and … and I …’ His face contorted with a grimace of self-disgust, he broke off and dragged a hand down his jaw. Hearing the sound in his head, he felt as if he’d never be able to forget her sharp cry. His voice dropped as he accused, ‘You wept.’
Silently, and he had held her shaking body and felt like a total animal.
Megan laid a tentative hand on his shoulder; his muscles felt rock-hard and rigid. ‘It wasn’t because you hurt me,’ she protested, stunned by his reading of the situation.
‘If I had known—’ His jaw clenched; the knowledge that he had hurt her felt like a blade sliding between his ribs. ‘But how could you be … Why?’
Megan groaned and scanned his face. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’
He looked at her as though she had just announced she was actually a Martian. ‘Let it go!’ He’d waited two years for that moment and when it had happened he had blown it! When he thought of the way he had … ‘Por Dios! I think you owe me an explanation,’ he announced grimly.
Her eyes slid guiltily from his. I’m yours and I love you. I actually pretty much always have, was a fairly accurate summing-up of the situation, but she doubted it would go down too well.
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that you—?’
Her voice tight with humiliation, Megan cut across his incensed demand. ‘You didn’t seem all that interested in conversation at the time.’
The line of colour across the angle of Emilio’s cheekbones deepened as their glances clashed. Even now the air between them hummed with a sexual tension that was almost tangible. Despite the intensity of their lovemaking it had not even taken the edge off his hunger for her.
He did not need reminding that his actions had been ruled by his own selfish carnal desire, a carnal desire that after two years of denial had been stripped to its primitive and most basic form.
It had been a point of pride with Emilio that he had never been a victim of his hormones. He had certainly never lost control in bed before, and now the one time he should have shown restraint with a woman, when he should have been gentle, he had snapped. His relentless, ravenous need for her had made him utterly blind to her inexperience until that last moment.
There must have been clues? How had he missed them? Missed the opportunity to make her initiation special.
‘And you were not acting like a virgin,’ corrosive shame made him retort defensively.
‘Know a lot about virgins, do you?’
His eyes narrowed as his eyes drifted to her tender lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘Nothing, as it happens,’ he said, thinking it seemed he also knew even less about women, or this one at least.
‘You’re making a big thing of nothing. Being a virgin isn’t like having a contagious disease. It’s not obligatory to go into isolation.’ Her mouth settled into a mutinous line of defiance as she tried to hide her hurt. ‘I’m sorry you feel cheated and short-changed but I’m not about to say sorry.’
His brows lifted. ‘What are you talking about now? Cheated …?’ he asked irritably. ‘You are not making sense.’
Face scrunched in an effort to hold back the tears that threatened to spill over, she lifted her chin and blinked hard.
‘Well, so sorry,’ she drawled, ‘if I’ve lost my edge of clinical objectivity, but I’ve never been in this situation before.’
‘And you think I have?’
‘Yes, I get it, you don’t need to spell it out.’ She had been slow but the penny had finally dropped. She knew why he was acting this way. ‘You thought you were getting someone who knew what she was doing in the bedroom and instead—’ she broke off to give a loud sniff and passed a hand across her suspiciously bright eyes as she gulped ‘—instead you got me.’
She heard the unattractive, self-pitying whine in her voice and shook her head, mumbling, ‘Even you could not have got it perfect your first time.’
He probably had. Megan closed her eyes, hating the woman he had got it right with.
Torn between frustration and tenderness, Emilio levered himself into a sitting position with the fluid grace that typified all his actions.
‘Have I got this right?’ he asked, placing one hand beside her head as he looked down at her. ‘You think I feel short-changed? Short-changed?’ he repeated, shaking his head as he added something, not appearing to realise he had slipped into his native tongue, and laughed. ‘The way your mind works, querida, is a constant source of amazement to me. Listen, you may not value what you gave me highly, but I do.’
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