What he failed to tell her was that he would have broken it off with Victoria, anyway. Would have broken it off even if he hadn’t found those mildly incriminating text messages on her mobile phone. Had been secretly relieved that the onus of ending their relationship hadn’t fallen on his shoulders.
‘And you never corrected those assumptions because they suited you. You wanted to get me into bed, and the fastest way of doing it was to lead me to believe that you had broken your engagement to Victoria.’
‘I didn’t need a fast way of doing that. We would have fallen into bed together anyway.’ But he flushed, because there was a modicum of truth in what she was saying. He had known that, however much she was attracted to him, she would not have leapt into his arms had she thought for a passing minute that she was a plaything. He resented the fact that she was throwing all of this in his face when she could so easily have accepted the situation for what it was. Two people who had temporarily reconnected.
‘Why?’ Megan looked at him unblinkingly. ‘Why did you bother? Why didn’t you just leave me alone?’
‘I realised that I still wanted you. I also realised that you still wanted me.’
‘And so you thought…why not? Is that it?’ Yet again, she was good enough to have a romp with, but not good enough for a committed relationship.
It seemed that neither of them had grown up after all. She was still looking for the impossible, and he was still convinced that she didn’t fit the bill. The bitter truth, she thought, was that she fitted the bill even less now. In the space of seven years he had become so powerful that the concept of hitching his wagon to a woman who defiantly refused to obey him would be unthinkable.
‘You think that you have somehow been insulted? What you fail to understand is that what’s happened between us needed to happen!’
Lost in a daze of her own agonising thoughts, Megan barely surfaced to hear his latest piece of wisdom.
Her brain caught up with what he was saying after a ten-second delay, and she looked at him blankly.
‘What?’
‘I am saying,’ Alessandro repeated slowly, ‘that we needed to get each other out of our systems. I am saying that the only way of doing that was to have a relationship, allow this overpowering mutual lust to burn itself out…’
Need? Lust? The words which she knew would have thrilled most women to death when applied to Alessandro dropped like poison into her consciousness.
While she had been blissfully toying with more romantic notions, he had summed everything up in an emotion that blew strong and then faded away. He had allowed her the illusion of pretending that there was more to what they had because he wanted to tire of her, and the only way he could do that was to have her until he no longer wanted her.
‘You’ve said enough.’ She forced her wooden body to move. ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going to go upstairs and get my stuff now.’ She reached for the ludicrously expensive jewellery adorning her and carefully removed it. ‘You can have this back.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A dark flush highlighted his sharp, arrogant cheekbones. ‘What the hell am I going to do with women’s jewellery?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’ Since he was making no effort to take what she was offering him back, she casually dropped it on one of the side tables in the room. ‘You can always give it to your next conquest. Most women adore this sort of thing.’
Alessandro watched her exit the room without fuss. No way was he going to follow her. He had a positive dislike of demanding women, and what could be more demanding than a woman who laid her cards on the table and threatened a walk-out unless her conditions were met?
He hadn’t been lying when he had told her that he’d needed to get her out of his system. Whether she wanted to be realistic or not, he also hadn’t been lying when he had told her that the same applied to her. If she wanted to ditch what they had, then so be it.
He decided that it just proved beyond the shadow of a doubt how much of a liability a woman like her was. She didn’t accept things. She stridently made her opinions felt, even if she could see the opposition all around her. Did he need a woman like that in his life, however good the sex was?
He was assailed by a host of conflicting emotions, but when he tried to pin them down, he found that he couldn’t. He could hear her rustling above him, collecting her things. There was a part of him that wanted to try and stop her, but of course, he wasn’t going to fall victim to that pathetic instinct. Much more overwhelming was his sense of pride, and with pride came a gut-deep certainty that this was a narrow escape.