His eyes narrowed as his eyes drifted to her tender lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘Nothing, as it happens,’ he said, thinking it seemed he also knew even less about women, or this one at least.
‘You’re making a big thing of nothing. Being a virgin isn’t like having a contagious disease. It’s not obligatory to go into isolation.’ Her mouth settled into a mutinous line of defiance as she tried to hide her hurt. ‘I’m sorry you feel cheated and short-changed but I’m not about to say sorry.’
His brows lifted. ‘What are you talking about now? Cheated …?’ he asked irritably. ‘You are not making sense.’
Face scrunched in an effort to hold back the tears that threatened to spill over, she lifted her chin and blinked hard.
‘Well, so sorry,’ she drawled, ‘if I’ve lost my edge of clinical objectivity, but I’ve never been in this situation before.’
‘And you think I have?’
‘Yes, I get it, you don’t need to spell it out.’ She had been slow but the penny had finally dropped. She knew why he was acting this way. ‘You thought you were getting someone who knew what she was doing in the bedroom and instead—’ she broke off to give a loud sniff and passed a hand across her suspiciously bright eyes as she gulped ‘—instead you got me.’
She heard the unattractive, self-pitying whine in her voice and shook her head, mumbling, ‘Even you could not have got it perfect your first time.’
He probably had. Megan closed her eyes, hating the woman he had got it right with.
Torn between frustration and tenderness, Emilio levered himself into a sitting position with the fluid grace that typified all his actions.
‘Have I got this right?’ he asked, placing one hand beside her head as he looked down at her. ‘You think I feel short-changed? Short-changed?’ he repeated, shaking his head as he added something, not appearing to realise he had slipped into his native tongue, and laughed. ‘The way your mind works, querida, is a constant source of amazement to me. Listen, you may not value what you gave me highly, but I do.’
MEGAN’S eyes slid slowly up from the expanse of golden chest she was staring at. ‘You value? ‘
She parroted the words like someone speaking a foreign language.
Emilio nodded and framed her face between his long brown fingers, smoothing the strands of hair spread around her face from her brow. ‘I am your first.’ The sheer impossibility of it still shook him. ‘Do you know how that makes me feel?’
Her eyes darted from side to side, refusing to meet his. ‘Annoyed? ‘
‘Privileged.’
She froze at the throaty rebuttal, her eyes heavy, lids half closing as he touched her cheek. The tremor she felt in his fingers as they brushed slowly across the downy curve shocked her.
Her lips, soft and warm and so incredibly sweet, trembled under his as he kissed her softly.
‘And in shock,’ he admitted, pulling back. ‘I still don’t understand how it is possible.’
Arm curved above her head, she watched as he propped his broad shoulders against the carved headboard. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the tangled strands off her hot face with one hand and, anchoring the sheet over her breasts with the other, pulled herself up into a kneeling position.
‘Because you thought I slept my way through college?’
The suggestion drew a dark frown from Emilio. ‘No, because you’ve been living with a man for two years.’ And though he had buried it deep, the knowledge had driven him out of his mind. He took a deep breath, let the anger pass through him and released it; despite a lot of practice he had never quite perfected the technique.
‘A man!’ Megan sank deeper into confusion.
‘All right, live-in lover, boyfriend, whatever he was to you.’
Megan sat back on her heels, lifting a hand to balance herself as the mattress shifted. She was totally at sea. Live-in lover? She had barely had a date!
‘What are you talking about? I haven’t been living with a man!’ She stopped, her eyes widening in comprehension, before sliding back down in the bed with a laugh and a billowing of silken sheets. ‘You’re talking about Josh?’ She chuckled.
He arched a brow, his focus drifting as his eyes were drawn to the outline of her body against the silk. She gave a sinuous wriggle. All he had to do was reach out and lift the sheet … He swallowed as he struggled to banish the image of her smooth, naked body from his head.
The effort made sweat break out along his upper lip.
‘There were others?’ He immediately recognised the irrationality, given the topic under discussion, of his jealous question. More? There hadn’t been any!
‘What is this about?’
Emilio looked down at her lying there, looking like a wild-haired wanton angel, and felt a pulse of desire throb through his body. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. This
Josh, he—’
Megan’s brows twitched into a perplexed line. Her fingers restlessly tugged at the sheet. ‘What is this thing you have about Josh? You sound as if you don’t like him.’
‘I have no thing about Josh. I’m sure he was perfect, but …’
‘Pretty much,’ she admitted. It was a view shared by all her female friends. They had all bemoaned the fact that the perfect men were always gay.
The smiling insertion drew a dark frown from Emilio. ‘You lived with the man!’
His accusing manner and bewildering interest in the subject of her ex-flatmate was beginning to make Megan feel angry. ‘It’s hardly a crime to share a flat with someone and I’m not on trial,’ she added, growing more bewildered by the second—his condemnatory attitude. ‘What has living with Josh got to do with anything?’
‘You have been living with the man for two years. What am I to think you spend your time doing? Playing Scrabble? Por Dios!’ His upper lip curled in a derisive sneer as he shook his dark head slowly from side to side. It was inexplicable to him that any man could live under the same roof as Megan for two hours and not make love to her—this man had spent two years!
She stopped, her startled stare flying to his face as the penny finally dropped. ‘Josh—my boyfriend!’
‘What was he waiting for—your wedding night?’ Emilio growled.
The question touched a nerve with Megan. ‘And would that be so weird?’ she asked him sharply.
Emilio stared at her. ‘In one word—yes.’
‘Well, call me weird but actually that was my plan up until an hour or so ago.’
It turned out it was easy to have lofty principles when there was no temptation. Not that she regretted her change of heart for a millisecond.
He swore under his breath.
‘Well, I don’t expect you to understand,’ she conceded with a sleepy yawn. Her time clock had to be seriously skewed. ‘Look, the fact is it’s true that I didn’t ever plan having sex before marriage, but that’s not the reason I hadn’t slept with Josh. I didn’t sleep with Josh because I am really not his type.’
Emilio frowned skeptically. To his mind Megan was every man’s type.
‘I mean really not his type.’
Emilio stiffened. ‘You’re saying …?’
Megan