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‘Okay. No. No, I didn’t. It wasn’t that type of relationship.’
‘What type is that?’ Riccardo addressed the ceiling, but suddenly he felt on top of the world. So he had been right all along—it had been a passion-free zone! Maybe a kiss or two, a friendly peck on the cheek, he liked to think, and he could deal with that. He didn’t know where this fierce possessiveness had come from, but he wasn’t going to rail against it. She was the mother of his child and he was an Italian man. It was understandable.
‘I told you. After what happened between us, I had a big rethink on what I wanted out of a relationship and I knew that it wasn’t just sex. It didn’t matter how good the sex was, in the end it just never counts for very much.’
As swiftly as he had hit the top of the world, he plummeted back down to earth and straight back into the brick wall of her not liking him. He knew he should rise above this. Damn it, it was hardly as though he hadn’t enjoyed women, having made sure that they knew in advance that he was only interested in relationships that came without strings. He was no saint, but he felt as if she was enclosed within four ice walls. And she didn’t want to bring the paragon Ben into the conversation because she still needed him.
‘Look.’ She stepped out of the bed and began putting on her clothes, glad for the distraction of doing something rather than lying there next to the man she now, with gut-wrenching dismay, realised she still loved. ‘I’m prepared to put Gina ahead of myself and let you stay here, at least for a while, until she gets to know you and feels safe enough to let you move out without thinking that you’ll disappear for ever. But there’s one big condition.’
And he would never know how important the condition was for her health, because sleeping with him had been a crazy mistake and she couldn’t do it again. It would be bad enough having him in the house, but to start having a sexual relationship with him again would spell a honeyed trap which she couldn’t fall into again.
‘We don’t do this again.’ Clothes on, she looked at him sprawled on the bed, half covered with the tousled bed clothes that were a mocking reminder of her weakness. She took a deep breath. ‘It was a mistake, and I guess it was a mistake we both had to make, but the same old same old doesn’t work for me any more.’
‘Same old same old?’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘Same old Riccardo, the good lover with nothing more on his mind.’
‘I proposed marriage!’ Riccardo reminded her, enraged at his impotence, at her for her moral high-ground, and at his own confusion because the thought of her and her sensitive twenty-first-century wimp stirred hot, ugly jealousy inside him.
But where’s the love? she asked herself sadly. ‘You just don’t understand, Riccardo. Anyway. That’s not important. I’m going to have my bath, and like I said we’ll both put Gina first and see how it goes for a little while.’ She didn’t trust herself with him. He could manoeuvre a conversation in directions she didn’t know existed until she found herself going down one of them, and she couldn’t let herself be persuaded into a relationship with him on his terms. So she opened the door and, before he could say anything else, she let herself quietly out of the room and straight to the bathroom.
Not important? Not important? Riccardo, staring in frustration at the closed door, was outraged. What, he thought venomously, did that man have that he didn’t? And how could she just write off physical attraction as something that didn’t count for anything? Moreover, would she still be able to have a relationship with the man after she had slept with him? He could have kicked himself for not asking her that vital question, and then it occurred to him that maybe, in the great scheme of things, he was emotionally so unimportant that their one-night mistake wouldn’t even register.
