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‘A little?’ Talk about an understatement.
Her lips set in a mulish line, the blush still beaming on those beard-scorched cheeks.
‘It was a mistake, okay? Brought on by stress and fatigue and...’ She paused, her gaze darting pretty much everywhere but his face. ‘And sexual deprivation.’
‘Sexual deprivation?’ He scoffed. ‘How do you figure that?’
She was going to have to spell that one out for him.
‘I’ve been extremely busy for the past five years. Obviously I needed to blow off some steam.’
He should have been insulted. And a part of him was. But a much larger part of him wanted to know if she’d really just told him she’d been celibate for five years.
‘Exactly how long has it been since you got to “blow off some steam”?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s none of your business.’
‘That long, huh?’ he mocked, enjoying the spark of temper—and the news that he’d been her first in a while—probably way too much.
He’d never sparred with her when she was a girl. Because she’d always been too cute and too fragile. It would have been like kicking a puppy. He’d always had to be so careful, mindful of how delicate she was. Back then he’d been terrified he’d break her, that his rough, low-class hands would be too demanding for all that delicate, petal-soft skin. So he’d strived hard to be gentle even when it had cost him.
But she’d given as good as she’d gotten a minute ago. And damn if that didn’t turn him on even more.
The flush now mottled the skin of her cleavage, and suddenly he was remembering gliding his tongue across her nipple, her soft sob of encouragement as he captured the hard bud between his teeth.
His blood surged south. And he got mad all over again.
She’d been so far out of his reach that summer. But somehow she’d hooked him into her drama, her reality, made him want to stand up to her daddy, to fight her demons, to brand her as his and follow some cock-eyed dream. When she’d told him she was pregnant he’d been horrified at first, but much worse had been the driving need that had opened up inside him—the fierce desire to claim her and their child.
She’d convinced him she wanted to keep his baby. And that was all it had taken to finally tip him over into an alternative reality where he’d kidded himself they could make it work. That she really wanted to make it work. With him. A British heiress and a nobody from Roxbury. As if.
He’d spent years afterwards dealing with her betrayal, determined that no one would ever have the power to screw him over like that again—even after he’d finally figured out that she’d probably just been playing him all along so she could stick it to her overbearing daddy.
The thought that he could still want her so much infuriated the hell out of him. But he’d just behaved like a wild man, making it tough to deny.
He’d ripped off her panties, damn it. When was the last time he’d done something like that? Been so desperate to get to a woman he’d torn off her underwear? Hadn’t even taken the time or trouble to undress her properly, to kiss her and caress her?
He might not be a master of small talk, but he had some moves. Moves women generally appreciated and which he’d worked at acquiring over the last ten years.
Until Xanthe had strolled back into his life and managed to rip away all those layers of class and sophistication and bring back that rough, raw, reckless, screwed-up kid. The kid he’d always hated.
She made a dash for the elevators.
‘Hey, wait up!’ He chased her down, grabbed her wrist.
She swung round, her eyes bright with fury and panic. ‘Don’t touch me. I’m not staying.’
He lifted his hand away. ‘I get that. But I want to know where you’re going.’ He scrambled for a plausible reason. ‘So I can get the papers delivered tomorrow.’
In person.
‘You’ll sign them?’
She sounded so surprised and so relieved he wondered if there was more to those papers than she was letting on. Because she had to know there was no way on earth he would want to contest their divorce—no matter how hot they still were for each other.
Focus, dumbass.
He shook off the suspicion. His objective right now was to make sure she didn’t hightail it all the way back to London before he was finished with her.
