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'Stayed?' She stared at him blankly. 'With you, do you mean?'
'No, with the village postman,' he returned drily. 'Of course with me. Who else?'
She could think of at least a hundred people she would prefer to stay with rather than Quinn, and what would people think? She spoke the last out loud as she said, 'I couldn't possibly, Quinn. People would assume…'
'Yes?' He surveyed her over the rim of his mug, his black eyes glittering. 'What would people assume?'
'That we were, well, sleeping together,' she said uneasily.
'Would that be so terrible?' he murmured cryptically. 'We are supposed to be in a relationship, don't forget.'
Right, she had had just about enough of this, Candy thought militantly. The cheek of the man was colossal. 'But we aren't, are we?' she bit back tightly. 'And in spite of this modern age in which we live I don't particularly want my reputation to be—' She stopped abruptly.
'What?' he asked with genuine bewilderment.
'Sullied.'
'Sullied?' He was eyeing her now as though she was mad. 'What on earth are you talking about, Candy? People don't care a jot about that sort of thing these days.'
'I do.' She had gone very white but she was looking straight into his irritable face. 'I do, Quinn.'
'I don't believe I am hearing this,' he rasped exasperatedly. 'You'll be telling me next you don't believe in sex before marriage!' And then, at the look on her face, 'Good grief, you don't, do you?'
To hide her acute embarrassment and the surge of pain sweeping through her Candy gla
red at him, her eyes stormy and dark as she spat, 'What I believe and don't believe is nothing at all to do with you.'
'I disagree.'
'Tough!'
'Now look here, Candy—'
And then she knew she was going to lose it, big time. It was the superior look on his handsome face, the almost condescending stance he was taking. It was too much for Candy's over-sensitised nerves.
'You have no idea—no idea at all, do you?' she bit out with savage fury. 'I had to live with the results of what an immoral lifestyle can do to someone.'
'Immoral?' He stiffened, his face darkening. 'I'm not talking about immorality for crying out loud.'
'That all depends on how you look at it,' she hissed furiously. 'My grandmother slept with a whole string of boyfriends before she married my grandfather, and then they had only been together for a short while before she ran off to Canada with his best friend when she realised she had fallen pregnant with the other man's child—my mother. He stayed around for a few months but he was soon gone, and then it was open house. Any man, any time! When Xavier was born my grandmother didn't have a clue who the father was and I don't think she even cared either. It was my mother who brought him up, and then when she was fourteen some drunken pig my grandmother had brought back to the house raped her. She died nine months later, bringing me into the world.'
'Candy, stop this.' Quinn was appalled; not by what she was revealing but by the look of raw pain on her face.
'Our name was notorious in the town where we lived.' Candy knew she ought to stop, but no power on earth could have prevented her from spilling it all. 'I was always known as the granddaughter of the Grey woman, even after Xavier had made his first million and moved us to the sort of place he had only dreamt of as a child living in dirt and squalor. Give a dog a bad name and it's kinder to hang him. That's what I learnt.'
'Not all people are like that, Candy.'
'I made up my mind as a teenager, when the first boyfriend to take me out groped me in the back of his car thinking I was like my grandmother, that I would never let any man treat me like that again,' Candy raged. 'He got nasty when I said no, and he said bad things, awful things, about my mother too. No one believed she had been raped, or if they did it was the general opinion she must have asked for it, being my grandmother's daughter.'
'But your fiancé wasn't like that, surely?' Quinn asked quietly. He wanted to go and comfort her, to take her in his arms and soothe the desperate pain and anguish, but he knew it would be the wrong time for any physical contact And he was experiencing his own emotional upheaval too. It bothered him more than he would have thought possible that she had been hurt like this.
'Harper?' It was so bitter it made him flinch. 'Oh, Harper was a sweetheart all right. He never put a foot wrong—or a hand,' she added with acidic sarcasm. 'He respected me; he wanted to cherish and look after me; he wanted me for his wife. What he really wanted was a free meal ticket for the rest of his life! He knew Xavier thought the world of me and it was common knowledge, before Xavier met Essie, that he was against marriage. Harper thought I would get it all one day.'
'But he didn't see why he should miss out until our wedding night and so he played around, often, but he got caught with one of his affairs—the woman got pregnant That was the news he gave me the night of the crash, and it was through shouting at me, because I wouldn't go back on my decision that we were finished, that he didn't notice the lorry that had jackknifed across the road until it was too late. He swerved, went off the road, and the rest—as they say—is history.'
Quinn swore, softly but with such intensity that it jerked Candy out of the near hysteria into trembling silence.
'I'm sorry, Candy.' His voice was deep and sincere and carried a pain all of its own. 'I'm sorry you met such a low-down rat when you were too young to recognise him for what he was, and I'm sorry he broke your heart. But don't let him break your inner strength.'
