her face like a cloud. ‘I still don’t know why I did that—I just saw the bar and …’
‘Maybe it was fate?’
Her feathery brows lifted in surprise. He was the last person that she had expected to hear talk about fate. ‘I don’t believe in fate. I slept with an incredibly sexy man. That wasn’t fate—it was hormones!’ And given the opportunity she suspected nine out of ten unattached females would have done the same. She would have thought that she was the one who wouldn’t have been attracted to him, but apparently she was no different. But he was, she thought as her glance drifted across the carved, perfectly symmetrical lines of his bronzed face, a dreaminess drifting into her expression. He made her think of some warrior with a poet’s soul—his mouth was definitely poetry. The dreaminess was swallowed up by a stab of hungry longing as she studied the sensual outline.
‘Incredibly sexy …?’
She jumped guiltily and dodged the wicked gleam in his eyes and found herself staring again at his mouth. Once she had started it was hard to stop. She cleared her throat and forced the words past the achy occlusion that made speaking difficult. It felt like wading through syrup.
‘Like I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.’
He grinned but didn’t deny it, she noticed. 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.
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