he had to be in order to get what he wanted for the betterment of humanity.
Everything in her longed to surge forward and somehow offer comfort, but his body language—shoulders bunched, head turned to the side—shouted back off.
She stared down at bare feet that were icy despite the carpet she stood on.
“I always wondered why you were always so …” Aloof? Emotionless? Haunted? “Quiet.”
She rubbed her arms, trying to bring life back into herself when she felt chilled to the bone. Her heart ached for him. Of course he would have needed someone to help put all those terrible sights into perspective. She wanted to scroll back time and watch from afar, allowing him the healing he’d so obviously needed.
“I wish you’d said something,” she said weakly. “I wouldn’t have got in your way with Olief if I’d known how bad it was.”
“No?” he challenged, with another shot of that searing aggression.
“Of course not! I’m not so self-centered that I felt threatened by your having a relationship with your own father.”
“Then why did you set it up for him to see us on the beach and take a strip off me for it? That was a depth of bitchiness that exceeded even my low expectations of you, Ro.” His recrimination made her knees go weak.
The tiny thread of hope she’d found and clasped on to, the tentative belief that she was making headway with understanding Nic’s reserve and softening his judgment of her, snapped like a rubber band, not only stealing her optimism with a sharp sting, but launching her into an empty space where there was only hard landings.
“Olief saw that?” The one person who liked her exactly as she was had seen her inept plea to be noticed and the humiliating rejection that had followed. Rowan wanted to sink through the carpet and disappear. She dropped her cringing face into her hands.
“Oh, give it a rest. The awards committee isn’t in residence,” Nic bit out.
“I passed Olief on the path, but I didn’t think he’d seen us!” She only lifted her mortified face because she was determined to make him believe her. “Do you honestly think I’d want anyone to know I behaved so cheaply? I can hardly face you.”
“Then why did you do it?” His eyes were cold and measuring, unwilling to accept her protest at face value. “It better be good, Rowan, because he made me feel like a pervert, saying men like me had no business with a girl like you. What the hell does that mean? Men like me? Too old? Or simply not good enough? Forget finding common ground after that. We were barely speaking.”
Her throat closed again. She felt sick with herself. She had to ’fess up or he’d believe forever that she was a tease, and worse—someone who had schemed to hurt him for no reason but a power trip. She couldn’t live with that. She wasn’t like that at all.
“I … I wanted to,” she managed in a strangled whisper, furnace-like heat unleashing in her to conflagrate her whole body. She felt like the candle flame swaying on its spineless wick, all her dignity melting into a transparent puddle beneath her.
“Wanted to what?” he demanded. “Make me look like an opportunist?”
“No!” Rowan pitied every minion who’d ever had to stand before him and explain herself. He was utterly formidable. But his demeanor was the kind of unyielding superciliousness she’d been knuckling under all her life. She was so tired of apologizing for being human and having flaws!
“I wanted to kiss you,” she blurted with defiance, staring him right in the eye while every nerve-ending fried under the responding flash of heat in his gaze. “I was attracted to you. We all have urges,” she excused with a shrug, desperate to play it down so he wouldn’t know how attracted. “I’d had a few drinks. It seemed like a good idea.”
For a long time he only stared at her, while the silence played out and the shadows closed in. Just as she began to feel sweat popping across her upper lip he moved closer, studying her so intently her skin tightened all over her body.
“You wanted a kiss bad enough to chase me to the beach for it?”
“Take your pound of flesh if you need it. Yes, I chased you and, yes, I realize how desperate that makes me seem. It was an impulse. I didn’t get out much and it was my birthday.” If she kept slapping coats of whitewash on it perhaps he wouldn’t see it for the act of lifelong yearning it had been.
“All those years of batting your lashes and trying to get a rise out of me … It wasn’t more of that same nonsense?”
She had to drop her gaze then, because it had very much been a culmination of that long, infernal effort to catch his interest.
His hand came under her jaw, forcing her chin up so she couldn’t hide from his penetrating glacier-blue eyes. “Because I can forgive a teenager for baiting a grown man, but at twenty you should have known better.”
“So you said then, and I wasn’t doing that.” Impatience got the better of her and she tried to pull away, dying inside as she recalled his angry kiss and his merciless rejection.
His hand moved to the side of her neck, long fingers sliding beneath the fall of her hair so his fingertips rested on the back of her neck, keeping her close.
“And today?” he asked, his tone dangerously lethal.
“Today you kissed me.” It took guts to hold her ground, especially when she was flushed with self-disgust as she recalled how she’d reacted: as if she still thought kissing him was a good idea. Her nails cut into her palms as she made herself face him and the crushing truth. “Or rather you tried to manipulate me with what mechanically resembled a kiss.”
He gave a little snort. “I’m long past the age of playing games. It was more than mechanics. We kissed each other.”
He made it sound like something to be savored. When he dropped his gaze to her mouth her stomach tightened. Her whole body tingled and her lips began to burn.
“We started something two years ago that wants finishing.”
Her hand came up instinctively to the middle of his chest. He hadn’t moved any closer, but she suddenly felt threatened. Her arteries swelled as all her blood began to move harder and faster. “Wh-what do you mean?”
“I’m not blind, Rowan.” He glanced down to where her still-bandaged hand pressed against his chest. His strong heartbeat pounded into her palm. “I noticed in the last few years that you weren’t a kid anymore. The only thing that stopped me taking what you were offering that night was a certainty that you didn’t mean it. If you had …”
She sucked in a breath and jerked back, pulling her hand into her breasts as though his glance at her knuckles had branded them.
Nic folded his arms across his chest, his shoulders hardening. “Did you mean it?” he demanded. “Are we finally being honest or still playing games?”
This was moving too fast. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Nic!”
“Because you still want to tie me up in knots for kicks?”
Was
