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Honor cringed. He had expected something extraordinary from her and she had given him only her very ordinary self. She had probably been clumsy and inept compared to his flawless Mary-Helen. He had made love to her three times, each time more fiercely than the last, but maybe that hadn’t been because her eager response had inspired him to ever greater passion, as she had naïvely imagined, but because he had been desperate to find the fulfilment that had been promised by the sizzling sexual tension that had built up between them. Only there was no true fulfilment, only a bitter emptiness that prompted an angry questioning of what had gone wrong.
She had to face it. What she had felt he had not shared. What had been sublimely unique to her had been commonplace to him.
Glory folded its splendid wings and quietly slipped away.
‘Maybe I am a bit of an anachronism these days,’ she said stiffly, ‘but I vowed when I was a teenager that I’d never end up like Helen’s jet-set model friends. If that was the way sophisticated people behaved I didn’t want any part of it. To them sex was as casual and meaningless as a handshake.’ Her voice shook as she said it. ‘To me it was going to be something special...’
‘And this is it?’ She flinched at his savagery as he rolled over and cynically surveyed the way she was hugging the bedclothes tightly against her body. ‘This is your “something special”? A pity you didn’t feel the need to make it “special” for me, too...why? Didn’t you trust me? What the hell did you think I’d do—?’
‘I didn’t think it mattered...’ she lied weakly.
‘Didn’t matter?’ He exploded upright on the bed, totally oblivious to his state of undress as he turned towards her and demanded, ‘What the hell did you bother keeping your virginity for, if you were going to throw it away like this? Talk about casual! My God, Honor, not even you could be that stupid—of course it matters! You weren’t even prepared, were you, you little fool? If I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask if you were protected you would have risked getting pregnant your very first time! Or is that what you wanted to make it even more special for yourself...?’
She clenched her hands over her chest, flushing at his cutting anger. Now at least some of that fury was explained. He was right, she had been foolish; her obsession with loving him had blinded her to the true consequences of her actions. She couldn’t believe her usual level-headed self could have been so careless as to forget the prime biological reason for the human sex drive...procreation. No wonder he thought she might have had notions of trapping him...
‘I—it’s the wrong time of the month for me...’ she told him truthfully, at the same time wondering whether her forgetfulness had been a subconscious attempt to bind herself to him in some permanent way...
His hardening expression told her what he thought of that time-honoured prevarication. ‘It’s the wrong time for you, full stop!’ he told her tautly. ‘Do you think if I’d known I’d have allowed it to happen this way?’
The confirmation of her worst fears was a blow that couldn’t be avoided. She took it on the chin and struck back.
‘What way? I didn’t know there was any other way for a man and woman to make love—’
Her sarcasm rebounded painfully on herself. ‘No, you didn’t, did you? And that’s the point. There are a lot of things you don’t know or didn’t bother to find out.’ His eyes made a grim survey of her shielded body. ‘Did I hurt you? Are you sore?’
To her horror he put his hand on the quilt as if he intended to whisk away her defences and check her as clinically as any doctor.
‘No!’
‘I must have; you were very tight that first time—’
Her flush deepened, anger conquering her humiliation. ‘That didn’t stop you, though, did it? Why didn’t you ask me then if it mattered to you so much? Why wait until you’ve had all your fun to worry about whether you hurt me or not?’
It was his turn to flush, his eyes darkening to mid-brown as he gritted, ‘It wasn’t fun—’
‘Oh, no, I could see you hated every minute of it,’ she said fiercely. How dared he imply that he hadn’t enjoyed what they’d done at all? It might not have been earth-shattering as far as he was concerned but it hadn’t been the nothing he was trying to dismiss it as, either!
‘You’re deliberately misunderstanding me...’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, but then we stupidly naïve virgins tend to do that—’
‘You’d better learn to start speaking in the past tense there, Honor. You gave your virginity to me, remember?’
She flared quickly at his insulting tone. ‘Yes, and what a mistake that was. I should have kept it for someone who would appreciate the—the—’ She hesitated, trying to think of the appropriate word.
He provided it for her in a cruel pun. ‘The honour?’
She took a deep breath. ‘As it happens I regret it, too...all in all the whole thing was a bit of an anticlimax, wasn’t it?’ She almost choked on her small, bitter laugh. She looked longingly over her shoulder towards the door but she couldn’t force herself to move. She couldn’t imitate his unselfconscious nudity. The idea of getting out of bed under his critical stare was unendurable.
Adam made a soft sound. ‘Damn it, Honor, that’s not what I meant to say...why do you goad me into these things by pretending to be blasé when we both know you’re not?
‘You took me by surprise...is it so difficult to appreciate how much? I couldn’t believe it that first time, and when I did you were right—I was too selfishly absorbed in my own pleasure to care. I wanted to grab what I could while I could, to have something to hold on to when the recriminations started. I never said I was disappointed. Did I feel disappointed when I was inside you? Damn it, look at me!’ His hand cupped her averted jaw and forced her face back to his, his palm cool against her flushed cheek. His eyes were deep and dark and compelling, filled with repressed emotion. Unfortunately his earnest assurances were coming just that little bit too late to be convincing.
‘You must see that I had every reason to think that you knew exactly what you were getting into...’
‘Of course I knew,’ she said flippantly, her green eyes meeting his proudly. ‘I was getting into bed with you.’
‘You were doing a hell of a lot more than that, Honor,’ he informed her harshly. ‘This was never going to be a one-night stand for either of us. You said you wanted an affair—and then I find that you can’t possibly know the first thing about the risks an affair entails. And even knowing that I still took advantage of your inexperience—’
