had been all too prepared to consider her a woman.…
‘Well, perhaps next time you’ll think before you act,’ he was saying, much like a schoolteacher to a backward pupil, and fresh humiliation seared her. What must he think of her?
‘Here!’
He passed her the old dressing gown she had discarded earlier, and while she struggled into it with trembling fingers, Kirsty was aware of him moving about, dressing swiftly.
‘Are you staying at the hotel?’
All she could manage was a nod.
‘Okay, I’ll walk you back to your room. You look as though you could do with a stiff drink first,’ Drew added unflatteringly as he switched on the bedside lamp flooding the room with soft colour.
‘Bit off more than you bargained for, didn’t you? Just out of interest, how far were you prepared to let me go before you finally stopped me, or were you simply looking on it as a good way of broadening your experience?’
Kirsty turned away, but not before he had seen the betraying sheen of tears in her eyes. There was a small explosion of sound and then suddenly his hands were on her shoulders, his voice harsh as he demanded bitingly, ‘You little fool, don’t you realise how close you came to being raped? Has no one ever told you just how damned hard it is for a man to stop when he’s as aroused as you’d got me? The experience might be lacking, but the equipment’s there all right,’ he added sardonically, watching the colour run up under her skin. ‘But next time you feel like experimenting pick on someone your own size.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Kirsty managed on a dignified whisper. ‘It was your idea to… to.…’
‘Make love to you?’ Drew supplied. ‘So it was, but it takes two, you realise, and the kind of response I was getting from you.…’ He broke off suddenly and looked at her. ‘It was the first time, wasn’t it?’ he asked expressionlessly, watching her with cool grey eyes that seemed to see right inside her head and make it impossible for her to lie.
Her, ‘Yes,’ sounded hunted and strangled, and Kirsty couldn’t meet his eyes, sure that she would read amused contempt there for her inexperience.
‘And at a guess you forgot what you were doing in my arms in the first place.’ He seemed to be speaking more to himself than her, and Kirsty was surprised to hear him add dryly, ‘Quite a salutary experience—for both of us. You’re a very desirable young lady, Kirsty Stannard, a very dynamic package, but in future, unless you want to lose that innocence very quickly, stop trying to pretend you’re something you aren’t. Have you any idea how close I came to taking you?’ he asked softly, with no mercy for the quick flood of colour under her skin.
‘Come on,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll walk you to your room, and order a drink from the kitchens for you—something to help you sleep.’
‘I’m not a child!’ Kirsty told him indignantly. ‘I.…’
‘Save it,’ she was advised with dry impatience, followed by a curt, ‘What the devil are your parents thinking about, letting a baby like you loose on the streets?’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Kirsty stormed back at him. ‘I’m twenty!’
‘A very great age,’ Drew taunted. ‘But I’m talking about experience, not age, little girl, and when it comes to the former.…’
‘I’m simply not in the same league as the Beverley Travers of this world,’ Kirsty supplied with a bitterness that surprised her.
‘Nowhere near it,’ Drew assured her mockingly. ‘Now come on, let’s get you tucked up in your little bed, before you go and drive some other unsuspecting male half crazy!’
Those minutes in his arms when he had wanted her so much that he had been tense with the effort on containing it might never have been. All at once she had been relegated to the role of child, and irrationally she resented it.
In the end Drew left her outside her room, but long after he had gone Kirsty lay awake reliving those emotions she had experienced in his arms, shivering at the knowledge that it had taken him to arouse them. A pure fluke, she assured herself, nothing more, and thank God she would never have to set eyes on him again. She didn’t think she could endure the humiliation. Bad enough if he had actually ‘raped’ her, as he described it, but in some ways worse to have been found out and rejected on the grounds of her innocence; to have fallen short of his requirements in a woman and be dismissed merely as a foolish child.
She had heard other people describing virginity as a ‘turn-off, but this was the first time she had come across concrete evidence of the fact. Drew had desired her, she knew that, but the moment he realised that she was still a virgin his desire had gone. Kirsty writhed in a torment of mortified chagrin; somehow the swift death of his desire made her feel a failure as a woman, a freak almost. What was the matter with her? she asked herself. She ought to be thanking her lucky stars. Self-disgust rose up inside her. What on earth had happened to her belief that physical desire was nothing without love? Why had she responded in the first place? Had perhaps fear released an adrenalin into her blood which had led to that warm, yielding tide of desire? That must be the explanation. Feeling happier, Kirsty closed her eyes. If she was honest she was forced to admit that she had been foolish enough to go to Drew Chalmers’ suite, but having done so and endured the after-effects, all she wanted to do now was to put the whole affair behind her, and forget about the incident completely. She could only thank her lucky stars that her path and Drew’s were hardly likely to cross again!
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