When he’d been nine years old, a teacher had introduced him to a Rubik’s Cube for the first time. It had been a simple warm-up exercise for the class, but Cesare hadn’t been able to comprehend how inanimate plastic could not be bent to his will. He’d spent hours staring at it, moving each tile, until some time around midnight on that same day he’d brought order to the madness of the cube.
He felt that same desperate sense of misunderstanding now. Jemima Woodcraft—a virgin? Impossible. Except it wasn’t. He’d felt the proof of her innocence for himself. He strode towards his en suite bathroom, dispensing with the proof of their love-making in the waste-paper basket, and with the same motion he grabbed a towel and wrapped it low around his waist.
He met the reflection of his eyes in the mirror, his expression grim. She’d come to his bed knowing what that would entail. Which left one question. Why the hell had she chosen to lose her virginity to him?
Calmer, he turned, moving back into his bedroom. She was sitting up, a sheet wrapped around her body, her gaze averted from his in a way that was infuriating and somehow endearing all at once.
‘You were a virgin?’ He didn’t need the confirmation, yet it still seemed important to establish the fact beyond any doubt. Or perhaps he simply wanted to hear her admit it.
He clamped his jaw together and expelled a harsh breath so his nostrils flared. ‘Jemima?’
His eyes narrowed, studying the pallor of her face, and frustration bit at his insides. She wouldn’t look at him.
‘Yes.’ The word was soft.
‘And you came here tonight to sleep with me?’
Now her face lifted, though she focussed her gaze about an inch above his shoulder. ‘Yes.’
At least she wasn’t lying to him. ‘You didn’t think this was something I ought to have known? Something I might have liked to consider?’
Her chin tilted at a defiant angle. ‘I tried to tell you.’
Cesare frowned, guilt and disbelief churning in his gut. ‘When?’
‘Before! Before you—before we—before we were together,’ she finished with a shake of her head. ‘I tried but I...was embarrassed, I guess.’
‘You thought it was better for me to feel your innocence as I obliterated it?’
She winced, her expression showing hurt.
‘I don’t know.’
For some reason, everything she said somehow made it worse. He felt angry. Disempowered. As though she’d taken what was supposed to be an easy exchange between two consenting lovers and turned it into something so much more complicated.
‘You don’t think this is something I deserved to know? To decide if I even wanted to be your first lover?’
Her face drained of colour. ‘Would it have made a difference?’
He swore in his native tongue, the curse a harsh invective that slammed around the room and seemingly electrocuted her. She jack-knifed from the bed, the towel locked toga-style to her body.
But he didn’t stop; he couldn’t. ‘You’re damned right it would have made a difference. I don’t do virgins, Jemima. What did you think? This would make me want to buy into your cousin’s hedge fund? That I’d feel so guilty at having unknowingly become your first lover I’d pay whatever I could to absolve myself of that responsibility?’
She sucked in a sharp breath, her eyes narrowing. ‘How dare you? This had nothing to do with Laurence.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
The column of her throat shifted as she swallowed. ‘Be that as it may, it’s the truth. I came here tonight because I wanted to sleep with you, not for any other reason.’
‘And if I knew do you think I would still have wanted to sleep with you?’
Her cheeks paled and he told himself the sensation rolling through him was satisfaction.
‘I honestly didn’t think it would matter.’
‘You were a twenty-three-year-old virgin. I brought you here thinking you were like me, that you enjoy sex for sport. If I had known you’d never been with another lover, I would never have touched you.’
She sucked in a breath that was pure indignation. ‘Well, rest assured, Cesare, I have no intention of darkening your door ever again.’ She glared at him, somehow managing to look elegant and haughty even as she crossed the room in a bed sheet.