‘Do you blame me?’ She made no further attempt to deny it. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist...resist...’ Her angry words tapered off as his brows arched.
‘Expecting you to admit the truth?’
His smug coolness was infuriating. ‘Gloating! Ruining my evening with Richard!’
‘Is that what I’m doing?’
‘Yes!’
She might have known that would please him. His amusement was tinged with malice. ‘Don’t you think you deserved a salutary lesson in the dangers of lying?’
‘I didn’t lie...exactly,’ she faltered.
‘We both know what a specious defence that is,’ he dismissed contemptuously. ‘You had every opportunity to correct my mistaken impressions and you didn’t. Instead you trotted out that ridiculous ghost story to obscure the issue—tried to make me feel so much like a fool that I doubted my own perceptions. Well, now is the time to make good your numerous sly omissions. And let me warn you—you’d better make it very good!’
‘Here?’ She looked nervously around. The tables weren’t very widely spaced and there were quite a few people here whom she knew. Their conversation had already attracted some curious glances and she hated the idea of generating food for local gossip.
‘You had your chance in private and you fudged it,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘How often can I expect to find you in my bed?’
‘For heaven’s sake, keep your voice down!’ agonised Vanessa.
To her chagrin he immediately lowered his voice to a thready whisper, leaning intimately close so that she could hear. ‘Why in the hell didn’t you just simply explain your nightly gypsy routine to me? You had no qualms about everyone else knowing. Did you think I’d take exception to an unconventional solution to an understandable problem? For God’s sake—I’d have been more inclined to congratulate you for taking such good care of my property!’
‘It wasn’t that simple—’ Vanessa hissed back.
‘Why? Because I thought you were an expensive call-girl? You should have been flattered, Flynn.’
She recoiled. ‘That’s such a typically male thing to say!’ she said furiously. ‘You think a woman who sells the use of her body to strangers is someone I should envy? You think prostitutes do what they do for pleasure?’ Her voice was choked with revulsion. She had been tainted with that acid brush of contempt once before and the mere memory of it was enough to eat into the scars covering the old wounds.
He looked deeply into her smouldering gaze, his fury stilling at what he saw in the uncertain black depths. ‘I’m sorry,’ he admitted gently. ‘That was a stupid thing for me to say. But I wasn’t making a serious social comment, I was just trying to get a rise out of you by being flippant.’
The admission didn’t calm her. In her mind she was still fighting that helpless sense of oppression. ‘I would never prostitute myself,’ she denied fiercely. ‘Not for anything or anyone...not for any amount!’
‘I know.’
He was no longer angry, she realised with a sting of shock, at least not in the way he had been a few minutes ago. Instead there was a steely determination in his steady gaze that made her swallow hard, suddenly wondering how much her knee-jerk reaction had revealed to him.
He went on, adding to her shock by admitting frankly, ‘But I can’t deny that it’s a common male fantasy—to be seduced by a beautiful stranger who conveniently vanishes afterwards—all pleasure and no responsibility. In real life we all know it doesn’t happen that way but we don’t have to worry about that when we weave our fantasies. After all, sexual fantasy is the safest sex there is. I’m sure that many women enjoy the reverse of that particular male fantasy in the privacy of their own minds—’
‘I don’t,’ Vanessa interrupted stoutly, trying to stop him before the conversation got totally out of hand.
‘Oh? Then what’s your favourite sexual fantasy, Vanessa?’ He leaned his chin on his hand, that steely glint belying his coaxing expression.
‘None of your business,’ she said stiffly, bewildered by his swift change of tactics. If he was intent on keeping her off-balance he was doing a damned good job.
‘It is if I figure in it,’ he mocked her.
‘Never in a million years!’ Vanessa spat out and he laughed softly.
‘You must have been disappointed, then, when you woke up so unexpectedly in my arms?’
She had a fleeting flashback to lean, muscled limbs and rampant masculinity. ‘But I didn’t wake up, did I?’ she said bitterly. ‘If I had a fantasy, it certainly wasn’t to be preyed upon by some...some unscrupulous incubus...’
‘Given the state I was in I doubt whether I fitted the profile of a demon lover, either literally or figuratively,’ he murmured.
Did he mean that he’d been so carried away with lust, it had all been over in a trice? Strangely,
that thought was even more mortifying. Vanessa had punished herself over and over with speculation that he had enjoyed her helpless body at length and at leisure. She had tossed and turned every night, haunted by the wicked images. Oh, God, if you looked at it like that she was having sexual fantasies about him!