Savage Courtship

He dropped his hands from her shoulders, his eyes blazing with cobalt fire. ‘What in the hell are you talking about? I’m not sterile!’

He sounded so furiously certain that Vanessa’s heart squeezed in her chest. ‘You have children?’ She faltered. It had never even occurred to her. Oh, she was so naïve!

‘No, I don’t have children!’ he shouted at her, so furiously offended that she took a step back.

‘Then—then how do you know you’re not sterile?’ she stammered with what she felt was impeccable logic.

‘Because—’ He stopped and uttered a word that made her pinch her mouth primly. ‘I don’t know—all right? But I have no reason to not believe I’m not—’ He ran a hand through his hair in an uncharacteristic gesture of helplessness. ‘Oh, hell, will you stop confusing the damned issue while I’m trying to make a confession?’

‘I’m confusing it?’ Vanessa couldn’t help an involuntary smile, which seemed to infuriate him beyond bearing. She had never seen him so close to losing control. It was quite fascinating.

As she watched, round-eyed, he took a deep, controlling breath and said very, very carefully, ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Vanessa, is that there is not the ghost of a chance that I got you pregnant that night—’ It was a measure of his mood that there wasn’t even the glimmer of amused recognition of his inadvertant pun.

‘Oh?’ Her limited sexual experience sent her imagination haywire. ‘You mean you—er—withdrew...before you...?’

‘No, I didn’t withdraw,’ he snarled. ‘There was nothing for me to have to withdraw from.’

Vanessa looked at him, appalled. Her colour rose, along with her vivid curiosity. ‘You mean we just...did it without actually—?’

‘We didn’t do anything in bed that night!’ he exploded. ‘Correction, we did do something,’ he amended grimly. ‘We slept.’

‘Slept?’

He shrugged, easing the motion down through the rest of his body as if loosening it up for combat.

‘Slept?’ She repeated sharply. It was finally beginning to sink in.

‘Yes, you know, that state of unconsciousness wherein one is completely relax—?

??

‘We slept!’

He bowed his head, awaiting the storm. It wasn’t long in breaking.

‘Why, you—’ Vanessa rounded on him like a furious tornado. ‘Are you telling me that I didn’t—?’

‘Ravish me? I’m afraid not,’ he said meekly.

‘That you didn’t—?’

‘Ravish you—no.’

‘That we just spent the whole time sleeping! And you expect me to believe that? What do you think I am, an idiot?’ she screeched.

‘No, an innocent.’ He was unwise enough to expand on that. ‘If I’d made love to you that night, Vanessa, believe me you would have been in no doubt of it the next morning. You would have been aching and tender in places I’m too polite to mention—’

‘You—polite?’ she spat. ‘Was it polite to let me think—? You...you bastard!’ She went bright red at what she had thought. How he must have been laughing at her!

‘Tit for tat, Vanessa,’ he pointed out, but Vanessa was in no mood to be fair. Her temper had reached flashpoint and her hand had streaked out and cracked across his face before she even realised her intention.

‘That’s one,’ he said so coolly that she lashed out again, across the other cheek. His head snapped to the side with the force of the fresh blow. Slowly he looked back at her.

‘That’s two.’

She wasn’t foolish enough to make it three but she had a desperate need to goad him out of that infuriating calmness.

‘What are you trying to do, frighten me?’ she sneered, circling him in a swirling of skirts like a black thunderstorm building up static electricity.