Mana: Before The Rise 227 Seven Year Itch 6

Rachel gave him a devastated look, looking at her face he frowned, glanced sharply at Bonnie, who was still hanging around in her bathrobe, which had probably been deliberate, marking time with his Wife.

Rachel pushed herself out of the deeply cus.h.i.+oned chintz sofa and picked up her cup and saucer from the table, containing and air of 'not pleased to clatter them together.'

"It's only instant coffee, Lucas," she said, her voice working but seeming to come from a long distance. "No trouble to get you one." She felt him scanning her face with urgent intensity, but it didn't induce her to meet his gaze. She made it seem almost as if 'She didn't want to see anything.'

Lucas started to reach out a hand to touch her as she pa.s.sed him by to go to the kitchen. She flinched, Her recoil caused him to stiffen. Rachel didn't care what tension she purposely left behind.

"You'd better get moving, Ms.Knight,' Lucas said curtly. 'The breakfast you ordered will be here in fifteen minutes."

"I have my clothes laid out. It won't take me long to throw them on and do my hair," she answered, her voice a sultry lilt, but hurriedly. She was absorbed in Rowen realistic acting that she almost forgot what she was supposed to do next.

"Do it then." It was an order.

The double clicks of two doors shutting, Bonnie's went into her room and couldn't help but both praise and fear her friends acting, the women look and carried the air of someone who had just found out her husband cheated on her. She was not one to mess with and surely the 'couple' at Waverley house is in for terror. Bonnie was lucky she was on her good side, otherwise she s.h.i.+vered to at the thought if she wasn't.

Lucas left to move across the hall to the kitchen.

Rachel already had the electric kettle switched on and was tipping a sachet of coffee into a cup for him. She made it look as if there were tears burning behind her eyes.

"Did Ms. Knight say anything to upset you?" His voice came from the doorway. A direct question. loaded with concern.

"No," she replied, reaching for the sachets of sugar.

"But you are upset," Lucas persisted, clearly not liking the vibrations he was picking up.

"I feel...very tired all of a sudden," she answered. "My bones are aching,' she added for good measure. 'I think I'll have a long soak in the bath now you've both finished in there."

The kettle whistled. She poured boiling water over the coffee granules and stirred. She heard Lucas start forward to get the cup and quickly picked it up to meet him with it. She needed to hold something between them. Her body was trembling with a terrible sense of vulnerability. These meticulous details are all seen by Lucas.

"Here you are." She thrust it at him, making a gla.s.sy-eyed smile.

"Rowen." He scanned her anxiously. "Is it only jet lag?"

"I'm sure a bath is what I need to freshen me up and iron out the kinks." She moved past him.

"Rowen, if something's worrying you...' His unease was palpable. He didn't want to let her go. After all, he wouldn't want all the good work he'd put in on the limo wasted.

"I'll be fine." The door to the bathroom was right in front of her. "My turn now," she tossed brightly in his direction, not waiting for another word from him before opening the door, barging in, closing and locking it behind her. She ran for the taps to the bath, her expression did a 180 and she seemed satisfied with herself.

Lucas stared at the bathroom door, knowing he had been shut out. The door made it physical fact, but the mental and emotional shutting out had already been in process. He'd seen it, felt it, and Rowen's denial of anything wrong simply didn't wash. It was another defense to keep him away from her.

The shock of it was how much he cared.

A week ago he might not have even noticed her shutting him out. If it had impinged on his consciousness, he would have shrugged it off as a mood that would pa.s.s, nothing to concern him. He'd become highly practiced at not letting much touch him. He'd told himself it was easier than working himself into a lather over things that weren't about to change anyway.

But they had changed. And it was suddenly terribly important not to have doors shut between them. They'd been opened, and he wanted to keep them open. He cared about that one h.e.l.l of a lot.

The caring was thumping through his heart so strongly, his whole chest felt like a punching bag. His stomach was screwed into knots, and his mind was pounding. Why this sudden, wholesale rejection of him? What had triggered it? She'd flinched away from him. It was such an extreme reaction, making him feel like a piece of slime she couldn't bear to brush against.

A deep cold seeped into his bones. Ms. Knight, he thought, in spite of Rowen's denials. It had been Ms.Knight and Waverley House that had started them along this road of change. He carried the coffee Rowen had thrust at him into the kitchen, not wanting it anymore. It was tainted with negative loading. The memory of how different she'd been earlier made the change so much more poignant.

The long flight, had him thinking about things while his wife was having a wonderful time in a conversation with another. It made him jealous, but, it also made him realize that they had had never talked like that. He had always cut off their conversations with curt replies. The times she tried to talk, the times she tried to get him to go out on a few dates, the times she tried to get them alone for nightly activities.

He blocked those all off and now the awareness of having a second chance at this marriage was very strong. He wanted it to work more, he realized, than he wanted anything else in his life. He needed to know what was happening with Rowen so he could correct it. He recollected being preoccupied with business issues as he'd stepped into the drawing room. Nothing had hit him straight away. Rowen and Ms.Knight had appeared to be in conversation.

He tried to reconstruct the scene in his mind. His wife, sitting on the sofa, a glossy magazine open on her lap, Ms. Knight, still wrapped in one of the complimentary bathrobes after her shower, standing by an armchair on the other side of the coffee table.

The look she'd turned on him...

Even in memory it gave him the weird sense he'd changed from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde right before her eyes. Instead of seeing him, she seemed to see a stranger she didn't know, didn't trust and didn't want to be near, someone it was safer to evade. Which was precisely what she had done, escaping into the bathroom.

Lucas gritted his teeth in frustration