Like throwing her down onto the carpet and making love to her properly, perhaps...?
‘You look extremely hot,’ he observed wryly. ‘Come on.’ And he took her firmly by the hand.
‘Where do you think you’re taking me?’ she heard herself squeaking.
Dominic frowned, and then sighed. ‘I’m afraid you can’t possibly play the helpless heroine now, Romy. Not when you gave me possibly one of the most erotic encounters of my life in the garden this afternoon. I’m taking you to the sitting room so that we can sit down together and have—’
‘Let me guess!’ she interjected sourly.
‘A long-overdue talk,’ he finished reprovingly.
Well, she had never heard it called that before, but she let him lead her into the sitting room anyway, and then sat on the blue velvet sofa with her legs tucked up beneath her while he busied himself with pouring them a drink. Then he came and positioned himself next to her.
Romy accepted her brandy with shaky fingers but took only a tiny sip before putting the glass down on one of the small tables. As a delaying tactic, she fussed around with the skirt of her dress and pleated some of the cinnamon-coloured satin between her fingers, then at last looked into his face with clear brown eyes. ‘So what do you want to talk about, Dominic?’
His mouth twisted into a sardonic smile. ‘Shall I give you a whole list of points up for discussion?’
‘That much, huh?’ Romy attempted to make a joke of it, but her voice stupidly began to wobble, and then she became afraid that she might commit the ultimate sin of bursting into tears.
‘What’s the matter?’ He frowned.
‘I don’t know!’ That was the trouble.
She tried turning her head away, but he wouldn’t let her, cupping her chin firmly in his strong hand, and Romy almost melted.
He felt her shudder. ‘Maybe now is not the time for talking,’ he said thickly, and moved his face towards her. ‘Maybe we should use our time more usefully—what do you say, Romy?’
She said nothing, for she felt weak and powerless and totally without fight. Her resistance to him had been vanishing ever since she had first set foot in his home, and now it had almost completely disappeared.
Her face was white, her eyes huge and dark and haunted, and Dominic’s jaw tightened. Damn! He could not possibly make love to her now. Not while she was looking at him with all the pain of a wounded deer.
‘Tell me about your marriage,’ he said suddenly.
It was as though he had woken her up from a coma. Romy blinked in astonishment that he should have asked her such a thing, and at such a time.
But, if she searched truthfully in her heart, would there ever be a time to discuss Mark without all the guilt and regret which inevitably accompanied it?
She sat up straight, moving slightly away from him, and her hand groped out for her brandy glass. ‘What do you want to know about my marriage?’ she asked, unable to keep the bleakness from her voice.
Dominic hardened his heart, refusing to let her fragile face deflect him. ‘Was it happy?’
‘No.’ She saw the bitter accusation in his eyes and flinched. ‘Not in the conventional sense, anyway.’
‘Because of your cheating?’
‘Because of Mark’s illness,’ she told him, and now it was his turn to flinch. ‘That cast an inevitable shadow over our relationship—but we made the best of what we had.’
There was a silence while he digested this. ‘And was he brave?’
Romy nodded. ‘Sometimes he could be remarkably brave—and at other times he was terribly, terribly frightened.’ She gave him a steady stare. ‘There isn’t a stereotypical way that people behave when they know they’re dying, Dominic—there are no rules or guidelines to follow. It’s erratic. Unpredictable. It’s like all human behaviour—you make most of it up as you go along.’
‘And could you bear to look him in the eye?’ he demanded fiercely. ‘After what you had done to him?’
‘Yes, I could.’ A muscle worked in her cheek. ‘Because his mother had been put in a nursing home and I was all he had left,’ she answered simply. And then, because she thought that Dominic was very successfully avoiding facing up to his share of the blame, she added, ‘And because—unlike you, Dominic—I could not face running away.’
‘I did not run away!’ he gritted.
‘You never saw him once—not once—after the wedding!’ she accused him. ‘You didn’t even come to the funeral, for God’s sake!’
‘How could I?’ he grated angrily. ‘How could I face him, knowing what I had done to his wife? And how could I face you, Romy, when I knew that all I still wanted to do was to drag you off to the nearest bed and—?’
‘Th-that’s enough,’ she told him shakily.
‘Turning up at your wedding was a mistake, but one that I could not possibly avoid without a huge scene. But I knew that I could not willingly face the two of you again.’ Dominic briefly shut his eyes. ‘And then, when I discovered how sick he was...’
‘Well?’ Her voice was brittle. ‘Why didn’t you come then?’
‘I couldn’t do that either,’ he said simply. ‘How could I? By then I hadn’t been in contact with Mark for so long that it would have been impossible to justify my absence without telling him the truth. And I owed Mark nothing less than the truth,’ he finished, on a sombre note.
Oh, the irony of it all! Romy took another sip of brandy. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted you to come if your only reason for doing so was pity.’
‘I know that.’ He drained his glass and put it down, then fixed her with a dazzling grey stare. ‘So what now, Romy—what do we do next?’
She was terrified that she would read much, much more into his question than he intended, and so she neatly turned it around. ‘That depends.’
‘On?’
‘On what you want to do.’
‘I think you already know the answer to that,’ he said huskily.
‘And on what I want to do,’ she added firmly.
‘And do our wishes match, Romy?’ he queried softly.
She studied the palm of her hand for a moment before looking up. ‘You mean—do I want to go to bed with you?’
He looked slightly taken aback. ‘Well, yes...’
‘What’s the matter, Dominic?’ she quizzed provocatively. ‘Not used to your women being honest about their needs?’
He laughed, but the laugh was tinged with a raw kind of hunger which set Romy’s veins tingling. ‘Are you one of my women, then, Romy?’
It was just unfortunate that he had chosen to phrase it that way. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was the best thing he could have said. Because making her sound like one of a vast harem had killed any romantic hopes she might have been harbouring in one fell swoop.
Had he seen the doubt and the weary resignation which had momentarily clouded her features? Was that why his mouth hardened into a bitter line as he said ‘Obviously not’? His voice had hardened, too. ‘I think you’d better tell me where you want to go from here, don’t you, Romy?’
Romy gave him a wide-eyed look. ‘Why, to bed, of course!’
Dominic looked at her with a positively shocked expression on his face, and it took him a moment or two to recover himself. ‘To bed?’ he queried, as if he had not heard her correctly.