She felt terrible. She was reducing the most enravishing experience of her life to the status of a fleeting encounter. And she had told him that she hadn’t wanted to be involved in any sordid liaisons!
‘Tonight things are going to be different,’ she announced, tacitly acknowledging that he wasn’t simply going to fade out of her life, that the ties between them had become too complex to sever quickly or easily.
He looked at her stubborn face and smoothly preempted her argument. ‘Of course they will be. Now that we’ve made love every which way, and got the uncomfortable lust for each other thoroughly out of our systems, we can relax into physical indifference.’
Since he had taken the words right out of her mouth, Jennifer had no right to feel so disappointed. She hid her chagrin behind a tight smile. He made it sound so... so boringly commonplace. Perhaps it was—for him. Surely nobody got that mind-blowingly good at making love without a lot of practice.
‘I’m not in the habit of having one-night stands,’ she pointed out.
‘Neither am I, although I must admit to a few in my testosterone-driven modelling years. Now I prefer more satisfying relationships. And I’m very careful of my health, so you needn’t worry on that score.’
She was embarrassed to realise that it hadn’t even entered her head. Her pregnancy had seemed to make a condom superfluous, and with a shock she realised that she had also subconsciously harboured a bone-deep trust in Rafe’s regard for her physical well-being.
‘If I hadn’t already guessed that you hadn’t had a great deal of sexual experience, I would have known it as soon as I entered you,’ he continued. ‘You were very tight. You weren’t a virgin by any chance?’
She would never get used to his blunt way of approaching delicate topics.
‘No, of course not!’ she said, rattled that he should have thought so. Had she been clumsy, inept? ‘I think even Sebastian might have drawn the line at arranging a virgin birth!’
‘Then it must have been a while for you—I remember you saying you had no prospect of getting pregnant naturally...’
He was obviously angling to know, so she certainly wasn’t going to tell him.
‘And for you, judging from your hurry to get me into bed,’ she snipped.
‘My last long-term companion dumped me ten months ago when she decided that I meant what I’d said all along about not ever marrying her.’
Jennifer’s eyes widened. ‘You haven’t had sex in ten months?’
‘I’ve been busy.’ He grinned at her expression, teasing, ‘I know you think of me as your rampant sex-god, but I do perform other functions in life. Just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean I’m profligate with my talent. If anything it’s the reverse—once you’ve experienced how intense sex can be with the right person, you get bored with bonking the fluff.’
‘You weren’t bored last night,’ she accused hotly, incensed at being reduced to a casual ‘bonk’. That was even less meaningful than a one-night stand!
His grin widened. ‘But you’re not a piece of fluff, darling, you’re my wife.’
She slammed the bathroom door on his smirking face and then had to go back out and fetch her clothes, attempting to ignore the way he rolled over to watch her, his green eyes following her from wardrobe to drawer, to dressing table and back to the bathroom.
‘Don’t use all the hot water, honey,’ he sang out after her in a parody of domestic affection.
If it wasn’t for the need to save water she would have run the en suite bathroom’s small hot water cylinder cold, but she had to settle instead for rifling the toiletries he had placed on the shelf next to her things and maliciously running the battery of his expensive electric razor flat by shaving her legs with it and then leaving it to buzz on a towel while she had her quick shower.
Having washed and blowdried her hair the previous night, she was forced to linger over cleaning her teeth until the razor gave its last, sick cough and puttered into silence. Now he would have to recharge it before he gave that designer stubble a graze, and her petty sense of revenge had her smiling as she returned to the bedroom warmly dressed in a green tartan skirt and pale yellow blouse.
Rafe had gone out onto the balcony, and she was relieved to see that he had donned his drawstring pyjama trousers.
‘Looks like the mountain has gone back to belching just steam and ash,’ he said, coming back inside and shutting the doors against the strongly sulphurous smell, the skin on his torso puckered from the southerly chill. ‘The wind seems to be pushing the plumes higher, but it’s difficult to tell because the sky is pretty grey and there’s still a low haze drifting this way.’
His bare feet made slight tracks on the floor, and Jennifer remembered that after their sizzling little piece of foreplay on the balcony the glass doors had stood open for some time before Rafe had got up and closed them during the night. Fine ash had sifted over the polished floorboards by the doors and she hoped that it hadn’t drifted as far as her desk. Her computer, inclined to be a little bit temperamental, would not take kindly to volcanic dust clogging its cyberpores.
A loud thump against the door to the stairs made Rafe glance at her with a droll expression.
‘Someone come to complain about their breakfast, do you think?’
Another thud made the door shake, and she hurried across the room.
‘It’s just Bonzer, head-butting the door,’ she explained. ‘He usually comes up in the mornings.’
But when she opened the door it wasn’t only Bonzer, but Milo, too. The cat strolled under the dog as he bounced forward and his paw accidentally clipped her ear. With an offended yowl Milo took off, springing onto the bed, and, ecstatically responding to the unexpected game, Bonzer followed.