‘I gave him the opportunity to call the wedding off, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He blamed himself, saying that he had put me in that position by not...’ She took a deep, painful breath. ‘By not making love to me himself. He told me that you were the type of man who had always had hundreds of lovers, and that even if I called off the wedding you wouldn’t be interested in me for more than a night.’
‘Oh, did he?’ asked Dominic, in a quiet, emotionless voice.
She knotted her whitened knuckles together. ‘He begged and pleaded with me to stay with him, and to marry him.’
‘And you agreed?’ he queried incredulously. ‘You agreed?’
Her eyes were dark and curiously empty. ‘Yes, I agreed,’ she told him sadly. ‘But I was young, Dominic. Frightened and guilty and confused. And I wanted to escape. Mark knew that—he played on my weaknesses, while I confess that I allowed him to. And I was nothing if not optimistic. I convinced myself that on our wedding night my love and affection for Mark would be enough to obliterate every memory of you.’
‘But it didn’t happen?’
Romy shook her head. ‘No, it didn’t. We didn’t make love on our wedding night, nor on any other night.’
‘Mark didn’t want to?’
‘Mark couldn’t,’ she told him bluntly. ‘Mark was impotent.’
He let out a long, tortured sigh. ‘Dear God,’ he said to himself bitterly. ‘And when did you discover this, Romy?’
She swallowed. ‘On our wedding night, actually. He told me then.’
Dominic’s eyes narrowed with suppressed rage. ‘He was prepared to do that to you? To begin a marriage knowing that it might never be consummated?’
Romy stared at him, wide-eyed. She had never thought about it in those terms before. ‘He told me that he had never had any interest in sex, but he was too frightened to go to the doctor about it. And when eventually he did, soon after we were married, we discovered that he had very little time left.’
‘And of course you couldn’t leave him then?’ he guessed.
‘Of course I couldn’t,’ said Romy. ‘And he didn’t want me to.’
‘Emotional blackmail,’ said Dominic heavily.
‘Oh, it was a lot more complex than you make it sound, Dominic. In a way, I felt it was the least I could do after betraying him—and with his best friend, too. I was at least in part responsible for the ending of your friendship. And it wasn’t as bad as it sounds—I liked Mark. I always had done. Staying with him was not an awful prison—I was glad to be able to help him. And besides,’ she finished miserably, ‘I had nowhere else to go.’
There was a long silence, before Dominic said, ‘I see,’ in an odd, final sort of voice, and Romy decided that she would leave with her pride intact. Before he kicked her out.
She rose stiffly to her feet, longing to go upstairs and get changed. The white shirt she wore was full of his scent and unbearably evocative, reminding her with heart-rending clarity of just how beautifully he had made love to her.
‘I’d better go,’ she said, and he frowned.
‘Go where?’
‘Home. Anywhere. Away from here, in any case.’
He had taken on the watchful pose of someone deciding how best to break in a young horse.
She strode towards the door, aware that she must look ridiculous in a thigh-length shirt and a pair of high-heeled shoes.
‘Walk out of here now, Romy Salisbury, and you walk out of my life for good,’ came his grated comment from behind her.
Romy whirled round, searching his face for clues. ‘But what alternative do I have?’
‘The alternative is that you stay.’
But what was he offering her? A wonderful love affair? Would that be enough for her? Romy wondered. Would she be prepared to settle for that when she wanted so much more?
‘But there is, of course, a condition to your staying,’ he continued, still in that same, rather emotionless voice.
And this was the pay-off. Romy wondered just how he would word it. Would he insist on laying down ground rules right from the beginning? Insist that she must make no demands on him? That she must always be there for him?
Romy bristled. Well, he could keep all those conditions, and she would tell him exactly where he could put them!
She fixed a saccharine smile to her face. ‘Oh? And what’s that?’
‘That you’ll try one day to find it in your heart to love me almost as much as I love you,’ he told her gently.
There was a long, stunned silence.
‘Oh, Dominic!’ she wailed, and burst into tears. ‘I do love you—I always have! I’ve thought about no one else but you, since the day I met you! And you didn’t even realise—you stupid, stupid man!’ she sobbed.
He pulled her into his arms and let her cry. She soaked his bare chest, and then he found a handkerchief in the top pocket of his discarded jacket and very tenderly wiped her face with it.
And only when she had stopped snuffling did he allow himself to smile, and to kiss the end of her nose with all the sloppiness he normally despised in other people but which now—most extraordinarily—he found he wanted to indulge in for the rest of his life!
‘Am I really stupid?’ he queried softly.
‘Yes!’
‘So I suppose marriage is out of the question, then?’
She eyed him suspiciously. ‘If you think that, Dominic Dashwood,’ she declared, ‘then you really are stupid!’
He smiled again at her baffling lack of logic. ‘Soon?’
‘I don’t mind. Just so long as we can live together first.’
‘It had better be soon,’ he told her sternly. ‘Since we have just made love without using any form of contraception.’
‘Gosh!’ Romy felt quite dizzy with pride. ‘So we did.’ Then she frowned. ‘Are you normally quite so careless?’
Dominic hid a smile. He was not used to being told off by a woman. He rather liked it. ‘Never,’ he told her honestly. ‘But I just assumed that you were on the Pill—and please don’t look like that, Romy; you have to agree that it was a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, under the circumstances.’
‘I suppose so,’ she sighed, and kissed the gravelly shadow of his chin. ‘But what if I had had millions of partners before you?’
He stared deep into her eyes. ‘Do you know—the thought of using contraception as a protective device with you simply never occurred to me? And I’ve never, ever taken that risk before.’
‘So why do something so out of character with me? Someone who you would have been justified in protecting yourself against, given all the evidence?’
‘Because I wasn’t acting on evidence; I was acting on instinct,’ he told her lovingly. ‘Maybe I knew, deep in my heart, that the only risk I was taking was having my heart broken into the bargain!’
No chance of that! thought Romy.
‘In fact,’ he mused, ‘if we’re talking about carelessness, I could wonder why you didn’t bother telling me that you were a virgin...?’ He raised his dark brows at her questioningly.
Romy sighed. ‘I guess I wanted to get my own back. You thought that I was a raving nymphomaniac, and I wanted to prove to you that I wasn’t.’
‘Revenge in its