‘Think about it. Sam needs to get to know me, but not in a forced, fake way. If we were dating—’
‘Which we’re not.’
‘If I was the new boyfriend we’d be bound to spend time together.’
He sounded so damned pleased with himself Scarlet was torn between laughter and hysterical tears. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You want me to pretend we’re going out together so you can get to know Sam.’
Me the girlfriend of Roman O’Hagan—sure, and the world really is going to believe that. Heavens, even a three-year-old would see through that one!
‘Not pretend, no.’
The colour seeped out of her face and then flooded back. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Sam must be used to seeing your boyfriends around the place?’
She shook her head, still stunned by his suggestion. ‘No, he isn’t.’
‘Don’t you have a social life, then?’ he asked, clearly not taking her statement at face value.
‘Of course I have a social life. I go to a yoga class and I belong to a quilting—’
His dark brows twitched. ‘Quilting? I frequently can’t tell if you’re on the level or you’re trying to wind me up.’
‘I don’t see why me talking about quilting can possibly be considered trying to wind you up.’
‘I’m not talking about quilting!’ he exploded.
‘Quilting is very relaxing,’ she informed him with dignity. ‘And you have something pretty and practical to show for your efforts at the end of the day. I’ve not got very far yet, but just because you’ve no aptitude for something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick with it.’
‘I am sticking with it but I can’t guarantee for how long. Will you quit talking about quilting?’ he revealed in a low, driven tone. ‘I’m talking about sex, unless you’ve taken some vow of celibacy. Please tell me you’ve not,’ he begged.
An expression of shock spread across his face when, instead of sharing the joke, she looked away. ‘You don’t date…not at all?’
‘Of course I date.’
‘I don’t see what the problem is, then. Why not date me?’
When he said ‘date me’ she was pretty sure it was a euphemism for sleep with me. ‘You don’t see the problem because you’re a sandwich short of a picnic and unused to dealing with rejection.’
‘Rejection I can deal with, but not from a woman who starts trembling with desire and undressing me with her eyes every time she’s in the same room as me.’
The mortified heat rushed to her cheeks. ‘My God, you are so colossally arrogant,’ she breathed.
A wolfish grin split his dark lean features as he looked down into her outraged face. ‘Maybe I am, but also I’m right. Aren’t I, Scarlet?’
Scarlet wasn’t going down that road.
‘You want reasons? Let me see—where shall I start? How do you know I don’t already have a boyfriend?’
‘You said you don’t have time for boyfriends.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘That probably explains your short temper.’ His fuse was certainly getting extremely short.
He could trace the source with great precision to the moment he had walked into her office and found her struggling into that too-tight top. When you lived in a society where you were constantly bombarded with images of provocatively undressed women it was kind of ironic that he had got so totally hung up over a one-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of bare flesh.
‘Everything is about sex with you, isn’t it?’ she accused. ‘You’re obsessed,’ she condemned crossly.
It took something as simple as a throw-away comment sometimes. His dark eyes trailed across her face, the soft contours of which he knew were already fixed in his memory. So was the sound of her laugh and her glare and the way…in fact he could access all her facial expressions any time he liked and also sometimes when he didn’t like.
‘You might not be wrong there,’ he agreed.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do. I think you also know how good sex could be for us,’ he rasped in a throaty voice that turned the heavy feeling low in her belly into an actual ache. ‘But for some reason you’re denying it.’
She closed her eyes and counted to a hundred slowly; all it did was panic her into impetuous speech.
‘Actually I don’t know a damned thing about sex,’ she heard herself announce loudly. ‘And before you offer I don’t want any lessons from you.’
‘Lessons…now that conjures up some very interesting—’ He stopped dead, the teasing expression fading dramatically from his face. Eyes narrowed, he subjected her to a hard, searching scrutiny. ‘Good God!’ he ejaculated hoarsely. ‘You’re a virgin.’
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