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Seriously? He stared down at her, a beat of exasperation pulsing over his skin.
‘So you think you can just toss that grenade into the conversation and then—what? Bat your eyelashes and swan off into the sunset?’
She glared at him. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she repeated.
‘In that case, you can not talk about it in the car.’
‘I don’t want to get in the car.’
Glancing from her face to her tightly closed fists, he swore softly. But, even though her stubbornness was exasperating, he found himself admiring her defiance. He was six foot four and, thanks to his head of security, Arturo, he knew how to handle himself. But Mimi was fronting up to him like a boxer.
‘Tough. You don’t have a choice. Because I’m sure as hell not leaving you here.’
Their eyes locked. Eventually she lowered her gaze and he felt her body go limp.
‘Then let go of my arm,’ she muttered.
Her sudden capitulation chafed at something inside his chest and again he had to suppress a swift, incomprehensible urge to pull her against him.
‘Fine. But don’t mess me around,’ he warned.
Slowly he uncurled his hand and, giving him a baleful glare, she stalked towards the waiting SUV like a cat on a hot tin roof.
He breathed out through gritted teeth and then made his way across the street, stopping to give instructions to his driver. He climbed into the car, glancing over at Mimi. As expected, she was scrunched up in the opposite corner, pointedly staring out of the window. Short of sitting on the roof, she couldn’t have put any more distance between them, but that was fine with him.
He needed space to bring order to the chaos of his thoughts, and time to adjust to the revelation she had so casually tossed into the conversation.
His heartbeat accelerated. He couldn’t comprehend that he might have been wrong about her. Surely she couldn’t have been a virgin that night? It didn’t make sense; she must be lying. But there had been a tension in her voice that had sounded real...
With an effort, he forced himself to replay that night at Fairbourne. He tried to remember whether she had been tense or apprehensive, or had acted in a way that might have suggested she hadn’t had sex before. Could he have been so stunned by his own febrile reaction to her that he’d missed it? Had there been a moment, just a fraction of a second, before he’d asked her if she had protection, when he’d pushed against the slick warmth between her thighs and she’d gripped his arm tightly...? With what?
At the time it had felt like hunger, urgency. Now he wondered if it had been uncertainty and panic.
At the time she’d said nothing. In fact, she’d pulled him closer, kissing him frantically and—
It had never crossed his mind that he would have been her first lover. He’d thought he had her all figured out—that in the years when he’d been studying at university and then taking over from his father she’d done a lot of growing up. With that heart-stopping body, her mass of blonde hair and soft pout, he
’d had no trouble imagining her being most men’s fantasy come to life, so he’d assumed that she knew what she was doing, knew what men liked, and that was why she was being so responsive, so hungry, so uninhibited.
Only...what if it had been nervousness about losing her virginity that had made her so frantic?
His stomach felt as if it was full of stones.
For so long he’d been certain that she had cold-bloodedly lied to him, with that same soft mouth that had kissed him so sweetly. He had thought she was the kind of woman who would effortlessly seduce a family friend to give her crooked relations time to cover their tracks. A woman who would have thought nothing of having unprotected sex with him even though she must have known indisputably that any future baby would have been born into an irreversible feud between their two families.
That she had acted like that, with such determined ruthlessness, had been as shattering as it had unfathomable. But now he was finding out that he had been wrong about how sexually experienced she was. And the fact that he’d been wrong about that was making him question everything else he’d thought to be true about the woman sitting next to him.
His jaw was suddenly so tense it was difficult to release the breath he’d been holding in.
Had he been wrong?
Rather than questioning the ‘facts’, had it just been easier to accept them at face value?
Maybe... But if she really had been a virgin surely she would have said something?
‘Mimi—’
He started to speak, but as the car began to move she cut him off.
