him know that she had even considered the possibility of getting involved. That really would make him laugh.
‘Of course, you’re moving to the States, aren’t you?’ Tilly was Ms Cucumber Cool as she carried the teapot over and found two mugs. She could do couldn’t-care-less as well as anyone, even Campbell Sanderson. ‘Where exactly are you going?’
‘New York.’
‘Is that where your ex-wife lives now?’
Campbell looked at her, startled. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, you said she lived in the States, and you don’t seem the kind of man who lets go easily. I wondered if you were going there because you wanted to see her.’
‘Not at all,’ he said sharply. ‘It just happens that’s where the head office is.’
Infuriatingly, though, Tilly’s words had made him pause and examine his own motives for the first time. ‘Of course I’ve considered the chance that I might bump into her,’ he went on after a while. ‘New York is a big city, but Lisa’s new husband is in a similar line of business, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that we’ll meet.’
‘Gosh, I hope he’s not more successful than you,’ said Tilly, only half joking, and Campbell smiled grimly.
‘Not any more,’ he said.
CHAPTER SIX
TILLY poured the tea. She could just imagine how Campbell would have been driven to out-perform the man who had taken his wife away from him. It would have hurt anyone, but to a man like Campbell the implication that she had left him for someone more successful must have been an extra dose of salt in the wound.
‘What will it be like, seeing her again?’ she asked.
He shrugged, and she rolled her eyes as she pushed a mug across the table towards him.
‘Come on, you must have thought about it! I’ve spent the last eighteen months practising what I would say to Olivier if I ever saw him again—not that I’ve had the chance to say any of it,’ she added ruefully. ‘It’s probably just as well.’
‘Olivier?’
‘The beat of my heart for two years,’ she said, blue eyes bleak with memory.
And presumably the man who had taught her that the absence of children didn’t make a break-up any easier. Campbell was remembering now.
‘Ah,’ he said. Were commiserations in order? These kinds of emotional conversations always made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t understand why women insisted on talking about this kind of stuff the whole time.
‘What would you have said?’ he asked at last, opting for a practical approach.
Tilly thought about it. ‘It depended on the mood I was in,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I was determined to make him realise just what he’d lost, so I was going to pretend to have a fabulous new lover and carry on as if I’d almost forgotten him. At other times I wanted him to acknowledge how he’d hurt me, but either way I would be very cool and calm.
‘In reality, of course, if I had bumped into Olivier, I would have burst into tears and begged him to come back, and then none of my friends would ever have spoken to me again!’
Campbell studied her across the table. Her generous mouth was twisted in a self-deprecating smile, but the blue eyes were wistful, and he wondered what Olivier was like. Campbell didn’t like the idea of him at all. He didn’t like the idea of anyone hurting Tilly.
She wasn’t beautiful, not like Lisa. Her features were too quirky for that, but there was something alluring about her all the same, he realised. She had warmth and wit and a charm that Lisa had never had, and in a strange way she was sexier, too.
The thought was startling, but Campbell decided it was true. Lisa was slender and elegant and perfect, but she was a woman most men admired from a distance. Tilly was quite different—all soft curves and luminous skin—and there was something irresistibly touchable about her. Any man’s fingers would be twitching with the need to reach out and slide through her hair, to smooth and stroke and explore that warm, lush body, and then he would want to take that mouth and see if it tasted and felt as good as it looked…
Alarmed by how quickly his thoughts had drifted out of control, Campbell slammed on the brakes and gave himself a mental slap.
He drank his tea, feeling jarred and vaguely uneasy. Tilly was the one with the vivid imagination, not him. Campbell Sanderson was famous for his coolness under pressure, for his single-minded pursuit of a goal. He wasn’t a man who let himself get distracted, especially not by a woman. The last time that had happened, he had ended up married to Lisa, and look what a mistake that had been! No way was he doing that again.
‘If you cried, there really would have been no chance of getting him back,’ he said caustically to make up for the fact that while his mind was firmly back under control, his hands were taking rather longer to catch up and were still tingling at the idea of touching Tilly.
Scowling at the sign of weakness, Campbell gripped them firmly around the mug.
‘I know.’ Tilly sighed. ‘What is it with men? Look at you. You’re happy to jump off a cliff but show you a woman in tears and I bet you’d run a mile!’
This was unfortunately so true that Campbell could only glower. ‘I like dealing with facts,’ he said. ‘Emotions are messy.’
Tilly stared at him and shook her head. ‘How on earth did you ever manage to get married in the first place? You must have had to succumb to a teensy little emotion then, surely!’
‘The attraction between us was a physical thing. It was never about hearts and flowers and all that stuff. Lisa’s not like that. She’s like me in lots of ways. She knows what she wants, and she goes after it, and she gets it. And for a time,’ he said, ‘she wanted me.’
Campbell paused, remembering. ‘It’s hard to resist a woman who looks the way she does. You’d have to see her to understand,’ he said, catching Tilly’s sceptical expression.
‘I