He didn’t answer and, after a moment, she felt compelled to fill the silence.
‘I’d just turned nineteen when my mother died. It was her death that shook me out of acting the wild child and made me realise I wanted to do something more with my life. That was when I went back to school, sat my A-levels and got myself into med school.’
‘Is that why you let your father keep pretending that you were the out-of-control social-climber?’ he asked almost offhandedly. ‘Because you felt guilty that you hadn’t got yourself together before your mother’s death?’
Oti pursed her lips and let her eyes slide from Lukas. She’d never thought of it that way, and she didn’t like what she heard. At the same time, it irked her to find she couldn’t deny it.
‘Maybe that was your penance for never having let your mother see your success.’
‘And maybe you’re making assumptions based on what you think my relationship with her was like.’ She bristled unexpectedly. ‘Maybe my relationship with my mother was never particularly good, especially considering how she venerated my sorry excuse for a father her entire married life.’
Her words seemed to charge the air. She could almost see it crackling before her eyes.
‘I presume you had a stellar relationship with your mother before she died,’ she snapped before she could stop herself.
‘Not really. I never knew my father. He ditched us before I was even born. But, like your mother, mine exalted him my entire life.’ His expression was so impassive that it was impossible to tell what he was really thinking. And yet she desperately wanted to know.
‘She’d been a chambermaid before I came along,’ he continued. ‘Possibly her favourite recrimination to me, from my earliest memory through to her death, was that he would have lifted her from that life...if only I had never come along.’
‘Sorry—’ she pulled a face, appalled at her own self-centred outburst ‘—I shouldn’t have lost my temper.’
‘Is that your idea of a temper?’ he challenged, his voice still giving nothing away, although now he had one trademark eyebrow cocked. ‘It’s remarkably...restrained.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she announced before she caught herself, desperate to lift the mood from whatever trench she’d just been digging. ‘I’m sure you’re unrestrained enough for the both of us.’
Where the heck had that come from?
The air around them shifted, closing in on her like summer skies before a thrilling storm.
‘Careful, Octavia, that could be taken as something approaching an invitation.’
A wiser woman might have paid heed to the note in his voice. The warning sign that she should start treading carefully.
The problem was that she’d spent her whole life being careful. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was about Lukas that was so different, but suddenly she didn’t want to be that overly retiring version of herself any more.
‘I do hope so.’ She held his gaze. ‘It’s Oti. Calling me by my full name won’t alleviate whatever this...this thing is between us.’
‘That’s enough... Oti.’
It seemed she’d scored a direct hit when she hadn’t really even known what she was doing. Lukas’s jaw clenched so tightly that she could see the muscle twitching.
‘I did tell you, back on our wedding day, that you risked being all mouth and no trousers.’
Did she really just tease him on a sexual level? Her? Who had less experience than anyone she knew?
‘I said that’s enough.’
She wasn’t even sure that he’d opened his mouth to speak. The words seemed to hiss out of him, the most deliciously dangerous warning.
‘What a shame, Lukas...’
‘If you can’t silence yourself—’ his voice throbbed in the space that separated them ‘—then trust me, Octavia, I will do it for you.’
He moved out of his seat so fast that she didn’t have time to process what was happening. But, unaccountably, she found herself hauled to her unsteady feet and pressed up against his solid, hewn chest, her head as light-headed as if she were drunk.
Maybe she was. But not on the wine.
‘I warned you,’ he growled. And she recognised that tautness in his voice, as though he fought to rein himself in.