“I see.” She really did and she was hurt in more ways than she could count.
“From Barbados,” he said, hurrying on to fill the silence growing between them, “we’ll head to London. Maybe visit your sister. Or even better, we’ll go to Venice—I’ll send for your sister, make all the arrangements. You can have her with you as long as you want.”
“How nice for me—you can arrange Kelly’s life, too.”
He frowned briefly, shoved one hand through his hair and said, “If you don’t want to go to Venice, we’ll go somewhere else.”
“Oh,” Keira said, walking past him now, into the kitchen where she picked up her coffee cup. “I get a vote?”
“What?”
She took a breath, hoping to steady the swell of fury rising up to choke her. “And if I tell you I can’t afford to take off work? To go and travel around the world with you?”
“I didn’t ask you to pay for anything,” he said, frowning. “I’ve taken care of it. I told you that.”
“Right. Silly me. So you decide what I do and where I go. You pay for me and I’m supposed to just be grateful to be taken care of.”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
He was looking at her like she was speaking Greek. Could he really be this clueless?
“You really don’t see it, do you?” Keira felt like her head was exploding. How could she ever make him see who she really was if he was convinced his bank account would fix any problem?
“I’m offering you the travel and excitement you always dreamed of and that makes me a bad guy?”
“You didn’t even ask me, Nathan. You just order me here or there, and I’m supposed to come trotting along behind you fluttering with gratitude?”
“I’m confused,” he admitted and stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “You said you wanted to travel.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“You want to visit your sister. See Venice.”
“All correct,” she admitted, and took a sip of coffee that she didn’t even taste. Heck, she was half amazed that she could force the liquid down past the knot in her throat.
“Then what’s the problem? Why the hell aren’t you happy?” He was shouting now, and that at least made her feel a little better. She’d finally cracked through his wall of blasé.
“Because you told me what I was going to do,” she countered, slapping her cup down onto the counter with enough force to slosh coffee over the edge. “You didn’t ask. You just arranged everything the way you wanted it to be. God, you went to Bill and told him we’d be traveling together. That’s just fabulous.”
“You said you loved me,” he said tightly. “I naturally assumed you would want to be with me.”
Keira choked out a laugh. “And because I love you I would want to be your ‘companion’? How many times have your hotel employees been told to prepare for your current ‘guest’? What number am I in line? Is there a salary that goes with the position? How much does your own private whore make? Am I paid by the hour? Or is my new wardrobe my payment?”
“For God’s sake, that’s not how I meant—”
“You’re unbelievable,” Keira said, striding across the kitchen to slap both hands against his chest. “You go behind my back to arrange my life. Oh, and you don’t even stop there. You think you can arrange my sister’s life—she has a job, you know? And a fiancé. She can’t just entertain me when it’s convenient for you.”
“This is not the way I expected this conversation to go,” he said.
“Well, maybe you should have written out a script for me.”
“Damn it, that’s not what I meant. I thought you’d be happy. I thought you wanted to travel. To see the world. That’s what you said.”
“I said a lot of things. Some of them you obviously ignored. I love my home. I don’t want to leave it forever, and I can’t just walk away from my responsibilities here because you say so.”
He inhaled sharply, deeply, and blew the air out in a long rush of exasperation. Well, now she knew just how he felt. She loved the man and now she knew all too well that he would never love her back.
“I didn’t tell you I loved you so that you would do something for me, Nathan,” she said, and all of her anger drained away in the wash of despair swamping her. “My love doesn’t come with a price tag. You don’t have to throw presents at me to try to even the playing field. I didn’t ask for anything from you. I offered you my love, free and clear. No strings attached.”
“Keira—”
“You know what? I think you should go, Nathan,” she said, moving past him to the front door, locking her knees so that she wouldn’t slump to the floor until long after he left. “You just don’t understand me and you never will.”
He stopped beside her and looked down into her eyes for one brief moment. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t understand you. I offered you everything you ever wanted and you turned it all down.”
“Not everything, Nathan,” she said, and quietly closed the door behind him.
Twelve
K eira smiled and tried to focus on her friend standing in front of her. It wasn’t easy. For a week now she’d been moving in a fog. She couldn’t get Nathan out of her mind and she wondered if she’d spend the rest of her life like this—only half aware of the world going on around her.
She’d had to tell several people that she wasn’t actually leaving with Nathan at the end of the month. And she’d had to put up with their knowing smiles and nods of sympathy for a love affair gone bad. Damn Nathan anyway. By trying to run her life, he’d made it that much more complicated.
“The contractor says he’s ready to start on the clinic next week,” Mike McDonald was saying, and Keira made an effort to concentrate.
“He wants to start before the thaw?”
Mike, an older man with long gray hair that he kept in a neat ponytail, shrugged and said, “He says he wants to start on the inside and then, by the time the snows are gone, his crew will be ready to begin the structural changes.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding as she shifted her gaze to the clinic that was going to become so much more, thanks to Nathan’s contribution and the promise of Hunter Palmer’s legacy. “I’ll tell the town council and you can give the contractor the go ahead.”