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So why was his heart beating with all the frantic irregularity of a man who had just been confronted by a goddess? Yes, she wore a dress and a pair of boots, which emphasised her amazing legs. But it was a very ordinary dress. Nothing special. What was it about her which made him seem to lose a grip on his sanity whenever she was in the vicinity?
Her tongue was sliding over the surface of her bare lips as if she was summoning up the courage to say something and he thought he had never seen her face look so pale and so bleached.
‘What are you doing here, Titus?’
He walked straight past her, his eyes rapidly searching the boxlike accommodation of bedroom and bathroom until he walked into a drab sitting room—relieved to find it empty. But his trembling rage remained.
‘I’ve come for some sort of explanation.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Please don’t insult my intelligence by feigning ignorance, Roxanne. We both know why I’m here. Surely there must have been part of you which had been expecting this?’
Slowly, she nodded, because, yes, she had. Only she’d thought that he might come looking for her sooner—ready to spill out the rage which she could see was contorting his aristocratic features. Yet his anger now seemed almost inconsequential because all she could think was how infuriatingly alive he looked—this most vibrant and powerful of men. His skin was deeply tanned and it made his brilliant grey eyes gleam like moonstones. The aching in her heart came back, stabbing painfully beneath her breast. He must have been away, she thought as she registered the healthy glow of his skin—which was probably why this inevitable confrontation hadn’t happened sooner. But seeing him again was far worse than she had ever imagined it would be. It brought back memories of what it had been like to lie in his arms. It made her recall the time when he’d bought her those beautiful mauve gloves. The times she’d stroked her fingers through his tawny-thick mane of hair. She shivered, knowing that she needed to get rid of him. Before she did something stupid—like begging him to make love to her just one more time …
She cleared her throat. ‘You’re talking about the video clip?’
‘Yes, I’m talking about the video clip! The video clip which seems to have been seen by half the world!’
‘Or by one and a half million inhabitants of the world to be more precise,’ she corrected tiredly.
‘Don’t try and get smart with me,’ he said furiously. ‘Just tell me when you decided to do it. Was it before or after you slept with me? I guess it must have been afterwards—because the story wouldn’t have had legs if we hadn’t been lovers.’ Lovers. The word seemed to ring round the room and mock him. As if there had been anything like love involved in what had happened between them, when all the time she had clearly been using him as collateral. Safeguarding her future with a gem of an idea—a publicity coup to end all publicity coups.
‘Is that what you really think?’ she questioned woodenly.
‘It’s not a question of what I think, Roxanne—it’s a question of what I know. You gave a very fine and sexually loaded performance in front of a lot of very influential people and you got someone to film it.’
‘But I didn’t know it was being filmed!’ She met the disbelieving elevation of his eyebrows and suddenly she couldn’t bear him thinking that she could cold-bloodedly exploit him like that. ‘I borrowed the costume from someone I’d known in my Lollipop days—because I could never have afforded to hire something like that. They had it couriered down from London and when they found out what the address was, they realised …’
Her words tailed off with embarrassment and Titus iced a disgusted stare at her. ‘What did they realise, Roxanne?’
She swallowed. ‘That you lived there. And that this could be a perfect marketing opportunity. So they hid in the house and when I came on to sing, they … they filmed it.’
Titus nodded. ‘So not only have you made me a laughing stock,’ he said, in a cold and deadly voice, ‘but you’re telling me that you also posed a security risk by letting some stranger into my house?’
Roxy shook her head. This was worse than she’d ever imagined. She had been prepared for his fury—she had almost wanted it. Because hadn’t her own rage almost equalled his? When she had discovered what they’d done she had felt exploited, exposed and picked over—as if a colony of vultures had stripped her bare. But she could see from the iciness of his grey eyes that it would be a waste of her time to try to convince him of that. Titus believed what he wanted to believe. What he’d always believed. That she was a low-end kind of person—deserving of sex, yes, but not of the consideration he might show to a woman of his own class. Otherwise, wouldn’t he have listened to her side of the story instead of first condemning her?
‘What do you want me to say?’ she questioned tiredly.
‘I want you to admit that you used me.’
There was a moment of silence as her indignation struggled to break free. Used him? Why, she had loved him. Loved him as she’d loved no other man, nor ever thought she could. Loved him even though she’d struggled not to—until her feelings had won out over common sense. The injustice of it all began to bubble up inside her until she told herself that maybe it was easier this way. If he went away from here believing that she was a taker, then he would never come back. Because the alternative would be to convince him of her innocence and then what?
They would kiss and make up. They would have passionate sex—probably right here in this institutional little apartment. And once the gilt of all that exciting make-up stuff had worn off, reality would set in. There was no possible future for them—there never had been and there never would be.
Titus would look for a way to escape and she would be left nursing a heart even more wounded than it felt at this moment.
But if he stormed out of here, convinced of her duplicity …
‘Yes,’ she said woodenly. ‘I used you. I used your ducal status and high-profile party for publicity purposes. It was an opportunity too good to resist. Are you satisfied now, Titus? You’ve had my confession in full and you can just shut the box on all your memories of me and pretend that I never existed. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather you did it elsewhere. I’m going out.’
From the swirl of his confused thoughts, he felt as if he were in the midst of some unspeakably bad dream as he took in her long legs and the knee-high boots.
‘Is it a man?’ he questioned sourly.
She drew a deep breath. You can do this, Roxy. You can convince him you’re the woman he thinks you are. ‘I’m afraid it is,’ she said quietly.
Titus flinched as a wholly unexpected stab of pain dwarfed even the fierce crushing of his ego. For a moment pride urged him to haul her into his arms and to kiss her and then demand to know whether any other man would ever make her feel the way that he did. Would ever make her moan with pleasure, the way that he did.
