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‘Are you breaking up with me?’ The words came out in a low, hard voice she didn’t recognise as her own. ‘Did you bring me to Paris to break up with me?’
‘Hell, no.’ He suddenly looked uneasy, and the knowledge shafted through her like the blade of a sword. He had been going to break up with her. It was just for some reason he’d changed his mind.
But he wasn’t going to love her. Ever.
‘You do know this will end. Everything ends.’ He closed the distance between them and took her hands in his. ‘I’m not going to lie and say you don’t mean a great deal to me—you do.’
She wanted to curl up in the corner of the room and die.
But her pride wouldn’t let her.
‘Good to know, Slugger,’ she said softly. She pulled her hands free and walked back out onto the balcony. He let her go, didn’t follow her. He would know she wanted to cry. He was probably used to crying women. No doubt he’d passed through a lot of them.
‘Clementine, it’s not over.’ His voice was husky, and some part of her snatched hold of that as proof he wasn’t as unaffected as he pretended to be.
‘No,’ she said, forcing the cheer into her voice. But it fell flat. ‘I just don’t like talking about it. Can we change the subject?’
‘We’re driving back to Paris in an hour or so. There’s no rush,’ he said slowly. ‘I thought you’d like to go out to Versailles. I think Marie Antoinette probably appeals to you, Clementine.’
She closed her eyes. He knew her so well. Yet not well enough to know she was in love with him. If he knew that, surely he wouldn’t be so cruel. Surely he would lie to her. For a little longer.
Well, she was going to lie to herself. She was going to pretend she could be with a man who wasn’t ever going to love her, if all he could give her was ‘a great deal’.
To mean ‘a great deal’ to someone was something. Wasn’t it?
She knew then what she had to do. Book a flight home. It was over.
Serge was angry. He didn’t think he’d ever been so angry in his life. It was that cold, settled anger that could sit in your gut for days, weeks, months. It kept him silent on the drive back up to Paris. He had a pretty good idea what was keeping Clementine silent. What had he expected? She was going to chatter and sing silly songs and trade barley sugar kisses with him as she had on the way down? He’d lost that girl for good. In an act of necessary sabotage.
Yes, his anger was of the settled kind, and it wasn’t going to shift, but he could feel it growing exponentially as he navigated the pretty Paris streets in the sports car and Clementine started talking about how clean Paris was compared to London. When she had exhausted that topic she moved on to that international conundrum the weather.
‘I’d like to have some time on my own,’ she told him in a faux-sweet tone as the valet took care of the car. ‘Do you mind if I go up to the suite alone?’
It was about then the anger burst. ‘Da,’ he said, ‘I do mind.’
She gave him a look that could incinerate and stalked ahead of him through the hotel. He didn’t hurry. The anger felt good, it felt justified, and it had nothing to do with Clementine.
She had closed the door on the bedroom and thrown herself on the bed. He kicked the door open.
‘Get out,’ she said shifting her legs off the bed.
‘I sleep here too, kisa.’
‘I told you to get out.’ When he didn’t shift she said, ‘Do you know what’s wrong with you, Serge?’
‘Go ahead—inform me.’
‘You’re a male chauvinist pig. You live in another century, and it’s not the last one.’
He slanted her a dark look. ‘Da, kisa. You know, I had a sixteenth-century ancestor who kept fifteen wives—a couple for each day of the week. He had no trouble keeping them in line, but I guess he just hadn’t met you.’
Somewhere in there was a compliment, she thought uneasily, but it got lost in the concept of fifteen wives and the way he was looking at her. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be on the bed. She felt entirely too vulnerable to him.
She knew he could overwhelm her in moments—not with his expertise, although that was considerable, but with his sheer maleness, and feeling as vulnerable as she was she didn’t know how she was going to cope.
She knew she could say no and Serge would stop. But no wasn’t coming, and all of a sudden the only thing that was going to work was skin on skin.
All Serge knew as he came over her on the bed was that desire crashed through him, stronger than he had ever felt it. He was driven to possess her and he would.
