something like that but he had clearly underestimated his own primitive side. Under the civilised veneer, he was as untamed as they came.
‘What...what do you mean?’ Sophie stammered. Of course, he had no insight into her murky past, but she still had a moment of wondering whether he had somehow worked everything out, including her feelings for him.
‘I don’t suppose you ever anticipated entering into a sexless marriage.’
Sophie went beetroot-red and didn’t snatch back her hand when he reached out and idly played with her fingers.
‘I...er...I...’
‘No.’ He stopped her mid awkward sentence. ‘Like I said, there’s no need to explain because I understand.’
‘You do?’
‘You were young. You weren’t to know that it takes all sorts to make the world go round and some men find it harder than others to face their sexuality.’
‘Sorry?’
For the first time in living memory, Javier wasn’t seeing red when he thought about the loser she had tossed him over for. In many ways, he felt sorry for her. With financial problems surfacing on the home front, and a man with control over purse strings her family needed, she had failed to see that he had his own agenda and had tied the knot in the expectation that life would be normal.
She’d been sorely mistaken.
Javier shunted aside thorny questions about whether she had loved the guy or not. That was then and this was now and, in the interim, she sure as hell had had her wake-up call on that front.
A virgin widow and now here she was. Here they both were...
Sophie was reeling from the series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Red-blooded alpha male that Javier was, he had jumped to the simplest conclusion. She was good-looking, she and Roger had married... The only possible reason they might not have consummated their marriage would be because he physically hadn’t been able to, and the only reason that might have been the case would be because he just wasn’t attracted to women.
End of story.
Was she going to set him straight on that count? Was she going to tell him the series of events that had led to her sexless union? The depth of feeling she had carried for him, Javier? Was she going to risk him knowing how madly in love with him she had been and then finding the link and working out just how madly in love she still was with him?
‘Roger, gay...’ He might as well have been for the amount of notice he had paid her.
‘Key thing here is this, Soph—it was nothing you did.’
‘Really?’ She very much doubted that but Javier nodded briskly.
‘I went out with a functioning alcoholic a couple of years ago,’ he confided, drawing her closer to him and liking her lack of resistance. ‘You would never have guessed that she drank her daily intake of calories. She was a model with an erratic, hectic lifestyle and she was very careful.’
‘Didn’t you suspect anything?’ Sophie stared at him, round-eyed. It was a relief to have the conversation off her for a moment.
‘We were both busy, meeting in various foreign locations either where she was modelling or where I happened to be. I only twigged when she started having more ambitious plans for our...relationship.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means she decided that meeting in various foreign locations wasn’t enough. She wanted something of a more permanent arrangement.’
‘Poor woman,’ Sophie said with heartfelt sympathy.
‘Misplaced sympathies,’ Javier said wryly. ‘She knew the game before it started. Not my fault if somewhere along the line she forgot the rules.’
She knew the game the way I know the game, Sophie thought, and I’d better make sure I don’t forget the rules or else...
And with a finger in the family company—frankly more than just a finger—parting company might be a little more difficult than he would want. Not just a simple case of ignoring calls and text messages after signing off with a bunch of flowers and a thanks-but-no-thanks farewell note...
‘So how did you, er, find out that there was a problem?’
‘She surprised me by inviting me over to her place in London for dinner.’
‘And it was the first time you’d been there?’
‘Like I said, the rules of the game...they don’t include cosy domestic scenes.’
‘You eat out all the time?’
Javier shrugged. ‘It works. I’m only interested in the bedroom when it comes to any woman’s house.’
Sophie thought that he’d seen more than just the bedroom of this particular house, but then, she knew, circumstances weren’t exactly typical even though the ground rules would be exactly the same.
‘But I went along and it didn’t take me long to see just how many bottles of alcohol there were in places where food should have been stored. And it took even less time to unearth the mother lode because there had been no reason for her to hide any of it as she didn’t share the flat with anyone. When I confronted her, she tried to make me believe that it was somehow my fault that she drank as much as she did, because I wouldn’t commit to her. She clung and cried and said that her drinking had gone through the roof because she was depressed that our relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Of course, I left her immediately and then got in touch with a private counsellor specialising in people with alcohol-related addictions. But the point I’m making is that there are just some people who won’t face up to their own shortcomings and will take every opportunity to shift the blame onto other people.’
‘And you think that, er, that Roger...’
‘I think nothing.’ Javier gestured in a way that was exotically foreign and then leant in closer to her. ‘It would be a tough call for a man to find the courage to face up to his own sexual inclinations when those sexual inclinations risk putting him outside his comfort zone and alienating him from the people he has grown up with.’
‘Roger was certainly a coward,’ Sophie said bitterly.
‘But all that is in the past.’ He waved his hand elegantly. ‘We find ourselves here and I’m glad you felt comfortable enough to bare all to me.’
‘You would have found out anyway,’ she said vaguely.
‘You shouldn’t have put your clothes back on. Now I’m going to have to strip them off you all over again. No, scrap that—what I’d really like is for you to take them off for me, bit by slow bit, a piece at a time, so that I can appreciate every delectable bit of your glorious body...’
‘I...I can’t do that.’
‘You’re shy...’ Had she ever undressed in front of her husband? he wondered. Was all of this completely new to her? He confessed to himself that he was tickled pink and turned on like hell by the thought of
