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His eyes narrowed and she realised her unintended double entendre had momentarily thrown him. She could see him silently debating whether she was referring to him or the pen. His hand clenched around the silver barrel.
‘Don’t you want to ask why she gave it to me?’ he ground out, his voice thick with frustration at her refusal to cooperate.
‘You just told me—to celebrate your graduation.’ Her calm acceptance seemed only to inflame his already dangerous temper.
‘Because we were sleeping together!’ His harsh truth exploded in her ears like another crash of thunder as he threw the pen onto the desk. ‘Elise and I pretended to be just friends but we were secretly at it like rabbits every chance we got. Isn’t that what you wanted to know?’
Were. The word sank into her consciousness and she clung to it like a lifeline. He was using the past tense. She allowed the certainty to saturate her awareness. But she had waited a moment too long to respond.
‘What’s the matter? Not shocking enough? Haven’t I given you enough salacious detail?’ He swooped like a hawk on her hesitation, revealing the savagely offended pride that was at the core of his bitter fury: ‘That’s why you came snooping around up here, isn’t it? You want to know if I’m the adulterous bastard they say I am—’
‘No—that’s not why I—’
‘Well, you’re not the only one who can go on a snooping expedition,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘You have quite a lurid recent past yourself, don’t you, Veronica? Let’s see what I came up with…’ He leaned over the desk to punch a key on his computer and the screen-saver dissolved into an Internet search page. Another couple of clicks and Veronica was mortified to find herself staring at Neil Ordway’s web-page, the one that had lately caused her so much hassle and unwelcome attention. On it he was promoting himself as a candidate on the reality TV show Second Chances in which people who were rejected in love tried again to win over the partner of their choice, with the help of a ‘romantic adviser’ and an intrusive camera crew following their every date.
‘Well, well, well, there are quite a few news links to this little gem! I see you were engaged last year, but you jilted the poor guy at the altar a few weeks after he had a multimillion-dollar lottery win. What went wrong—did he ask you to sign a pre-nup?’ he said sardonically.
Veronica flushed with remembered pain and outrage. ‘No, actually, he had wonderful plans for us both to share it. He kept his big win a secret until just before the wedding when he told me he’d bought a dairy farm for us to live on after we were married—contrary to everything we’d planned together,’ she said flatly, reliving the horrendous row the night before the wedding, which had exposed the myth that they were a partnership of equals and confirmed that her multiplying doubts about the man she was to marry were more than the usual bridal jitters.
‘Well, now he’s telling everyone he wants another chance at a new life with you,’ he taunted, scrolling down the page.
‘No, he doesn’t, he just won’t admit his own mistakes,’ she said, shouldering past him to quit the application before he could read out any more. ‘All isn’t as rosy as he thought on his farm and he blames me. He’s never forgiven me for not turning up at the church, even though I’d told him the night before that the wedding was off. He thinks that he can humiliate me into taking him back—or, failing that, just humiliate me. Fortunately, the TV company is on a strict time schedule, and they can’t film his story if I won’t cooperate.’
He caught her elbow when she drew back, bitter triumph at her discomfiture lurking in the dark brown eyes. ‘Not very nice, is it, Veronica, to have people publicly pawing over the intimate details of your private life, and hounding you for comments—?’
‘No, it’s horrible—but then I don’t have the luxury of all the firewalls that you can afford to throw up around you—’
‘Damn it, you don’t think I feel just as exposed?’ he demanded ferociously. ‘Constantly having to defend myself to people like you, who try, judge, and condemn me out of hand—’
‘How can I know what your feelings are if you don’t talk about them? And I never condemned you—’
He gave a raw laugh. ‘I saw the way you cringed from me when I came into Sophie’s room.’
Was that what he’d thought?
‘That was because I felt guilty, that’s all!’ she cried. ‘You make me feel as if being curious about you is some kind of crime—’
‘Curiosity? Is that what it is?’ He caught her other arm as she tried to shake him loose. ‘Exactly what kind of curiosity are we talking about? Why don’t you tell me what it is about me that you find most fascinating?’ he invited savagely.
Lightning flashed and Veronica instinctively squeezed her eyes shut and tensed, waiting for the thunder, but this time it was a couple of seconds before it raged off in the near distance.
She gingerly opened her eyes and found his combative expression tempered by faintly cruel amusement. ‘You really are twitchy about storms, aren’t you?’ he scorned.
‘I saw a cow killed by a lightning strike in a paddock when I was a child.’ Her hands unconsciously gripped his restraining forearms, reassuring herself they were both safe. ‘I’ve been a bit storm-shy ever since.’
His amusement faded. ‘That was probably fork lightning. This is sheet lightning—discharging up in the air, within the cloud itself—only dangerous if you’re a bird or a plane. It’s true,’ he added as she looked at him, her grey eyes deeply dubious. ‘I’m a certified genius—I know all sorts of useful facts.’ His mouth took on an ironic twist. ‘Would I lie to you?’
There was another flash and instant crack and she jumped, instinctively moving closer to his sheltering chest. ‘Oh, I was sure it was moving away!’
‘I used to come and holiday here with Zoe sometimes during my university breaks. When there’s been a big buildup of static in the clouds, these dry summer storms can crash and bash back and forth across the plateau for ages,’ he said, subtly easing them further away from the window by the desk. ‘Once, when I was staying here as a kid with Zoe and Fred I timed a continuous storm at two hours—although technically, I suppose, it was actually a series of storm cells.’
Veronica’s eyes rounded in dismay and he uttered an arid laugh. ‘Afraid you might be trapped with me until it passes?’
A tiny frisson passed through her body and his gaze sharpened into a keen alertness that drove her rashly into speech.
‘I’m not a coward…unlike someone else I could name,’ she said with a haughty disdain that instantly made him hard. ‘You accuse me of making unfounded assumptions but you’re the one putting words in my mouth and then refusing to listen—’
‘I’d rather put something else in your mouth,’ he muttered, shocking her out of her flimsy sandals.
