He gently eased out of me and inched away and I missed his hardness and his heat immediately. I wanted to reach out and pull him back and forget myself, forget everything in more of his devastating kisses.
But he froze and frowned, and I shivered, an arrow of apprehension darting through me. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘No condom.’
His words hit my brain like bullets, shattering the hazy afterglow with a brutal dose of reality. The implication of his realisation tilted the world on its access. My heart crashed against my ribs. My blood chilled. Protection hadn’t even crossed my mind. We’d been so caught up in the rush. So frantic, so needy.
So careless.
‘I can’t believe I didn’t think of it,’ I said, a leap of alarm taking flight inside me even though there was zero point in panicking when it was far too late for regret and nothing could be done about it right now anyway. ‘Ineverforget.’
Nick took a step back, then tugged his jeans up and refastened them, all traces of wildness and desire and humour gone. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said grimly. ‘For the first time ever, I didn’t think of it either. I was unable to think of anything, let alone get you upstairs to my room where there’s a box. Are you on the pill?’
‘No.’ I slid off the console table and reached for my clothes with shaking fingers.
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
He shoved his hands through his hair and then rubbed them over his face. ‘Right.’
I slipped my top over my head and pulled on my pants and leggings, my stomach clenching and my heart pounding as I worked out the timeline. ‘Date-wise, we could have a problem.’
‘We won’t have a problem.’
‘What do you mean?’ Could he somehow magic up some emergency contraception? Did he think that crossing fingers and hoping for the best actually worked? Or was he talking about abortion?
‘If what we just did does turn out to have consequences,’ he said, picking up his still damp shirt and frowning at it as if repelled by the thought of putting it back on, ‘I’ll take care of you.’
What?
It came as no surprise that Nick would want to do the supposedly right thing, and that was all well and good, but I hadn’t spent years building up my self-reliance only to give it all up at the first hurdle. If, in nine months, a mini combined version of the two of us came along, I’d cope the way I’d learned to—by putting one foot in front of the other with my chin up and my jaw set, determined to look on the bright side. There was no guarantee he’d stick around—nobody ever did—and I wasn’t about to put my faith in someone only to have them let me down by vanishing either physically or emotionally, or, quite possibly, both.
‘There’s no need for that,’ I said, instinctively recoiling at the very idea of it. ‘I have resources.’ One hundred and eight million of them, in fact. ‘I’ll deal with it.’
‘We’lldeal with it.’
‘At least it’s not the nineteenth century, thank God. At least you don’t have to marry me or anything if things do take a turn for the unexpected. Heaven forbid.’
He glanced up at me, his gaze dark and oddly unsettling. ‘Do you have something against marriage?’
‘You could say that.’
‘What?’
I frowned. How was it important? Why did he want to know? And weren’t we supposed to be focusing on the fact that we’d just had unprotected sex? ‘We’re drifting off topic,’ I said, rather regretting the slip of the tongue.
‘That horse has bolted,’ he said and tossed the shirt onto the sofa. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it right now. Humour me.’
Yes, well, he might have a point about the bolting horse, but humour him?Thatwasn’t going to happen. There was nothing remotely funny about the disintegration of my parents’ marriage and the role I’d played in it, or its effect. My issues with trust and my insecurities over who I was and whether anyone would ever value me for me rather than what I did or didn’t have weren’t a source of amusement either. Besides, I never talked about my innermost hopes and fears. I had no one close enough to confide in and I wouldn’t know how even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, especially not now, when I was feeling so off kilter.
The sight of Nick’s still bare chest and the memory of how it had felt plastered to mine mere moments ago were messing with my reason. I couldn’t rid my head of an image of the hypothetical consequence of our moment of madness—a little boy with Nick’s dark hair and my blue eyes, perhaps, or a little girl with my brunette waves and his cool grey gaze.
My initial panic at the thought of an accidental pregnancy had been instinctive, the result of social conditioning and ultra-stern lessons at school, but deep down I longed for a family and a place to belong. I dreamed of unconditional love and honesty, a future in which I could make up for the lack of both in my past. Deep down, I hated and regretted that I couldn’t get over all the obstacles that prevented it.
The events of the last half an hour and the thoughts streaming uncontrollably through my head now were making me feel confused and vulnerable in a way that I loathed when I’d fought so hard to be strong, and the need to protect myself by restoring my defences and keeping him at bay surged through me like a tidal wave.
‘We had sex, Nick,’ I said, ruthlessly burying the thoughts, the emotions and the images in order to regain control of myself. ‘Long-overdue sex that’s hopefully expunged the craziness from our systems, and great sex, I grant you, but that’s all it was. It doesn’t mean you can ask me personal questions. It certainly doesn’t give you the right to dig around in my psyche. So back off.’