again!’ she choked, hating the flush that swept across her skin as she averted her face from his. How dared he seek to taunt her with something she had tried so desperately to forget? ‘You promised that we’d pretend it had never happened—’
‘But that’s all it ever was, Kalera—a pretence. You and I both know it did happen. You can’t wipe out the truth simply by ignoring its existence. At the time, I’ll admit, it seemed to be the wisest course, but circumstances change…’
‘What circumstances?’ she asked, trying to pull together her shattered thoughts, furious with herself for letting him catch her off guard.
‘Well, now you’re no longer a vulnerable, grieving widow, wallowing in guilt over the fact that your sexuality survived your husband’s death. If sleeping with Stephen doesn’t make you feel like the adulteress, then I guess that lets me off the hook, too—’
Familiar as she was with his love of shock tactics, Kalera still gasped as her eyes whipped up to meet his, her husky voice as icy as her face was hot. ‘How dare you?’
Her veil of hair flared out as he spun her around in a flamboyant turn, drawing their clasped hands down against his chest to avoid bumping elbows with other dancers. ‘As a former lover who was made to feel as if I had scarred you for life, I feel I have a right to a certain interest,’ he said piously.
‘You and I were not lovers,’ she corrected him fiercely, her pupils shrinking into tiny pinpoints on ghostly grey backgrounds.
‘You’re arguing over semantics, Kalera.’ He smiled into her angry face. ‘We came as close as two people possibly can to making love…the only thing missing was the final act of penetration, which was somewhat superfluous in any case, since we’d both already had the supreme satisfaction of—’
‘Duncan!’ Kalera’s spluttered protest was accompanied by a frantic squeeze of his fingers and a furtive check of the faces in the immediate vicinity, but luckily no one appeared to have overheard his scandalous words.
‘I suppose if you hadn’t had an orgasm you wouldn’t have felt so guilty afterwards,’ he continued, in defiance of her quietly agonised attempts to hush him. ‘You could have persuaded yourself that you endured rather than enjoyed, that I had abused your trust and taken advantage of you, whereas it turned out that I was the one being used and abused.’
Somehow she had to stop him from saying those awful, awful things out loud. ‘I wasn’t using you—’
‘Not consciously, I’ll allow you that, but it seems highly convenient that you didn’t decide that what we were doing was wrong until after you had everything that you wanted from me. I wonder, would your new lover have been as gracious in the same circumstances?’
‘He’s not my—’ She snapped her teeth shut, appalled at what had almost slipped out.
Navy eyes gleamed like polished silk. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed, his voice soft with an infuriating lilt of amused triumph. ‘You’ve agreed to marry the man and you don’t even know what he’s like in bed? I would have thought Golden Boy would have been anxious to dazzle you with his prowess—’
‘Unlike you, Stephen doesn’t happen to think that sex is all there is to a relationship!’ Kalera tried to quell him with a haughty glare and instead found herself captive to a lambent fire smouldering in his gaze.
‘Not all—but certainly a large part. You can have lust without love but I don’t think a healthy love can exist without a spark of elemental lust and you two don’t exactly light up the room with each other,’ he murmured. ‘Although I suppose if you’re marrying for practical reasons rather than love…’
He was fishing and she knew it, but she couldn’t help snapping, ‘Of course Stephen and I love each other!’
‘Do you?’ Duncan’s scepticism was like sandpaper on her nerves.
‘I have been in love before,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I do know what it’s like!’
His face seemed to go taut, his eyes narrowing. ‘Are you saying that Prior makes you feel the way that Harry did?’
His incredulity gave Kalera the uneasy feeling that she was being backed into a corner she couldn’t see. ‘Yes—no—’ She sounded wishy-washy even to her own ears. ‘It’s totally different—you wouldn’t understand.’
He was not to be so easily dismissed. ‘Try me.’
The harshly pitched invitation seemed redolent with deeper meaning. ‘I have no intention of discussing it with you—’
‘Why? Because Golden Boy wouldn’t like it?’ he jeered. ‘Does he have you so thoroughly under his thumb already, Kalera?’
‘No—because I value my privacy,’ she corrected him. ‘You have no right, whatever was—or was not—between us in the past, to try and manipulate me into confiding in you. I’ve had enough of that kind of thing in my life.’ The last tumbled out as something of an afterthought as she looked for their table, trying to catch a reassuring glimpse of Stephen waiting there for her, but even on tiptoe she wasn’t tall enough to see over the other dancers blocking her view.
‘What do you mean—what confidences has Prior been trying to weasel out of you?’ Duncan’s dark brows steepened in suspicion, his hand tightening on her lower back. ‘I told you that he was operating a hidden agenda.’
Kalera’s reference had had nothing to do with Stephen but she was tired of having to defend herself.
‘If this is another lecture like this morning’s, about my being such an infatuated idiot that I wouldn’t notice the bug over the bed for the louse who was in it—you can stop right there!’
He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Well, how was I to know that you’d refused to sleep with him? You implied that Boy Wonder had swept you off your feet—and into bed was the obvious assumption!’
‘Obvious to you, maybe, but thankfully Stephen is more refined. And anyway, I haven’t refused,’ she was unable to resist flinging at him. ‘It’s just that neither of us wants to rush things. We both happen to be enjoying the process of courtship…’
‘I guess sleeping with the enemy while you were still working for me would have been too much like another act of pseudo-adultery,’ he said slyly.
Kalera flicked her chin up. ‘That had absolutely nothing to do with it!’ she declared, wondering how he managed to home in on her doubts with such unerring skill.
‘Absolutely, huh?’ He tilted his head and the outrageous earring danced provocatively in her sight, reminding her how much Duncan loved to flout the conventions, and how successful he was at goading others to forget their polite inhibitions.
‘So you don’t even feel a teensy-weensy bit unfaithful to me whenever you kiss him?’
She gave him her serene, Mona Lisa smile, while inside she was reeling with shock.
‘I don’t feel guilty for loving him, if that’s what you mean,’ she said mildly, and felt proud of her restraint when the mocking light in his eyes abruptly snuffed out. ‘I think Harry would have liked him,’ she added, intending to put a final period to the conversation.
