His brows rose. ‘I’m perfectly happy with the relationship I have at the moment, thanks very much.’ And he wasn’t sure he felt altogether comfortable discussing any future relationships with the woman he was currently involved with, either. The woman he had spent such an amazing night with. The woman he wanted to spend many more nights with.
‘We don’t have a relationship, Rafe,’ Nina told him evenly.
‘Last night—’
‘Was last night,’ she insisted firmly. ‘And one night does not a relationship make,’ she added decisively.
Rafe stilled as he eyed her guardedly. ‘Then what does it make?’
Nina shrugged slender shoulders. ‘It made for a few very enjoyable hours in bed together.’ She deliberately used the past tense, knowing she would never forget those precious hours, at the same time as she accepted she had been just another conquest for Rafe, just another woman to fall for his charm.
But she had known that when she went to bed with him, so no recriminations there. It wasn’t Rafe’s fault that her emotions had become involved to a degree where Nina wasn’t sure if she wasn’t already half in love with him.
Rafe didn’t care for the past tense in Nina’s statement. ‘And is that your usual modus operandi? Spend the night with a man and then just walk away?’ he persisted, now wondering exactly what Nina had meant the previous evening when she had told him she ‘lacked experience’? That inexperience certainly hadn’t been apparent last night when the two of them had enjoyed each other so completely.
He’d assumed at the time that Nina had meant that she’d had a couple of previous lovers, but nothing serious; her offhand attitude towards him this morning, to the night the two of them had spent together, seemed to imply otherwise. And he didn’t like it; he didn’t like it at all.
Nina didn’t like the sneer she could hear in Rafe’s tone. At the same time she wasn’t willing to back down on the stance she had decided to take where he was concerned.
Rafe might give the outward impression of a relaxed and charming playboy, but after their conversation last night Nina now knew there was another man behind that façade. A man of astute business acumen and deep intelligence. And curiosity.
And intelligence and curiosity were things she simply couldn’t afford where her father and the past were concerned.
But that didn’t stop her from wishing it could have been otherwise.
She had woken a little after six this morning, her body a pleasurable ache as she’d turned to find Rafe sleeping soundly beside her. She hadn’t been able to resist lingering, for just a few minutes, in order to study him in the early morning sunlight streaming in through the windows.
His face had appeared almost boyish in his relaxed state, the overlong darkness of his hair a silky curtain about those relaxed patrician features. Long lashes a dark sweep above the sharpness of his cheekbones, chiselled lips curving in a smile even in his sleep.
The sheet had fallen down to his waist, leaving his bronzed and muscled chest bare. His chest was covered in that light dusting of ebony hair that formed a vee down to the flatness of his navel, and lower, to where his shaft already lay aroused against his stomach.
Rafe was, without a doubt, the most beautiful man Nina had ever seen.
And last night he had been all hers, to kiss and touch. Their lovemaking was beyond anything Nina had ever imagined it could be, their bodies seeming to be totally attuned to pleasuring each other, each kiss, each caress a symphony of that pleasure.
It had been a beautiful night. One that Nina never intended to forget. But, as she had lain beside Rafe, drinking in her fill of him, she had known that it was over. That, for her father’s sake, it had to be.
She certainly wasn’t about to put her father at risk and become Rafe’s ‘sometimes’ girl. She knew Rafe well enough, his history with women well enough, to know that, despite their closeness last night, he had no intentions of settling down with one woman.
She gave a dismissive smile. ‘There’s nothing worse than waking up the morning after and turning over and being sorry that the person beside you is there.’
Rafe drew in a hissing breath, his eyes as hard as the gold they resembled. ‘And is that what happened to you? Did you wake up this morning and look at me and regret last night had ever happened?’
‘Don’t be silly, Rafe.’ She forced a tinkling, dismissive laugh, knowing she would never, could never, regret waking up beside Rafe this morning. But if he wanted to think that was what she had done, then perhaps she should just leave him under that misapprehension.