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CHAPTER FIVE
“I’MTHEONEasking the questions,” Timoney protested, but her words seemed to trail off even as she was speaking them.
Because Crete levered himself down, bracing his hands on the back of the settee, effectively caging her there.
Unless, of course, she wanted to lean forward and—
But no. That would be bad.
Because it would be so good.
And Timoney was unprepared for this, if she was honest. It had been bad enough for him to appear out of the mist, like every dream she’d had since she’d left his flat in London in tears. It had been another to sit on this well-worn couch she loved, to gather her strength around her as securely as she had her cloak and imagine this was some kind of cross-examination.
One she might actually win.
Especially when she’d gotten him to do a thing he’d never, ever done before—talk about himself. Not his businesses, buthim.
It was a harsh little gift, but a gift all the same.
She had always suspected he was a man whocouldfeel deeply. She had always told herself that, secretly, he did. But having heard him actually discuss the cold facts of his stark upbringing, she wasn’t at all surprised that he didn’t want to.
Timoney felt entirely too much on his behalf.
But now his face was too close to hers. And that same old familiar seismic upheaval that was a hallmark of the Crete Asgar experience rocked through her anew. There was no solid ground. There was only the brilliant dark blue of his eyes, his perfectly sculpted face, and that scraped-raw, hollowed-out-with-longing need for him that she didn’t think she would ever be rid of.
No matter what happened tomorrow.
“You were soft and spoiled when I found you,” he said, his voice as pitiless as it was rough, and yet she felt it on her skin—all over her skin—like a caress. She had to fight to repress a shudder of reaction. “A ripe little peach, mine for the taking. If it hadn’t been me, little one, it could have been anyone. You and those useless friends of yours, careening about London, looking for trouble. Do you know how many girls like you find more trouble than they can handle, year after year?”
“Doyou?” she retorted, though her heartbeat was heavy in her ears and her skin felt so oversensitive that a glance might make her come apart. “And if you do, it really begs the question—how many young women do you normally pluck up and carry off into coatrooms?”
His mouth curved and it was not a relief. It was too hard for that. Too sardonic.
“Here’s what I know about entitled little heiresses like you,” he said, his voice a raw thread of dark need inside her. That was the trouble with this man. He had always felt like he was a part of her. “You spin around brightly, then crash. One after the next. Whether it is into sad marriages like the one you plan to enter into tomorrow. Whether it is too much partying, too much exposure, too much glamour, until all you can see is the underside of such things, black and scarred and torn. It all ends in the same dreary way.”
“If I’m so interchangeable, there seems even less of a reason that you should find yourself here tonight,” she managed to say, somehow getting her chin to lift in at least some small show of defiance. No matter how shaky she felt inside. “Go find another just like me, with my compliments. I’m sure she can tell you exactly what you want to hear. Sooner or later you’ll almost certainly find one who won’t dare to express emotion in your sterile little apartment no matter the provocation. A match made in heaven.”
“This is the point I’m trying to make, little one,” he murmured, still much too close. Still too raw, inside and out. Could she feel the heat of his body, blazing into her? Or was it that she wished she could? “Girls like you are used to getting what you desire. You don’t even know how to want, not really. The world is simply handed to you on one platter after another, so that you truly believe it’s character building to live in Belgravia in a listed house. You may even think you’re roughing it when really, all you’re doing is playacting until your money comes in.”
As that hewed a bit too close to her own thoughts on her tenure as an admittedly silly PR girl, she had no choice but to bristle at hearinghimsay it.
“Thank you for your dissertation on my uselessness,” she threw back at him. “But I assure you, no one is more aware of the playacting component than me.”
“You should thank me for throwing you out, Timoney.” And his dark blue eyes glittered like the night sky. “It looks as if it’s given you a little bit of character.”
What was funny was that she knew that was meant to be a killing blow. If he had delivered it while they’d been together, it would have destroyed her.
But that was the thing about being wrecked as totally as he had wrecked her. It wasn’t possible to be wrecked like that twice.
Or she hoped it wasn’t.
So she did the unthinkable. She laughed. “It seems to me that you’re indicting yourself,” she said. “Maybe it’s true that I was an unformed little piece of clay, traipsing about London in search of meaning or a kiln. But it’s also true that you were captivated by that particular little lump of earth. Besotted, one might even say. But not in love, of course.” And she did nothing to keep that faint note of mockery from her voice. Maybe not so faint. “Because that would be a bridge too far. Did you come here to see if you can erase the damage you did so I can go straight back to being putty in your hands?”
“I would not object.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth, then, and try as she might, Timoney couldn’t deny the electricity that hummed within her. Maybe she didn’t want to deny it.
But whatever backbone she might have gathered on her way out of London, she knew she might as well rip it out and sling it out into the snow if she succumbed to his kisses again.
