Stacy gave him a startled look. ‘Everything?’
‘You know what you implied that last day in Cornwall, you wanted me to think he was your lover. But you’re innocent, aren’t you?’ he probed.
‘Innocent?’ she queried.
‘A virgin.’
‘Not in thought.’ How many times had she imagined being made fully his!
‘But in body,’ he insisted.
‘And if I wasn’t?’ she challenged.
‘Then I’d still want you. You’re like a fever in my blood.’
‘That doesn’t change anything. If I married you I would only have to look at another man to know the cruel edge of your tongue.’
‘That’s only because I love you.’ He sounded agonised.
‘But you’ve been like this from the start, ever since we first met.’
‘Because I loved you even then. I once told you to imagine I’d fallen in love with your screen test. Well, don’t imagine it any more—believe it. That’s exactly the way it happened. You’re the reason I’d finally decided to divorce Margaret, the reason I had to be a free man when I came over to England.’
Stacy searched his face for some sign of mockery—and found none. She shook her head. ‘You have to be joking!’
‘It’s never seemed particularly funny to me. As you know, I insisted on choosing the person to play Kate myself. I looked at hundreds of screen tests, some of them good, some of them bad. But as soon as I saw you I seemed to go under. I even had them make up my own personal copy of it. Over the next few months I looked at it constantly, hardly able to believe the way I felt. What I did know was that if you felt the same way about me when we met then I had to marry you. Thank God I hadn’t actually asked Margaret for a divorce before she died, I would have felt as guilty as hell. But when I finally met you—!’
‘Yes?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘You were more beautiful than I ever imagined. I’d looked at that damn film so many times that when I saw you get in the lift that day I could hardly believe it was you. The costume was the same, and yet the girl inside it was of this era, a product of this modern permissive society. That was when the jealousy started,’ he admitted with a sigh.
‘Quite unnecessarily.’
‘Yes,’ Jake agreed softly. ‘But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. You have to remember that I lived with Margaret’s other men for so long that each man you came into contact with seemed to be a threat to me. That night Forbes tried to force you I felt murderous. And then when he taunted you on the film set—God, I hate his guts!’
‘So do most people. But I think his attack on me was partly my own fault. I should never have had dinner with him. I only did it to thwart you.’
‘Because you thought I was married.’
‘Yes,’ she nodded.
‘I don’t think I was completely over the shock of Margaret’s death, maybe I still felt married. Whatever the reason you shied away from me, completely.’
‘You’d lie about your identity,’ she reminded him. ‘I found that unforgivable.’
‘Yes. I’d seen you on film, but I couldn’t get to know the real you that way. I had no knowing whether my being Jake Weston would make any difference to how you feel about me.’
‘Make me more interested, you mean,’ she said dryly.
He grimaced. ‘That backfired on me too. After that you seemed to find every other man in the vicinity worthy of your notice but treated me with contempt. I could have killed Forbes at the time, but in a way his treatment of you enabled me to get close to you again. My offer to keep other men at bay seemed a good idea at the time.’
‘Until you saw me kiss Matthew—a purely brotherly kiss, I might add. After that I needed protection from you. You—you almost—’
‘Almost took you as brutally as Forbes had tried to do. Yes,’ he admitted with a deep sigh. ‘I couldn’t control my feelings for you any longer. In some ways you seemed to be everything I had ever wanted, and yet I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that some other man had taken you first. I’ve never thought of myself as a possessive man, with Margaret as an example I couldn’t be, but to think of other men touching your body, loving you the way I wanted to, knowing every delicious inch of you,’ he shuddered. ‘I couldn’t take that. And then you told me I would be the first!’
‘And you didn’t believe me.’
‘But I wanted to! You’ll never know how badly I wanted to believe that.’