His dry voice cut into her carnal recollections. ‘I thought you had a head-on approach towards most situations.’
Mari shook her head, the physical action helping to free her of the last clinging strands of the mind-numbing sensual fog. Adopting a cool expression, she lifted her chin and admitted, ‘What seems a good idea at the time can seem a major mistake in the cold, clear light of day.’
An ice age could not have been more unexpected or as total as the frigid hauteur in his regard.
‘So you have decided to draw a line under last night and call it a...mistake?’ He sketched mocking inverted commas around the word as he bit it out through teeth bared in a hard, contemptuous smile.
Mistake? Wasn’t that a pretty good analysis of the emotions that he’d been struggling not to analyse—his own ‘head under the blanket’ moment—as he’d stood accepting the sharp arrows of an icy-cold shower that had washed the scent of her off his flesh but not the memory of the sex, which seemed to have penetrated to a cellular level?
The light was not cold, but it was clear as it shone on her upturned features.
The fact that calling it a mistake was exactly what he’d been doing did not lessen the sense of outrage he recognised as totally irrational.
The confusion on Mari’s face lifted. ‘No...last night...’ Did she regret it? ‘I’m not talking about last night. I meant the wedding crashing. Last night was...’ Her voice trailed away. She couldn’t say special to a man who had enjoyed God knew how many last nights... Just sex? For her it had felt like making love. She gulped past a ridiculous desire to weep. She should be glad that her first time had been so special. She knew a lot of people who hadn’t been so lucky, and some of the stories had not made her regret her abstinence.
But then, she hadn’t known what she was missing; now she did. Oh, God, what had she done? She had no answer, just a total aching certainty that if she had the opportunity to do it again she would.
‘One would not have happened without the other.’
Unsure what to read into this statement, she nodded cautiously and eased one leg out from under her.
‘And you’d still be a virgin.’ Just saying it gave Seb the same gut-punch feeling he’d had last night.
Of course, he’d have been lying if he hadn’t acknowledged that the fact he had been her first, that he had taken her to places no other man had, aroused him on a primal level. And though they were damped down, he could only assume that it was those fundamental male instincts that were now responsible for the uncharacteristic possessiveness he felt when he looked at her and the anger he had experienced when he had thought she could dismiss the previous night with a shrug of her elegant shoulders.
In order to hide the depth of her discomfort, Mari rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘Oh, are we going to have this conversation?’
‘I’m sorry if you find this boring, but yes, we are.’
She scanned his lean face and tilted her head in an attitude of astonishment. ‘You’re mad at me for being a virgin?’ The discovery drew a laugh from her parted lips.
‘I’m mad at you for not warning me sooner,’ he rebutted grimly. He swallowed and dragged a hand over his wet hair, slicking it back from his bronzed forehead. ‘I could have hurt you.’ Passion was one thing, but to be as full on as he had been with someone totally uninitiated sent a heavy slug of fresh guilt through his body. It should have been gentle and tender...
Tender. Hell, it shouldn’t have happened at all!
He looked at the top of her shiny head; it was all he could see. Her chin had dropped to her chest and her hair had fallen in a silky curtain across her face. It made him think of how it had felt. The ends had brushed his chest as she had slid down his body... He inhaled. No, he would not go there, and last night was a one-off. He had not been thinking with his brain, but that would change.
He was totally clear in his mind about this when her head lifted. She parted the hair that had fallen across her face with both hands and looked up at him through the fringe of her long lashes with eyes that shone like sapphires and whispered huskily, ‘You didn’t.’
As her soft full lips quivered into a slow smile that was both sexy and vulnerable, Seb felt his heart crash into his chest wall like a sledgehammer. Utterly unprepared, he had no protection from the powerful feeling.
‘That’s...’ Without warning, a moaning gasp was wrenched from her lips. The sound pierced Seb like a dull blade as he surged forward in response to the cry of pain.
‘What’s wrong? What is it?’ He sat on the side of the bed where Mari had her knee drawn up to her chest in an awkward tangle of limbs and sheet, and was clutching her calf.