“Because you don’t care? Or because you do?”
She glared at him. “Care? About you? I will never make that mistake again.”
“Then why did you sleep with me? After his funeral, you welcomed me with open arms…”
“You were grieving,” she dismissed.
“That isn’t an answer.”
She felt backed against a wall. “Then why did you come to me?” She retaliated in kind. “There must have been any number of women you could have consoled yourself with that night. Why me?”
Their eyes clashed and Millie’s breath was louder than usual.
“You were always good at making me forget.” The cryptic comment made little sense to Millie. She angled her face away, too frustrated to look at him.
“I just don’t see how we can make this work. We can’t even occupy the same space without fighting. What kind of marriage can we possibly have? This is ridiculous.”
“We will learn to get along,” he responded. “As we used to.”
“I don’t want to get along how we used to. I don’t want to like you. I don’t want to trust you. I don’t want to listen to your stories and laugh at your jokes. I don’t want anything to do with what we had then. It was all a lie, but I bought it, hook, line and sinker. What kind of gullible fool does that make me?” She scraped her chair back, hands on hips, glaring down at him. “I’ll tell you what. It makes me different, because I will never be that woman again. I will never let you make me feel special. I will never fall for your practiced charms, your easy seduction. We made a baby together, Zafar, but as surely as I will love that baby with every bone in my body, I will always, always hate you. All I can hope is that I can conceal my contempt from our child – they should never know the truth of my feelings for you.”
She whipped around intending to leave, but he moved swiftly, standing and crossing to stand in front of her, blocking her path, his dark eyes clearly showing fury now.
“I don’t want you to hate me,” he ground out, his body so close that when she exhaled, her nipples brushed his chest and she had to fight waves of awareness that spread through her.
“Yeah, well, we can’t always have what we want.”
“And what about desire, Amelia?”
Her eyes flared wide and she jerked them away, wanting to conceal her physical response from him.
“What desire?”
His laugh was a harsh sound of derision. “The desire that sparks between us as much as it ever did. The first time I saw you, I wanted you. Did I ever tell you that?”
Her lips parted on a rush. She didn’t otherwise answer, but it didn’t matter. He continued speaking without her reply.
“When I saw you amongst the artefacts, I was frozen to the spot. I’d never seen anyone like you – so graceful and lithe, so petite and fair.” He lifted a hand to her head almost as though he couldn’t stop himself. His fingers ran over her blonde hair, and she juddered with anticipation as his hand dropped lower, his fingers brushing her shoulder. “You trembled when I introduced myself, and all I could think was that I wanted to kiss you, to make you tremble in another way entirely.”
“Don’t,” she whispered, even as her body was crying out for him to kiss her now, to touch her, his fingers to take possession of her breasts, weighing them in the palm of his hands, to strip her clothes from her body and remind them both of what they were capable of feeling when they came together.
“Your innocence was obvious. I fought it, Amelia. I fought you for a long time. I wanted to conquer my need for you, to prove that I was stronger than such a base instinct, but I was wrong. The more time we spent together, the more I ached for you, just as I ache for you now.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “Zafar —,”
“And you used to look at me with eyes that were pleading, lips that were parted, just like this,” he padded his thumb over her lower lip. “You used to lean towards me without, I think, realising it, aching for me to make love to you, to make you a woman.”
“You’re right,” she answered huskily. “I did want that. I wanted you. But I wanted all of you, not just your body. I wanted your heart and foolish me, I thought you were offering that.”
“And now that you know I’m not,” he leaned forward, his body pressing to hers, his hips shifting a little so she felt the weight of his arousal and stifled a moan. “Does that mean you don’t want my body after all? Or can you separate a childish desire for the fairy tale happy ending from a physical impulse that brings us both immense pleasure?”
Sadness rushed through her, because her heart agreed with him. Her certainty that they were falling in love had been a stupid, immature wish, not rooted in reality at all. He was an experienced man who’d had many, many lovers, who could easily separate love from sex. If only she’d understood that was what he’d been doing!
“You got hurt because you loved me,” he said quietly, almost gently. “That was a mistake. I didn’t realise how you felt until it was too late. But now? You hate me, by your own admission, you always will. So is there harm in making our marriage a physical one? In being intimate when it’s what we both want, deep, deep down?” He drew a finger lower on her front, between the valley of her breasts, so she moaned softly.
“I don’t want you.” But her body made a liar of her, swaying further forward so there was no space between them, shaking with the strength of her need.
“Yes, you do.” He dropped his head so swiftly she didn’t realise what he was about to do. Or perhaps she did, but hadn’t dared hope. His kiss was a reclamation, a staking of ownership, a demanding of acknowledgement. His kiss was her salvation and her downfall, but she didn’t fight him; she couldn’t. In that moment, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to.