She saw him flinch back from her feverish words. A dark tide of colour burned up under his skin, and he looked almost as wretched as she felt.
'I can't go to bed with you, Dominic; I can't involve myself in a brief affair with you, because it would tear me apart. I love you too much.'
There, it was said. He would leave her alone now. She turned away from him, waiting to hear the sound of the door closing behind him. Dominic had his own code of honour; now that he knew the truth he would understand, and so she waited, tense and frighteningly close to the edge of her self-control.
When he touched her she flinched almost as much as he had done earlier, but his grip compelled her to turn round and look at him.
'Let me get this straight.' He was speaking slowly, breathing heavily as though fighting to control a huge inner rage. 'You won't make love with me because you love me?'
For the first time in her life she was frightened of him. He wasn't reacting the way she had expected. He looked angry, violently, dangerously angry, and he was looking at her in a way that made her skin crawl with fear.
'Is that what you're saying?'
He shook her and she tensed beneath his hand. It was too late to lie now. 'Yes.'
He released her so unexpectedly that she fell back against the bed, watching him with nervous eyes. He was staring up at the ceiling, swallowing hard.
'I don't believe this.' His voice was flat and hard.
'Why do you think I made love with you in the first place?' Her voice was nowhere near as self-controlled as his had been. 'It certainly wasn't because of anything to do with David.'
'All these years I've fought against coming back… told myself that what you felt for me was just an adolescent
's emotion. I kept in touch with your parents, hoarding every little nugget of information I got from them. I thought you were happy in London—the career woman who put her job first and her lovers second. I tried every way I knew to forget you, and to stop myself from going mad because I'd fallen in love with a child of seventeen. Have you any idea what that does to a man? It made me feel like some sort of pervert. It got so bad that I couldn't trust myself alone with you. What in God's name made you think that all I wanted was a cheap affair?'
She was almost too stunned to speak.
'I… You only said that you wanted me… I thought it was just sex… When I mentioned Amanda you said she was looking for a husband, and implied that you weren't interested.'
'Of course I damned well wasn't! There's only ever been one woman I've wanted to marry, and that's you.'
He reached for her, dragging her into his arms, his voice muffled against her. 'Christy… when I think how close we've just come to losing each other… Tonight when you said you didn't want me…' He broke of, gripping her tightly.
'I couldn't bear to make love with you. I was terrified of what I might reveal. Did you really love me all those years ago?' She couldn't believe it.
His smile was slightly crooked. 'Want me to show you how much?' He laughed softly at her expression. 'When you were seventeen I was twenty-five, plenty old enough to know what I wanted from life, and old enough to be terrified of the way I felt. One of the reasons I went to the States was that I felt I couldn't trust myself not to manipulate you into a relationship you weren't really ready for. It would have been all too easy to take advantage of your adolescent feelings for me and to persuade you into marriage, and I knew that wouldn't be right.'
His thumb stroked the softness of her lower lip and she caught it in her teeth, biting it gently, her eyes widening as she caught his harshly indrawn breath.
'The first thing I'm going to do when this snow lets us out of here is to get us a special licence,' he told her huskily.
It was her turn to laugh, a confident, happy sound, knowing that he loved her. 'And until then?' she teased.
'When I asked you this afternoon if you were pregnant, I was secretly hoping that you might be. Then you would have had to marry me, or so I told myself, and I'm afraid a rather base male instinct still makes me feel that it would be a very good way of making sure that you can't run away from me.'
Dominic's child. Emotion quivered through her, and she held out her arms to him.
'Stay with me tonight,' she whispered against his ear. 'We've already spent far too many nights apart.'
'Are you sure that this is really what you want?' She could see the tension in his eyes as he waited for her response.
'I'm sure.'
Christy moved her mouth to his, kissing him slowly, savouring the taste and texture of him.
Against the provocatively lazy movement of her lips he muttered, 'If you keep on doing that, you're going to get yourself in an awful lot of trouble.'
Suppressing the bubble of laughter welling up inside her, Christy responded softly, 'Mmm, do you know, that was exactly what I had in mind.'
*****