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‘Clementine, I don’t think you understand what I’m offering you.’
She was plucking at her sweater now. Serge watched, fascinated, even as he endeavoured to work out what her problem was and exactly how much it was going to cost him.
‘Two weeks in your bed in exchange for a career I’ve worked very hard for? I don’t think so.’
‘I was thinking of something more open-ended,’ he said, aware Clementine was about to turn him down flat. And how in the hell he’d opened himself up to be shot down he had no idea. It was Petersburg all over again—standing in that street, feeling like a thug for upsetting Clementine, when all he’d wanted was to see her again. To go on seeing her.
Yet he wasn’t quite able to get the words I’ll make it worth your while out of his mouth. He told himself it was because he’d never actually had to say them to a woman. The women he chose to be with understood the unspoken contract: mutually enjoyable sex, a certain lifestyle made available to them, and at the end—and there was always an end, sooner rather than later—a reward in the form of jewellery or something else that softened the edges of what was essentially a sexual contract.
Or an interview in a trashy magazine. But the women who had done that were always the ones with whom he’d had only glancing contact.
Clementine looked at him with those soft grey eyes he remembered from last night.
‘I don’t know, Serge,’ she said with quiet dignity. ‘You haven’t made much of an effort so far.’
Sto? A dark flush of colour moved over his high cheekbones. His male pride sat up and took notice. Not made much of an effort? What exactly did that mean?
‘It’s not as if I saw anything of you today, and after last night that felt…weird.’
‘Weird?’ He repeated the word as if she was speaking in another language. Something about her simple, straightforward manner was riffling through his hard-won masculine detachment.
‘I felt a bit…used,’ she confessed.
He shifted beside her, his eyes narowing. Clementine viewed the change in him warily.
‘What is it you require, Clementine?’
He spoke so formally, his accent thickening attractively on her name.
‘Time. With you.’
She asked for the moon, he thought, challenged all the same.
Diamonds were so much easier.
Yet a wild sort of certainty about how this would play out focussed him on the one thing she seemed to be asking for that he could give her.
Time in his bed. Time with him. Time for both of them.
Clementine wondered what his silence meant. She could read him a little now, but she wasn’t that good.
‘Serge?’
A slow, elemental smile lit up that mouth she had longed to soften with hers the very first time she’d met him.
Never had she felt like this with a man before. From the very start he had lit something inside her. She felt like a woman when she was with him, and not a gauche girl stumbling through life. She didn’t want it to end. She didn’t want to give him up. But she didn’t want to lose her self-respect if he only thought of her as a convenience.
‘I will make time.’ His green eyes had darkened. He reached for her, and suddenly she was wrapped in those muscular arms and being kissed in the way she had dreamt of being woken this morning.
Clementine was up early every morning thereafter for the rest of the week. She made sure of it. It meant she was sleeping lightly and waking often, but come six a.m., when Serge stirred, her eyes were open and she was waiting for him.
She would steal her arms around his neck and hold onto him, talk drowsily about what she had planned for the day: a gallery, a ride downtown, a walk through Central Park. Serge would listen, and gradually she’d eke out a little of what he would be doing. She gathered he wasn’t used to explaining himself, but he was making a manful effort on her behalf. It was a start.
On the Friday, lack of sleep caught up with her. It was light on her face that woke her, and she surfaced to an empty bed. Her heart sank. Because it told her what she’d been steadily avoiding since that first morning after: this wasn’t the beginning of a relationship, it was a sexual fling.
People had them. She had girlfriends who slept with men for no other purpose than sexual enjoyment. It was a natural part of life. Apparently.
But she didn’t. She had relationship sex—the sort that had a framework of mutual caring and a view to a future together. That both of her relationships had been ended by her, neither truly touching her heart, did not make it any less true. She had gone into them with an innocence, a belief in love, until Joe Carnegie showed her exactly how base the relations between men and women could be.
