She nodded, her lips too dry to speak, despite the dampness of the steamy air.
He narrowed his eyes, taking in her inertia and her heavy eyelids. ‘You’d all stripped down to bikini bottoms. And yours was gold—so that it looked all hard and shiny—yet it clung like syrup to the curve of your hips. And I didn’t even notice the others. I couldn’t see them. All I could see was you. You. And your skin was glistening, just as it’s glistening now. Soft, creamy breasts topped with tight little rosebuds…’ He let his voice trail away.
‘Drew, please—’ she managed, wondering whether he knew that those rosebuds were tightening now beneath the concealing blanket of foam.
‘I’d been running and I was pouring with sweat, and I saw you stretched out on a towel with your arms raised so languidly above your head, and I could barely move—’ It had been one of the most exquisitely frustrating erections of his life, and in forcing himself to quell it he had only succeeded in making himself ache all the more.
‘Drew, don’t—’ She moved her hips restlessly. ‘Don’t…’
Ignoring her plea, he simply stared very hard at her. ‘And do you remember what I did next?’
‘You shouted at me and threw me your T-shirt,’ she responded dully. ‘And told me to cover myself up.’
‘So I did.’ He gave a disbelieving laugh as he recalled the hypnotic lure of seeing her pale flesh contrasted against the darker curves of the baking pebbles. That lure had kept him abroad far longer than he had intended, for he’d seen the danger she represented—a danger he had not contemplated at that stage in his young life.
Yet, perversely, the more he denied it, the more her allure had stubbornly refused to go away. And every woman he was intimate with in those subsequent years wore shiny gold bikini bottoms in the fevered longings of his mind.
He came and crouched down beside the bath, so that his face was on a level with hers, and she found that she couldn’t look away from the compelling blue blaze of his eyes. ‘God—what a fool I was with you, Shelley. To be so in awe of your innocence that I let it control me!’
She shook her head, but it felt weighted and useless, too heavy for her neck. ‘Nothing controls you, Drew. You’re the one who does the controlling.’
He reached his hand out and trickled a finger down the damp flush of her cheek, feeling the unresisting silk of her skin. ‘Am I really?’ he questioned softly. ‘No, I don’t think so. I let my conscience control me for too long—protecting my innocent bride-to-be, when all the time she couldn’t wait…couldn’t wait for marriage and the man she professed to love. You wanted sex so badly that you were prepared to give yourself to the first man who came along, weren’t you, Shelley?’
She leaned her head back against the bath, too weary to protest, too comfortable to move. ‘I’m too tired to argue with you,’ she sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Oh, yes, it was,’ he contradicted forcefully. ‘You know damned well it was!’
She shook her head. ‘No, Drew. You placed me on an impossible pedestal—which you seemed to glory in smashing from underneath my feet! It was all right for you! You’d lived a little; you’d gone travelling and tasted all that the world had to offer. And then you came home to your virgin bride—how perfect! But you never gave a thought to my needs, or my feelings, did you? You couldn’t resist those women abroad, but you could certainly resist me!’
‘So the way you behaved was my fault—is that what you’re saying, Shelley?’
Suddenly he stood up and moved away and her eyes followed him, missing him, needing him, wishing that she could travel back in time and that everything could be so different.
But it couldn’t. And she wasn’t going to open herself up to more hurt by hankering after a man who had no interest in her other than sexual. Especially a man who had once loved her.
He stood there staring down at her, his face a weave of complex planes and shadows, and she wondered if he was aware of how much she desired him.
Even after all this time.
‘Get out,’ she mumbled, her eyelids feeling as if someone had perched lead weights on them.
He frowned. ‘I’m not going anywhere until I’m convinced that you’re not going to fall asleep. Do you have any idea of how long you’ve been lying there?’
‘Not long enough!’ She struggled to keep her eyes open and finally got around to asking what she should have asked the moment he’d nonchalantly strolled into the bathroom. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’