‘Considering anyone else.’
There was nothing even faintly apologetic about his admission. ‘Never...?’ Was anyone really that selfish? Kat struggled with the concept.
‘You sound shocked.’
‘That there are selfish people in the world?’ She shook her head. ‘I’m not that naive. It’s just mostly people try to hide it.’
It wasn’t as if he had never been criticised—he’d actually been called a lot worse than selfish—but this was the first time he had ever experienced an inexplicable impulse to defend himself. It wasn’t as though her approval meant anything to him—it was an impulse that he firmly crushed as he pushed out coldly, ‘There are also virtue-signalling martyrs in the world who, in my experience, rarely try and hide it.’
He heard her sharp intake of breath as she came to an abrupt halt. He took a couple of strides before he stopped and swung back. She was standing there, hands fixed on her hips, her head thrown back as she stared up at him through narrowed amber eyes.
‘Are you calling me a martyr?’ Her eyelids fluttered as her eyes widened with astonished indignation.
He arched a sardonic brow and heard the sound of her even white teeth grating.
‘If you can’t take a little constructive criticism, Katina—’
She recognised he was baiting her but not before a strangled ‘Constructive!’ had escaped her clenched lips; then she managed a smile of jaw-clenching insincerity. ‘Then I suppose I should say thank you, and I promise you that any further constructive comments from you on my behaviour will be treated with the same degree of appreciation that I’m feeling now!’
His low, quite impossibly sexy rumble of appreciation—was it possible for a laugh to make you tingle?—had her tumbling from sarcastic superiority back to tingling sexual awareness.
She looked away quickly, embarrassed and confused by her reaction to a laugh, and took a moment before she trusted herself to look up again. When she did the mockery she had come to expect had faded from his lean face, replaced not by sympathy but something that came close to it.
Zach had not got to where he was without possessing an ability to read feelings, so recognising the fear underlying her tough stance was nothing more than he would have expected. What he didn’t expect was the surge of irrational guilt attached to the surfacing need to offer her some sort of reassurance.
‘I know this must feel frightening, being plunged into an alien environment, but you know, it does us all good to step outside our comfort zone once in a while.’ He stopped, his expression closing as he realised how far outside his own comfort zone he was straying. There was a very good reason he didn’t wander around emoting. In the financial world, empathy had a way of revealing your own weaknesses.
In his private world it had never been an issue. His relationships, if you chose to call them that, were about sex, not establishing an emotional connection.
The unexpected softening of his tone hit Kat in a weak spot she hadn’t even known she had. If he had opened his arms she’d have walked into them wanting...what?
Whendid I turn into the sort of girl who needed a big strong man to turn to?
She let her breath out in a slow, slow hiss, tilted her chin and gave a cool smile. She hadn’t turned into that girl and she never would.
‘Please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you care,’ she snapped back, ignoring the voice in her head that said she was using him as a scapegoat.
The weakness might be hers, but he had exposed it.
‘Or do you even know how to spell empathy?’
‘Well, if I need to borrow some, I’ll know where to come.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You really are the original bleeding heart. How many men have figured out the way into your bed is by being weak and needy and...damaged?’ he sneered.
She sucked in an outraged breath through flared nostrils and stalked past him, tossing over her shoulder, ‘You are worse than disgusting!’
The sardonic arrogance stamped on his features faded as she walked across the tarmac, her angry posture as graceful as a ballroom dancer’s, chin up, her long neck extended, narrow shoulder blades drawn back. He might arguably have won the brief war of words, but the triumph felt hollow. Something possibly to do with the fact his body, reacting independently of his brain, was sending painful slug after slug of raw hunger in response to the movement of her slim body.
Theos, but this woman was killing him, or rather the lusting after her was.
He might consider her out of bounds but there were plenty that wouldn’t. His task was getting less enviable with each passing moment.