don’t mind, but I used your toothbrush.’
‘You can use anything you like but keep the volume down,’ he pleaded, holding his head.
‘Are you hung over?’ Did he even remember making love? She smiled her way through a stab of totally irrational bitterness. For her this one-night stand had been memorable, her first, but that didn’t mean it had any significance for him.
‘No, but I’m human,’ he retorted. ‘Being that cheerful in the morning,’ he concluded positively, ‘is not.’
‘So you’re not a morning person.’
The scowling lines of his staggeringly handsome face melted without warning into a wicked grin as he leaned back against the pillows, hands behind his head, and raised a mocking brow. ‘There are those that might dispute that...’
Her cheeks burning, Lara lifted her chin. ‘I’ll take your word on that one,’ she said, wondering whether he could be any more smugly self-satisfied. Even if his smugness was justified, it was an unattractive trait, and discovering a flaw in this perfect specimen made her feel slightly more cheerful as she moved across the room towards a mirror, combing her fingers through her wet curls.
Watching the gentle sway of her breasts against the red silk as she walked across the room, he felt his lust stir lazily. Actually, not so lazily.
‘I have never slept with a virgin before.’ And it had not been on any list of things to do in the near future.
She swivelled gracefully around, the expression on her beautiful face wary.
‘You’ve clearly got no sexual hang-ups...’ Though she did possess a delicious ability to blush. ‘It’s none of my business,’ he conceded, ‘but why?’
She stood there, poised, he suspected, on the point of telling him to go to hell, when she shrugged and pulled out a stool, sinking with a sigh and a rustle of silk onto it.
‘You know, I’ve been asking myself just that,’ she admitted with disarming candour. ‘I planned to lose my virginity last night, just not with you. I never really thought that casual sex would work for me without the emotional stuff, you know—liking, a connection...but it did quite beautifully, thank you.’
‘Liking...not love?’
Her candid gaze slid away as she got to her feet. ‘I think we communicate on more of a lust level.’
‘I’m assuming there is a man somewhere that came with the emotional stuff wondering where the hell you are.’
If it had been him, he’d have died a thousand deaths through the night imagining all the things that could have happened to her. ‘What were you thinking?’ he growled. ‘You could have met anyone!’
‘I expect Mark is asleep still.’
He reined in the surge of emotion. Sharing casual sex did not entitle him to bad-mouth a guy he didn’t know, although the confirmation that he existed at all had not improved his mood, and he could think of no circumstance that excused a man allowing a woman to wander around a strange city alone at night.
‘Poor guy,’ he said in a voice laden with insincerity.
Lara missed the insincerity but heard the words, and saw a red mist.
She turned slowly, rounding on him with eyes shooting green flames.
‘Poor guy,’ she echoed. ‘Poor guy! He’s a...’ Her mouth closed over a word her mum would have been shocked her daughter even knew, and, teeth clenched, she stalked towards the bathroom.
‘So you’re not planning a kiss-and-make-up session.’ The relief he felt was on her behalf, he told himself. Lara deserved something better.
Lara’s anger faded as quickly as it had sparked into life. ‘I overreacted, didn’t I?’ She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. ‘Mark is a total and utter louse, but the situation is as much my fault as his. If I hadn’t been walking around thinking I’d found my soulmate I’d have seen this coming a mile off.’
‘Your hero fell off his pedestal.’ It seemed suddenly sad that she would learn all too soon there were no heroes. ‘So what did he do?’
She gave a laugh that rang with self-mockery and shook her head. ‘Oh, why not? It’s a bit of a cliché really. I came here with my boss—he asked and I said yes.
‘What I didn’t know was that I was a last-minute stand-in for his girlfriend who couldn’t come, and he’d paid for the room, and he is a bit tight with money.’
It was a fault she’d been prepared to accept when he had still seemed the sensitive man of her dreams.
‘It turns out he asked because he thinks I’m basically easy, actually I think he’s not the only one, not that I care what people think.’
Hearing her fall back on a defence that was only used by people who did care, Raoul was forced to subdue a surge of protective tenderness.
‘And the virgin thing,’ she continued. ‘I think he thought he’d been sold a...what do they call it...?’
‘False bill of goods?’
She nodded. ‘I said I was going to sleep with the first man I saw. I was almost right.’
‘This boss of yours sounds like a total loser.’
‘I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.’
He raised a sardonic brow. ‘Because I asked.’ Which in itself was not just unusual and totally out of character, it was completely unheard of.
A few murmured nothings that constituted post-coital conversation were normally the precursor to him rolling out of bed and making a practised exit.
Except it was never his bed he was exiting.
From every angle this was a weird situation, almost as weird as finding he wanted to prolong this. He didn’t even have a major objection to hearing her open up more, talk nonsense...maybe even contribute to that nonsense himself...?
He didn’t read anything significant into it, recognising that it was not an emotional connection that was making him behave so out of character, but the knowledge that the world he had escaped from in her body last night would come rushing back the moment she vanished.
‘Look, I should be going before anyone...’
He looked up and saw she was looking at a framed photo on the wall.
‘That’s my mother.’
‘Oh!’ Had she really been that obvious? ‘She doesn’t look Italian.’ Everything about him epitomised Lara’s own version of an idealised Latin male but his English was perfect and she couldn’t detect any accent.
‘I’m Italian on my father’s side. My mother was American with a Spanish mother.’ And you are sharing this information why exactly, Raoul? Maybe the opening-up thing was contagious?
‘Your mother’s dead?’
