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Marco glanced back at her, eyes narrowed. Was she so obvious? Could he see the torment and confusion in her eyes, her face? ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he asked, and she nodded. ‘You don’t...you don’t regret this?’
‘No,’ she whispered, because that much was true. Mostly.
He stretched out next to her, unabashedly naked, and tucked a few stray tendrils of hair behind her ear as he studied her face. ‘Then why do you look like you’re about to cry?’
‘Because it’s so much.’ The words burst from her and a few rogue tears trickled down her cheeks. She batted at them impatiently. ‘I wasn’t expecting to feel so much. And I don’t mean physically,’ she clarified quickly. ‘I’m not talking about the pleasure.’
‘I hope you felt that, too.’
‘You know I did,’ she said, and she sounded almost cross.
Marco frowned, shaking his head. ‘Then what?’
Did he not get it? But then maybe Marco hadn’t felt the emotional tidal wave that had pulled her under. Maybe she was the only one who felt so exposed, so vulnerable and needy. She felt as if Marco had stripped away everything she’d had to protect herself and left her reeling, wondering how to recover. Wondering how she would ever live without him even as terror clutched her at the thought of living with him. At being this vulnerable again, ever.
‘I need to use the bathroom,’ she muttered and wriggled away from him, the duvet snagging about her body.
Marco reached for her arm. ‘Sierra—’
‘Please, Marco.’ She finally freed herself from the bedcovers and hurried towards the en suite bathroom. ‘Please just let me be.’
* * *
Marco watched Sierra barricade herself in the bathroom, a frown deepening on his face. What the hell had happened? He’d had the most incredible sexual experience of his life, and he’d reduced his lover almost to tears. It didn’t make sense. He knew, despite the initial pain, she’d enjoyed herself. He’d felt her climax reverberate through his own body. And he knew she’d been touched emotionally, too, but then so had he. Sex had never felt so important as it did right then.
But Sierra seemed to think that was a bad thing. She’d been tearful, cross, even angry—and why? Because she didn’t want to feel those things? She didn’t want to have that kind of connection with him?
The answer seemed all too obvious. Swearing under his breath, Marco rose from the bed and reached for his boxers. The intimacy they’d wrapped themselves in moments before was already unspooling, loose threads they might never knit back together, which was just as well. This was a fling, nothing more. No matter what he’d felt moments before.
And yet it still stung that Sierra was withdrawing from him. The possibility that she might regret what had happened filled him with a bitter fury he remembered too well. This time he’d be the one to walk away first. He’d make sure of it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BY THE TIME Sierra emerged from the bathroom twenty minutes later she’d managed to restore her composure. Cloak herself in numbness, just like she used to during her father’s rages. Strange that she was using the same coping mechanisms now, after the most intimate and frankly wonderful experience of her life, as she had then.
She unlocked the door to the bathroom and stepped out, thankfully swathed in an enormous terry-cloth dressing gown. Marco was sitting in bed, his back propped against the pillows, his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms folded. His face was unsmiling.
‘Better?’
‘Yes.’ She tucked her hair behind her ears and came gingerly towards the bed. What was the fling protocol now? Should she thank him for a lovely time and beat it to her own bedroom? That was what she wanted to do. She wanted an out, even if the prospect filled her with an almost unbearable loneliness.
Marco arched an eyebrow. ‘You’re not actually thinking of leaving my bed, are you?’
It disconcerted her that he could guess her thought processes so easily. ‘I thought... I thought maybe it was best.’
‘Best? How so?’ There was a dangerous silky tone to Marco’s voice that she remembered from when she’d first seen him at the lawyer’s office, and then at the villa. It made alarm prickle along her spine and she took an instinctive step backwards.
‘You no doubt want your space, as do I. We know what this is, Marco.’
‘What is it?’
‘A fling.’ She forced herself to say the words, to state it plainly. ‘We’re agreed on that. Nothing’s changed.’ Even if she felt as if her whole world had shattered when Marco had made love to her.
