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He came back within minutes, his face still grim.
‘I’ve told your father that I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but for your mother’s sake we both think it best that you stay here this evening. He’s going to tell your mother that I invited you back here for supper and that you accepted. If you go back looking the way you do now, you’re likely to cause her to have a relapse.’ He crouched down in front of her, expertly sliding the zips down on her boots and tugging them off before she could even think of a protest. The heat of his palm as he held the arch of her foot, his long fingers curling round her ankle, made her heart thud at twice its normal rate.
‘You’ll have to take these off, I’m afraid,’ he told her, standing up and gesturing to her tight jeans.
Her face froze, and she knew suddenly and intensely that there was no way she could do what he asked. It was all very well to tell herself that he was a doctor, but he was also Dominic. She knew that she was being silly; after all, he had seen her growing up, a skinny, flat-chested, adoring child, but she wasn’t that child any more, and for some reason she didn’t want him looking at her body with that same clinical detachment with which he had studied it before.
‘I’m perfectly all right.’ To prove it she swung her legs to the floor and stood up, taking a few tentative steps, before she started to shiver and had to subside back on to the settee.
Far from being relieved, Dominic’s mouth had compressed into a savagely inimical line.
‘What is it, Christy?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Surely you aren’t frightened of my taking advantage of the situation?’
The explicit way he let his glance linger on her body left her in no doubt as to what he meant. Even though she tried to suppress it, there was nothing she could do to control the hot surge of colour sweeping up under her skin.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’ Her voice sounded unfamiliar and thick, almost as though it was choked with tears. She turned her head away from him and added huskily, ‘I know quite well that you’re the last person who’d ever want me, Dominic.’
She couldn’t look at him, but even without doing so she was intensely conscious of the stunned quality of his stillness. In the end she had to look at him, her eyes meeting the brilliant, disbelieving glitter of his in shocked astonishment.
‘Is that what you honestly think?’ He dropped down on to his heels and slid his hand into her hair so that she couldn’t turn away from him. His voice sounded oddly rusty. ‘Is it, Christy?’
She wanted to turn away from him, but there was no way she could. Instinctively she moistened her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, and then froze when she saw the way his eyes darkened and followed the movement.
‘You’ve been pushing me away ever since you came home. I thought it was because…’ he broke off and shook his head. The firelight danced on the exposed nape of his neck, and she had an aching desire to reach out and stroke it.
‘Christy, what’s gone wrong between us? What…?’
She couldn’t let herself listen to the husky seduction of his voice. He had hurt her once, and so badly that she had never really recovered. She had to remember that. She twisted beneath his hand and instantly he released her, his frown deepening.
‘I don’t know what game you think you’re playing with me, Dominic,’ she told him. ‘You humiliated me once,’ she burst out bitterly. ‘I’m not going to let that happen again. It’s all very well for you to act as though it never happened…as though you never virtually called me a little tramp…’ Her colour was high now, her eyes glittering with unshed tears, her mind sliding back to the past, and her body shivering with pain.
Her voice broke, and because she knew she wasn’t far from tears, she curled her hands into tight fists, willing herself not to give way, her face turned into the darkness of the settee and away from Dominic’s probing scrutiny.
She heard him get up, and felt him standing in front of the fire, blocking off its warmth. He moved, almost restlessly, and then she heard him say, ‘I’d no idea you felt like this. God in heaven, you can’t be holding that against me, Christy! What was I supposed to do?’ She felt him coming towards her and cringed back, but he didn’t touch her, his voice roughening and coming from somewhere above. ‘You were a child!’ His voice was almost tortured now.
She struggled to sit up and face him, as he stood looking down at her.
‘I was seventeen,’ she told him bitterly.
‘Like I said, just a child.’
She couldn’t avoid the tight-lipped look he gave her or her shock as he suddenly swore savagely and volubly—something she had never before heard him do. ‘A very provocative child, maybe,’ he added tersely, ‘but a child none the less.’
She was the one who should have been bitterly angry, not him. She couldn’t understand that anger, and something of her lack of understanding must have shown in her face, for suddenly he grasped her shoulders and pulled her round into the firelight.
‘You may be eight years older, Christy, but that doesn’t seem to have made you any more mature. You’ve held on to your bitterness and resentment like a child instead of trying to see my point of view. What the devil was I supposed to do? What would you think of me right now, if I’d taken you up on your offer?’
It was something she had never thought of, and her eyes widened as he forced her to face up to the reality of what had happened between them. Now, as a woman of twenty-five herself, what would she think of a man of her own age who made love to an ignorant, adoring adolescent?
She shuddered as the realisation of what he had saved her from shot through her, falling back against the back of the settee like a jointless doll as he abruptly released her.
‘You never even tried to see it from my point of view, did you?’ He was pacing the floor now, his face in the shadows. ‘My God, to think you’ve carried this resentment against me around with you all these years! I know I hurt and upset you, Christy, but I had to…can’t you see that? I was so damned scared for you. You were such an innocent. Hell, you hadn’t the faintest idea.’ He broke off and swore again. ‘I’m not in the right frame of mind to go into this right now. I’d no idea you felt like this.’ He shook his head heavily like a man coming out of deep water for much-needed air.
Why did he keep on stressing that? It couldn’t possibly matter to him what she thought.
Christy didn’t realise she had spoken out loud until he caught hold of her again hauling her to her feet in front of him.
‘Of course it damn well matters!’ He was practically shouting at her. ‘Do you believe for one moment that if you walked in here now and offered yourself to me like that I’d even think of turning you down?’
Shock crystallised inside her. She searched his eyes and face for signs of mockery and saw only anguish and…and desire…
It was like being hit in the chest with an iron first. Dominic wanted her.
She opened her mouth and closed it again, and then heard him say in a thick, unfamiliar tone, through a haze of cotton-woolly disbelief, ‘Do that again,’ and her mouth opened instinctively to absorb the heat of his as he pulled her against him and kissed her with a famished kind of hunger that was so erotic that she had no defences against it.
Against her mouth she heard him mutter, ‘You can’t know how much I’ve wanted to do this. Even then, God help me. I want you, Christy. I want to take you upstairs to bed with me and make love to you until…’
It was his voice that brought her back to reality, making her pull away from him in panicky shock.
‘What is it?’
She pushed him away, shaking her head, and as s
he did so, she saw him frown and look at her coat.
‘I see. You’re thinking of him. Is that it?’ His mouth hardened and she saw the bitterness in his eyes. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. I forgot that you were committed…elsewhere.’
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to tell him how wrong he was, but some last shred of sanity luckily prevented her. He wanted her, he had said, and God alone knew she had wanted him. The moment his mouth touched hers she had known how much she ached and yearned for him; eight years of telling herself she had changed meant nothing. She had known the moment she felt his mouth against her own that she still loved him, but this time it was a woman’s love, not a child’s.
Half of her couldn’t believe it—didn’t want to believe it, but it was true none the less. She had to fight to keep back the hysterical laughter building up inside her.
‘I’d better take you home.’
She didn’t protest, simply allowing him to lead her to the front door, her mouth still tingling from the pressure of his kiss. Her body ached in a way that was far more intense than any mild desire that David had ever aroused in her.
How ironic fate could be. Almost she could laugh at the ridiculous folly of Dominic thinking that David was her lover, but just as long as he continued to think that, she was safe. If he ever discovered that no man had ever touched her, that no man had ever aroused the need in her that he could arouse, then she was lost. Lost because he would take her simply out of his own need and desire for her, and that was something she didn’t think she could bear. Once, she had thought no further than the dazzling pleasure of having him make love to her, but then she had been a child convinced that somehow once he had made love to her, he must love her. Now she was adult and knew better. Dominic had said nothing about loving her, and she didn’t think she could endure giving herself to him knowing that while he was her whole life, she was nothing more to him than a woman whom he wanted.
