‘Betrayed?’ he exploded. ‘Do not use such emotive words with me, Lucy! I had met you on precisely two occasions up until that moment!’
‘But you had slept with me!’ she whimpered, like a dog whose master was raising the whip.
‘So? For God’s sake—don’t you think you’re overreacting?’
She felt sick. ‘How is that?’ She trembled. ‘How am I overreacting?’
‘Because at the time what we had was casual. It was new. It was uncertain. It was all those things which are true at the beginning, and sometimes the beginning is the end.’
‘Don’t try to confuse me with your warped logic!’ she raged.
‘I am trying to tell it like it is,’ he said, with a forced patience which was unfamiliar territory to him. ‘We had made no arrangement to see one another again, had we? Remember?’
Through the mists of her pain she looked back through her memory, blindly searching for something which would make it all acceptable. The mists cleared. She had been back-to-back on a series of long-haul flights which had clashed with his trips around the globe in exactly the opposite direction. And, yes, in theory he was right—they had not made any arrangement to see one another again.
In fact, he had told her casually to ring him, but she had not bothered. She had been in that early stage of a relationship where she was uncertain of him—not sure whether he really wanted to see her again and not wanting to pursue him because that way lay heartbreak and the loss of respect.
Lucy had recognised that for a man like Guido the chase was everything, and that once a woman started reversing the traditional role she would be doomed.
She had almost been over him when his call had come, out of the blue.
‘I thought you were going to call me!’ he had accused softly.
‘I’ve been busy,’ she’d retorted.
‘Oh, have you?’ He had laughed, and his voice had dipped into a honeyed caress. He had been trying to forget her. She had touched him in a way he was not familiar with—a way which spelt some unknown danger and not the kind he wanted to embrace. But it had not worked. He had not forgotten her at all. ‘I’ve missed you, Lucy,’ he’d murmured, and she had been lost.
Intellectually, she could see now the logic behind his reasoning—but jealousy was a different plant altogether, and it flourished and grew like a weed.
‘And how many more?’ she demanded hotly. ‘How many since?’
‘None!’ he exploded. ‘After that it was only you—you know it was!’
On some level, yes, she did—for their lovemaking had been completely different when they had met up again. It was as if the break had allowed the barriers between them to fall—certainly the sexual ones. She had felt freer and more liberated—able to indulge his fantasies. And her own.
Perhaps she could have forgiven him then, had it not been for his motive for bringing her here. Her secret little dreams, that he’d wanted to introduce her to his family and to deepen their relationship, had been as nebulous as dreams always were.
‘It still doesn’t change your reasons for bringing me here.’ She stared at him sadly. ‘Have I reached such elevated heights in your regard for me that I should rejoice that you’ve brought me here to see off other women? To protect you from their advances like a human guard-dog?’
‘You are making a….’ For the first and only time since she had known him he seemed to struggle to find the right words in English. ‘A mountain out of the molehill!’ he declared passionately.
But then something snapped, and her own temper exploded to match his. ‘I don’t think so!’ she raged. ‘I think that nothing very much has changed at all, if you must know! It was casual way back then, and it is still casual now!’ Hadn’t she said as much to Gianferro yesterday?
There was a fraught and odd kind of pause, which could never have been described as silence—for the sound of their breathing punctured the air with accusations and hurt.
‘So what do you want to do about it?’ he said eventually. ‘Are you going to shout and rage a little more and then come over here and let me kiss it better?’
As if it was a tiny graze on her knee instead of a jagged, deep tear through her heart! She closed her eyes briefly to blink away the salty glimmer of tears, then shook her head. ‘No. I want to go home,’ she said shakily. ‘And then I never want to see you again.’
He stared at her, scarcely able to believe what she was saying. ‘Don’t play games with me, Lucy,’ he warned softly. ‘For I have no appetite for them. If you threaten to leave then I will arrange it. But I shall not run after you, nor plead with you to stay. That is not my style.’
No, she couldn’t imagine that it was. But she was not playing games—she was deadly serious.
‘Then arrange it. Please.’
His narrowed eyes raked over her one last time. ‘So be it,’ he ground out, like a skater digging his blade repeatedly into the ice. He turned on his heel and slammed his way out of the suite, leaving Lucy looking after him, biting her lip to stop herself from crying.
Yet even while she was silently damning herself for ever having asked him anything the one subject she had not broached loomed up like a dark spectre in her mind.