‘I have nothing to say to you.’
He shrugged. ‘Then I’ll do the talking.’
‘But just so we’re clear,’ she said, and carried on speaking as if he’d not said a word, ‘I am not stepping foot in that house again. So if you could just drop me at the airport...?’
He stared at her, his body tense with incredulous anger. Did she really think she could just explode a bomb into his world and then walk away without so much as a word of explanation?
‘This is not a taxi service, and you will go where I take you.’
The hostile expression on her face did nothing to improve his mood.
‘I’m not going anywhere with you except to a hotel or the airport,’ she snapped back.
Her eyes were the same shifting capricious blue as the lake surrounding his house in Patagonia, and just looking into them made him want to strip naked and dive in. Or maybe it was the smooth skin of her bare legs, or her pink, kissable lips that were making him want to tear off both his clothes and hers?
‘There’s no point going to a hotel. None of them will have any rooms,’ he said curtly.
‘Then I’ll wait at the airport.’ Her soft mouth was fixed into a steely line.
‘You won’t need to wait.’
Rolling her eyes, she muttered something under her breath that sounded like ‘entitled, arrogant jerk’, and turned towards the window. But less than thirty seconds later she turned back to face him, a frown creasing her beautiful face.
‘I don’t understand...we just passed the sign to the airport.’
‘Yes, we did,’ he said evenly.
‘But you said you were taking me there.’
He shook his head. ‘No, you just made that assumption.’
As he had assumed she was sexually experienced?
The question popped into his head without warning and, gritting his teeth, he pushed it to the back of his mind. He would get answers, but with the aftershock from her revelation still juddering inside his head he didn’t know up from down—knew only that it would be a bad idea to try and resolve this now.
‘So where are we going, then?’
Her hands had curled into fists and he could hear the undercurrent of panic in her voice.
‘Somewhere private.’ He stared at her steadily. ‘Somewhere you won’t be able to embarrass my family. Somewhere a long way from civilisation, where nobody knows who you are. Somewhere you and I can have a nice long chat without any interruptions.’
‘What do you mean by a long way from civilisation?’
It was testament to the level of her panic that she didn’t even blink at his threat of a chat. He watched as she stared at him blankly, and then a flicker of alarm travelled across her face and she started shaking her head.
‘No, Basa. I am not going to your house in Patagonia now.’
‘Too late,’ he said calmly. ‘We’re already on our way.’
* * *
Mimi felt as though a bucket of icy water had been upended over her head, like in one of those internet challenges. But at least with those you knew what to expect. How could she possibly have foreseen that he would pull a stunt like this?
She bit her lip. He couldn’t be serious. Patagonia was hundreds of miles away, and he’d already told her he couldn’t put his job on hold like she could.
Relief flooded through her veins.
Surely this was just part of his ongoing mission to show her who was the boss—or maybe he was trying to scare her, to punish her for sneaking off. But whatever it was, it couldn’t have anything to do with wanting to talk about her virginity. Why would that matter to him?