Knowing she had to fight it, remind herself that all she’d ever been to him was a willing partner in a furtive sexual fling, she gathered her defences and stated calmly, ‘You startled me. I thought you weren’t expected back until tomorrow.’
‘I was impatient to return.’
He was close enough for her to feel his body heat, to inhale the heady male scent of him. His lean, fantastically sexy body was tautly held, and she wished he wasn’t so impossibly gorgeous, so utterly tempting…
‘Do you want to know the reason for my impatience?’ His eyes glittered beneath the dark, heavy fringe of lashes. ‘Shall I tell you?’
Tension spiralled inside her. When he looked at her like that, one dark brow indolently raised, a smile playing at the corners of his sensual mouth, and spoke in that low, sexy undertone, she just flipped. Already she could feel hot colour flooding over her face.
Self-defensively, she turned away. ‘I can guess.’ Was that shaky squawk her voice? Dabbling her fingers in the cool water that trickled from the fountain into a wide, heavily carved bowl, she pulled in a breath and managed calmly, ‘You can relax. I’m not pregnant. And I’m as pleased about it as you must be,’ she tacked on hurriedly, just in case he thought she found the news unwelcome because she’d wanted to have some hold over him, trap him maybe.
She couldn’t see his face, of course, but he was probably grinning from ear to ear with relief. But when he eventually spoke after moments of silence that made her spine prickle, he sounded sort of heavy.
‘If that’s what you really feel, then we must take more care in future.’
Future? What future?
An on/off furtive affair? Someone he could count on for no-strings sexual release whenever he happened to visit the UK?
She might, for her sins, love the brute, but she would not be seduced into being his bit on the side! Or was he really going to ask her to marry him, as he’d told Terrina he would?
‘Forget it!’ She whirled round on her heels, gla
ring up into his hard, implacable features. ‘I don’t intend to jump into bed with you whenever you’re around and happen to feel the urge! But at least your offer—if that was what it was—means you’ve stopped being so darn ratty!’ she finished on a humiliating wobble. Dammit all, she was crying again! When would she learn to grow up and be adult enough to hide her emotions?
‘Stop it, Rosie!’ Sebastian commanded rawly, his hands curving heavily around her shoulders. ‘Don’t cry. Idiota! I was never angry with you—or only for a few shocked moments when I stupidly thought you were spinning a line when you claimed to be Marcus’s daughter. And I did apologise for that, remember? Remember?’ he reiterated firmly, giving her a gentle shake when she refused to answer.
‘You shouldn’t have believed that, not even for a moment!’ she objected thickly. ‘You really hurt me, you know that?’
They had spent such a perfect evening and night together and she’d really dared to believe that he was beginning to feel something more than just lust for her. Then he’d made her whole world fall apart by accusing her of being out for what she hoped she could get.
‘I’m sorry, cara mia, I hope you will some day forgive me for a momentary lack of trust.’ He looped an arm around her shoulders and led her to a seat in a corner of the courtyard, beneath an arbour covered with wisteria, designed to give shade in the heat of the day. ‘Sit and listen to my confession.’
He settled beside her and took her hands in his. Rosie smartly released them, sensing real danger. He only had to touch her to have every sensible thought flying out of her head. She fished in the pocket of her stylish jacket for a tissue and blew her nose.
Loudly.
Hopefully, her elephantine trumpeting would put him off his stride, stop him from seducing her disastrously weak self into agreeing to his dubious and disgracefully demeaning plans for her future.
It didn’t have the desired effect. Even here, in the shadows where the moonlight didn’t reach, she could see him smile. And his hand as he brushed her hair away from her overheated forehead was bone-shakingly tender.
‘I was nineteen when I fell in love for the first time,’ he told her quietly. ‘Looking back, I know it was just a sudden rush of the rioting hormones that young men are prone to. I met Magdalena in a night-club. She was absolutely stunning. And when she made a direct play for me I was so flattered, so puffed up with pride, I could barely stand upright! I was so besotted I did everything she asked of me—bought her anything that took her fancy, squired her to the best restaurants, brought her home to meet my parents. You name it, Magdalena got it.’
‘That weekend we spent here she got careless. She wrote a postcard to her sister in Madrid and asked Tomas to post it. She hadn’t bargained on the average human being’s curiosity. Tomas read it and brought it to me. In essence, it was boasting about her divine luck. She’d landed a rich idiot. Five years her junior and still wet enough behind the ears to be as malleable as putty. That weekend, at his fancy home, she was going to get an engagement ring out of him and then she’d be home and dry and looking forward to a life of luxury. After that, I have to admit, I got cynical,’ he continued with a self-deprecating shrug of his wide shoulders.
‘Especially when I met more of her kind over the ensuing years. Glossily packaged women trading on their looks, with their eyes on the main chance. And that, cara, will explain—not excuse—why my hard-nosed cynicism made me overreact when you told me who you were.’
He took her hands in his again and this time she made no attempt to remove them, mesmerised by what he had told her, even pitying him and the circumstances of great wealth, not to mention fabulous good looks, that had made him so wary of women and their motives. It had turned him into a cynic, too, she thought sadly. His only interest the acquisition of more and more wealth.
‘And as for being ratty, as you put it, my anger wasn’t directed towards you, mia cara, but against Marcus for what I perceived as a double betrayal—against Tia Lucia and your abandoned mother. For the life of hardship you and she had to bear. When I actually listened to what he had to say I understood and could finally sympathise.’
‘You only thought about what you call the “double betrayal” when you began to believe that I might really have proof of my identity. To begin with, your immediate thought was of my father’s money,’ she accused miserably, ‘hating to have to think so badly of him.’
‘For that I am sorry. I have told you. Explained why I became so mistrustful. Please forgive me.’
Rosie mentally stiffened her spine. If she allowed herself to weaken she could easily agree to become his occasional mistress, if only to prove to him that this woman could love him for what he was, not for the depth of his pocket.
Yet something was niggling at the back of her mind and, try as she might, flustered as her emotions were, she couldn’t access it.