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“You think that’s what I’m trying to do—by talking about what happened between us.”
“Nothing happened between us.”
“But something very nearly did.”
“It’s time for you to leave.”
“Are you that scared? You’d rather chuck me out of your house than have a conversation with me?”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Angelo. I made a mistake. It was stupid of me. I can’t take it back but I don’t have to discuss it for your amusement.”
“So maybe I made a mistake as well.” Angelo’s voice was curiously soft. It wasn’t what Rosie had been expecting him to say and she looked at him with mutinous hostility. “Maybe I should have just faced reality.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, you don’t want to know what I’m talking about, Rosie. You want to pretend that you can walk away now that the business with the cottage is at a stalemate and never look back. You give instructions to a lawyer, he handles everything for you when and if you need him. But you give the game away every time you get too close to me.”
Rosie stared at Angelo in terrified silence. She could keep arguing with him, telling him that he didn’t know what he was talking about, except how could she deny that very obvious pass? How could she deny the way the colour bloomed in her cheeks whenever he was near, or the way her words emerged, high and unnatural? It didn’t make any difference knowing that she should be distant and remote towards him. She would never forget the way he had ended things with her, the fact that he had jumped into bed with her friend and then married her. Yet on some horrible, primitive, elemental level, she just couldn’t shake the effect he still had on her.
“I don’t even like you,” she protested weakly. “You married my best friend!” Tears gathered at the back of her throat, thickening her voice, and she looked away abruptly because she didn’t want to go there. She didn’t want to rake up the past. She just wanted to move on from it, except how was she going to do that when he was standing metres away from her, forcing her to face up to stuff she didn’t want to acknowledge?
“And you think I had a choice?” Angelo rasped, pushing himself away from the window. He raked his fingers through his hair and grimly wondered how far he was prepared to go to get her into bed with him. Would he be prepared to unearth things that were better left buried? Would his intense pride even allow him to do that? No!
Rosie was shocked rigid by Angelo’s response. She had no idea what he was talking about. Of course, he would have had a choice. There was no way that Angelo, of all people, would ever have allowed himself to be pushed into doing something he didn’t want to do. And yet there had been an underlying savagery and bitterness in his denial that confused her.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean we still turn each other on, Rosie. Cute, don’t you think? After everything we’ve been through? When I saw you at that funeral... I can’t believe I’d forgotten just how sexy you were. Or maybe I hadn’t. Maybe I’d shoved the memory somewhere to the back of my brain, tidied it away so that it was out of sight. Is that what you did as well?”
“What did you mean when you said that you had no choice?”
“Let’s move on from that, Rosie. I have no intention of getting mired in semantics. The past is over and done with, but unfortunately it’s left us with a somewhat uncomfortable present. I turned you down the first time you made a pass at me in the cottage because I stupidly failed to think this whole attraction situation through.”
Rosie was in a daze. How could he be talking about something as intense as the chemistry that still sizzled between them in a voice that was as cool and as casual as a stranger’s voice? When he spoke about this whole attraction situation, he could have been discussing a curious weather system or a nasty traffic incident on the M25.
“And now?” She couldn’t escape the sudden electric tension in the room.
“You look as stiff as a plank of wood,” Angelo said drily. In fact, there was a part of him that was stunned at what he was doing. He was pursuing a woman who had no place in his life. He was elevating sex to something he couldn’t do without. It was a weakness he felt he couldn’t control, although it certainly helped dealing with it the way he was now.
“How can you expect me to be relaxed?” Rosie sprang out of the chair and began pacing the room, her arms tightly clasped around her body. When she had impulsively taken Angelo’s call and done the unthinkable, the unexpected...asked him to help her...she hadn’t envisaged that this was where the evening would end. She stopped and looked at him from across the width of the room. “This is the most bizarre conversation I’ve ever had!”
“Why? Because we’re talking about sex? Finishing a conversation you began when you touched me?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking when I did that.”
“You weren’t.”
“Weren’t what?”
“You weren’t thinking. You were acting purely on impulse. I was the one thinking and it has to be said that sometimes it pays not to think too much. Can cloud the water.” Except this was a much better outcome.
“I have a proposition for you,” Angelo continued as he sauntered towards the sofa, eyed it as though it might harbour infectious germs and decided against it to try the third chair in the room which, although not as challenging as the one to which Rosie had now returned, didn’t offer much hope of relaxation. He might not have grown up with creature comforts but he had certainly grown accustomed to them.
“What sort of proposition?” Rosie asked warily. Her back ached from the chair but her legs were shaky, and pacing the small room like a caged bear made her feel awkward and vulnerable. The palms of her hands were clammy with perspiration and the black dress felt scratchy and uncomfortable.
Angelo leant forwards and rested his forearms on his thighs so that his hands dangled loosely between his legs. “We could go round in circles,” he murmured, “sniffing each other and then backing off, but we can’t hide the fact that we’re attracted to one another.”
“We don’t like each other.”
“Not the point. Over the past three years, tell me honestly, did you manage to put me out of your mind?”
Rosie thought about that blind date with Ian, the reasons that had prompted her to go on it in the first place. Since Angelo had disappeared from her life, she had hidden behind her work and entombed herself behind a wall of ice. She reddened and remained silent, which was answer in itself.
“I’m getting the picture.”
“No, I don’t think you are, Angelo. You think that because we happen to be attracted to one another, that we should do something about it?” There was a hysterical edge to her laughter but when she caught his eye it was to find that he wasn’t sharing in the mirth.
“We don’t do something about it,” Angelo said coolly, “And we don’t get past it.”
“Of course we do. Physical attraction doesn’t last. That’s the whole thing about lust. It goes away, given enough time.” She smoothed restless hands along her thighs. “You slept with my friend.”
“Don’t go there.” Angelo stared her down. If only she knew the circumstances of that one fateful night, when he had been bombarded with the information that would signal the death of their relationship.
It was a memory he kept firmly locked away and he would never bring it out of hiding. It was a moment in time of which he was deeply ashamed. Drunk, wild with rage and pain. God, had he cried? He might have. He thought he had. How could one woman have so thoroughly burrowed under his skin? Where had his natural aptitude for self-preservation gone? Had he been so thick that he had needed someone to come along and show him the proof of his own stupidity? He had barely been aware of Amanda in the bedroom although he had certainly been stripped and far more, as it turned out, the consequences of which he could never have envisaged.
“You’re crazy.”
“Am I?” He stood up with lazy intent and she was frozen to the spot as he walked slowly towards her. When he was standing in front of her, he reached down and trailed one long, brown finger against her cheek.
In her head, Rosie was pretty sure she was objecting to that fleeting, horribly intimate caress. Barely a caress. Just a feathery touch. Unfortunately, her head had stopped communicating with her body which had been galvanised into shamefully instant response. Wetness spread between her legs, dampening her underwear. She could feel it. And then, galloping away at a tangent with breakneck speed, a series of graphic images leapt into her head: thoughts of that lazy finger stroking between her thighs, parting the soft folds that protected her clitoris, rubbing the small bud until she was crying out for more. Her breasts felt heavy, the nipples tight and sensitive. He knew her body so well. It was as though no time at all had elapsed since they had been lovers.
How was this possible? How could she be feeling like this? But she knew that it was the same violent physical reaction, as instinctive as a knee-jerk, that had driven her to reach out and touch him at the cottage.
