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He was fishing and she knew it, but she couldn’t help snapping, ‘Of course Stephen and I love each other!’
‘Do you?’ Duncan’s scepticism was like sandpaper on her nerves.
‘I have been in love before,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I do know what it’s like!’
His face seemed to go taut, his eyes narrowing. ‘Are you saying that Prior makes you feel the way that Harry did?’
His incredulity gave Kalera the uneasy feeling that she was being backed into a corner she couldn’t see. ‘Yes—no—’ She sounded wishy-washy even to her own ears. ‘It’s totally different—you wouldn’t understand.’
He was not to be so easily dismissed. ‘Try me.’
The harshly pitched invitation seemed redolent with deeper meaning. ‘I have no intention of discussing it with you—’
‘Why? Because Golden Boy wouldn’t like it?’ he jeered. ‘Does he have you so thoroughly under his thumb already, Kalera?’
‘No—because I value my privacy,’ she corrected him. ‘You have
no right, whatever was—or was not—between us in the past, to try and manipulate me into confiding in you. I’ve had enough of that kind of thing in my life.’ The last tumbled out as something of an afterthought as she looked for their table, trying to catch a reassuring glimpse of Stephen waiting there for her, but even on tiptoe she wasn’t tall enough to see over the other dancers blocking her view.
‘What do you mean—what confidences has Prior been trying to weasel out of you?’ Duncan’s dark brows steepened in suspicion, his hand tightening on her lower back. ‘I told you that he was operating a hidden agenda.’
Kalera’s reference had had nothing to do with Stephen but she was tired of having to defend herself.
‘If this is another lecture like this morning’s, about my being such an infatuated idiot that I wouldn’t notice the bug over the bed for the louse who was in it—you can stop right there!’
He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Well, how was I to know that you’d refused to sleep with him? You implied that Boy Wonder had swept you off your feet—and into bed was the obvious assumption!’
‘Obvious to you, maybe, but thankfully Stephen is more refined. And anyway, I haven’t refused,’ she was unable to resist flinging at him. ‘It’s just that neither of us wants to rush things. We both happen to be enjoying the process of courtship…’
‘I guess sleeping with the enemy while you were still working for me would have been too much like another act of pseudo-adultery,’ he said slyly.
Kalera flicked her chin up. ‘That had absolutely nothing to do with it!’ she declared, wondering how he managed to home in on her doubts with such unerring skill.
‘Absolutely, huh?’ He tilted his head and the outrageous earring danced provocatively in her sight, reminding her how much Duncan loved to flout the conventions, and how successful he was at goading others to forget their polite inhibitions.
‘So you don’t even feel a teensy-weensy bit unfaithful to me whenever you kiss him?’
She gave him her serene, Mona Lisa smile, while inside she was reeling with shock.
‘I don’t feel guilty for loving him, if that’s what you mean,’ she said mildly, and felt proud of her restraint when the mocking light in his eyes abruptly snuffed out. ‘I think Harry would have liked him,’ she added, intending to put a final period to the conversation.
This time it was Duncan who stumbled as he looked down at her in amazement, responding with instinctual speed, ‘Are you crazy? Harry would have hated him.’
‘Harry never hated anyone in his life,’ she scoffed. His tolerant kindness had been one of the things that she had most loved about her husband.
‘Whereas Steve has elevated it to an art form,’ said Duncan, recovering his equilibrium and executing a couple of head-spinning turns to prove it. Breathlessly trying to keep up with him, Kalera could feel the frustration that had him almost jumping out of his skin. ‘You saw what he was like just now. He was really getting off on the idea of having snatched you out from under my nose—’
As if she were a disputed toy rather than an independent woman with a mind and will of her own!
‘You were deliberately trying to provoke him into reacting like that,’ she pointed out. ‘I’m not going to listen to you run him down just because you don’t like him. You’re totally unreasonable on the subject of Stephen—’
‘I’m unreasonable—what about him?’
He sounded like a petulant child and her superior look told him so. ‘I suppose the next thing you’re going to say is that it isn’t fair and it’s all his fault,’ she said tartly.
He scowled, injecting a note of pathos into his tone that was utterly unconvincing. ‘Aren’t I even allowed to express a friendly concern for your welfare? I think it’s great that you want to get married again, but anyone with half an eye can see that Prior’s all wrong for you. You haven’t known him very long—I have. Up until a few years ago we were best friends—since our schooldays, in fact—that’s how we got into business together…’
Best friends! Kalera kept her face smooth but her clear grey eyes must have clouded with the effort of masking her reaction to the small bombshell for Duncan immediately pounced on her uncertainty.
