The wicked grin made him look years younger and even more wildly attractive.
‘She must have been very young, your mother, when she died. It was unexpected?’
She nodded. Her mother had been a very young sixty-four.
‘She was in her forties when she had me. She’d been ill for a while.’ The onset of the illness that had struck her mother down had been insidious, although not immediately life-threatening. But she had been living with the effects of the degenerative disease that would eventually kill her. ‘I was angry.’
‘Yes.’ He knew about anger.
During his stays on the oncology ward Roman had seen that reaction to death, seen enough people suffering the effects of shock and grief that it seemed to him that it was sometimes worse for the healthy ones who had to stand by helpless as their loved ones suffered and sometimes lost their battles for life.
The point was he should have seen the signs. He could recognise now with the wisdom of hindsight that she had been displaying all of them that night in the bar.
Roman closed his eyes and groaned.
Izzy looked at him uncertainly and he looked very pale when he looked at her again. A moment later he swore in his native tongue.
‘You were in shock.’ And he’d been too busy wallowing in self-pity to notice. He suddenly froze, his dark eyes swivelling her way. ‘You just said you’d never done it before.’
Izzy expelled a choky sigh. Hell, just when she thought she was safe.
‘Well, I don’t make a habit of picking up strange men in bars. One-night stands are not really my style.’
He studied her down-bent head with a frown before moving his head slowly from side to side in a firm negative motion. ‘No, that wasn’t what you meant.’
Shifting uneasily under his severe gaze, she walked across to the sofa and sat down. ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell me what I mean. I am quite capable of saying what I mean.’
Roman refused to be distracted. ‘And capable of lying, it would seem.’
‘So you think one-night stands are my style …’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘It was your first time.’ Even as he said it he rejected the statement; he had not actively avoided taking a virgin to bed, but then neither did he avoid meteorites. They both existed but the chances of encountering one were pretty remote.
She was not laughing or at the very least looking amused by such a preposterous notion. Instead she refused to meet his gaze and gave a defensive shrug.
‘IT WAS a figure of speech.’
‘A figure of speech as in you were a virgin.’
Roman’s sarcasm made her flush and for a moment Izzy considered lying. But did it really matter if he knew the truth now? She thought not, so decided to come clean.
‘My only time, actually.’ She flashed him a warning glance and added fiercely, ‘And don’t ask me why because, to be honest, I don’t know.’
She did have her suspicions, though, the most likely that being a twenty-year-old virgin had been a form of rebellion for her—not against parental control but against a total lack of parental control.
While other girls’ parents gave them curfews and warned them of the dangers of teenage sex, her liberal mother had been telling her it was fine if she wanted to have boyfriends stay the night.
Izzy had always found such conversations excruciatingly embarrassing, but her mother had favoured what she called a frank and open exchange of views.
‘You didn’t act like a virgin.’
‘How is a virgin meant to act, Roman?’ She adopted an expression of fake interest as she started to feel angry. ‘In the strange world you live in.’
‘I live in the real world. You’re the one who …’ He stopped and pinned her with an intense, almost accusing stare. ‘You must have had boyfriends?’ he persisted, remembering how incredibly tight she’d been and her sharp gasp of shock as he had thrust deeply into her …
‘For a semester I was in love with one of my mother’s research assistants,’ she recalled with a reminiscent grin. ‘Happy now?’
He swallowed … happy? Happy that he had taken her innocence and not even noticed!
‘So you had a relationship with this—?’ A relationship that stopped short of sex. As he remembered her cool hands on his body and her hot, sweet tongue … that did not seem likely at all.
‘Simon. No, it turned out he was gay.’ She could smile now at the memory of her big moment when she had finally worked up the courage to ask him out. He had been nice about it and quite kind, but eventually the story had reached her mother, who had found it extremely amusing.
Unable to maintain contact with his intense stare, Izzy looked away.
Roman tried to think past the static buzz in his head. He felt numb. A virgin! It seemed impossible. The innate sensuality she projected had been one of the things that had drawn him to her. She was the most passionate creature he had ever held; the need to possess her had been all-consuming and she had matched his hunger and desire every step of the way.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He still couldn’t get his head around it, but it had to be true. There was no reason for her to lie. She had seemed totally at ease with her body, completely uninhibited and endlessly fascinated by his body. The question of her virginity had not even crossed his mind—why would it? She had seemed almost to know what he wanted before he had himself.
Face it, Roman, she was the best sex you ever had and she was a virgin. The staggering thought kept hitting him and the shock was not getting any less with each successive impact.
She turned her head, recognised the anger in his tense stance and shook her head. That was a reaction she had not anticipated. ‘Why didn’t you notice?’ she countered.
At the time Izzy had presumed that he would.
She’d thought her sheer cluelessness would alert him and had desperately hoped it would not be a deal breaker.
But amazingly she hadn’t felt awkward at all, or embarrassed or shy, which was insane because previously the idea of even being naked with a man had been something she didn’t feel comfortable with. The entire intimacy thing had always been a problem for her, not because she was prudish but because she was choosy.
She had thought about it afterwards a lot and wondered if perhaps the fact that it had been anonymous sex, that he hadn’t known her or had any preconceptions about her, had allowed her to let go. For once she didn’t have to be the person everyone thought she was—nice, calm, sensible Izzy—she could be who she wanted to be. It had been the most liberating experience
