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Unable to adopt a sufficiently shallow socialite tone while she was looking at the outline of his disturbingly sensual mouth, Chloe switched her focus to his hard, stubble-covered jaw. ‘Yeah, it really was a lucky escape for me,’ she began, and then stopped, her eyes darkening as the memories of feeling cheap and used, still fresh and raw, surfaced once again. Why was she pretending to be someone she wasn’t? She didn’t care what he thought of her and her chin lifted a notch in defiance. ‘Oh, why don’t you just call me an easy lay and have done with it?’
His half-closed eyes lifted from the heaving contours of her breasts and collided with her blue shimmering glare. She pulled in a deep breath and, lower lip caught between her white teeth, took a moment to control the quiver in her voice before she drove home her point.
‘Just because you treated me with zero respect, Nik, do not assume that I don’t respect myself!’
She was lecturing him! Nik was too astonished to immediately react to her accusation and too ashamed to admit anywhere but in the privacy of his own thoughts that he probably deserved it.
‘And for the record this is the twenty-first century; nobody expects a prince to marry a virgin bride these days!’
‘Again, that’s lucky or the European royalty would be a doomed species...’ As he spoke the gaps between his words extended as he almost lost track of what he was saying. Her currently outraged attitude meshed with the images and little snatches of memory from that night in his head, flickering faster and faster until he could hear his own thoughts from back then—so deliciously tight, so excitingly shocked... As if everything was new to her, shockingly new! Had she been a virgin?
‘We are a doomed species anyway, I suspect,’ she was saying. ‘They call it evolution, but I suppose royals are a bit like dinosaurs. In the future there will be entire floors of museums displaying our fossilised remains in glass cases.’
‘Evolution is preferable to revolution... How didn’t I treat you with respect?’ he suddenly shot at her, trying to catch her by surprise so she would answer him truthfully.
She said nothing.
‘So you did have a problem with me walking out on you?’
Her eyelids half lowered. ‘It was a first for me, I admit.’
A first? A first of what, exactly? The idea that she could have been a virgin, considering the way she’d approached him that night, was totally crazy, and even if it were true, did he actually want to know? Didn’t he have enough guilt in his life without adding any more? The problem was that now the idea was out there, swimming around in his brain, he had to voice it, even if he did end up looking like a fool.
‘The first time you’d woken up with the pillow beside you empty, or the first time for you full stop?’
She felt a trickle of sweat trace a sticky path down her back and decided to deliberately misunderstand him. ‘First one-night stand? You really haven’t read any of the surveys in the magazines, have you? Everyone’s doing it.’
‘The thing about those surveys is that people lie.’
His intent stare made her feel as though he were looking directly into her head and she could feel the blush she was willing away materialise until she felt as though every inch of her skin were on fire.
‘And I’m not talking about one-night stands,’ he added flatly.
Pushed into a corner, she reacted with cool-eyed hauteur. ‘I really don’t think there’s any need for a post-mortem...but if you’re asking what I think you’re asking, I don’t think I owe you any explanation.’
‘So you were a virgin.’
‘Weren’t we all once...even you?’ Hard as it was to imagine. ‘How old were...?’ Her eyes flew wide. ‘Oh, God, I said that out loud, didn’t I?’
‘I was sixteen and she was...older.’ The glamorous, bored stepmother of one of his friends at boarding school, and he’d been very willing to be seduced. ‘But even at sixteen I would not have thought it the greatest idea in the world to pick up a total stranger in a bar and have sex with them.’
‘It wasn’t exactly planned!’
‘Look, I’m fine with youthful rebellion. I’ve been there and done that, but I sure as hell don’t much like being the unwitting partner of it.’
Chloe felt her embarrassment slip away, incredulous anger rushing in to fill the vacuum; his hypocrisy was staggering. ‘So now you’re the victim and I should apologise? Not that there is a victim, I mean... I just saw you that night and...’ She met his eyes and looked away. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s not as though you were fighting me off with a stick, is it?’
A laugh was wrenched from Nik’s throat before he closed his eyes and wondered how a man could feel like a defiler of innocence and incredibly turned on at the same time.
‘I guess I crushed a few of your romantic illusions,’ he said heavily.
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Well, it had to happen sometime so relax; after the therapy I’m totally fine.’ She stopped suddenly, remembering that she was talking to someone who might really have needed therapy for something more than making a poor choice. She’d slept with the wrong man; he’d seen his friend die in his arms. ‘Not that there is anything funny about therapy...in fact, it’s a very useful tool,’ she told him earnestly.
A nerve began to slowly clench and unclench in Nik’s jaw, and it had a mesmeric effect on Chloe.
‘What has my sister been saying to you about me?’
Chloe began to shake her head, thinking his sister’s opinion of him proved that love really was blind... Lust, however, was a completely different proposition... She tilted her chin and refused to acknowledge the shameful ache of arousal she felt just looking at him, but in her own defence this man took the term eye candy to a whole new level! ‘Absolutely nothing...except of course that you are an expert on just about everything. To be totally honest with you, I’d got sick and tired of hearing the sound of your name.’
