A muscle throbbed low in his jaw as her insult hit its mark. Matt Whatever-his-last-name-was was clearly all macho alpha pride. Her suggestion had riled him. Well, so what? She couldn’t care less.
‘And no, I don’t think about that weekend!’ she snapped before he could interject. ‘So far as I’m concerned, you’re just some blip in my rear-view mirror—and if I could take what happened between us back, I would,’ she lied, her stomach rolling at the betrayal of their son.
‘Oh, really?’ he asked softly, words that were dangerous and seductive all at once, his husky accent as spicy and tempting as it had been three years earlier.
‘Yes, really.’ She glared at him to underscore her point.
‘So you don’t think about the way it felt when I kissed you here?’ She was completely unprepared for his touch—the feather-light caress of a single finger against her jaw, the pulse-point there moving into frantic overdrive as butterflies stormed through her chest.
‘No.’ The word was slightly uneven.
‘Or the way you liked me to touch you here?’ and he drew his finger lower, to her décolletage, and then lower still, to the gentle curve of her breast.
Heaven help her, memories were threatening to pull her under, to drown her with their perfection, even when the truth of their situation was disastrous.
Just for a second, she wanted to surrender to those recollections. She wanted to pretend they didn’t have a son together and that they were back in time, in that hotel room, just him and her, no consciousness of the outside world.
But it would be an exercise in futility.
‘Don’t.’ She batted his hand away and stepped away from him, anger almost a match for her desire. She rammed her hands against her hips, breathing in hard, wishing there was even the slightest hint of his having been as affected by those needs as she had been. ‘It was three years ago,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t just show up after all this time, after disappearing into thin air...’
He watched her from a face that was carefully blanked of emotion, his expression mask-like. ‘I had to see you.’
Her heart twisted at those words, at the sense that perhaps he’d found it impossible to forget their night together. Except he’d done exactly that. He’d walked away without a backwards glance. He could have called her at any time in the past three years, but he hadn’t. Nothing. Not a blip.
‘Well, you’ve seen me,’ she said firmly. ‘And now I think you should go.’
‘You’re angry with me.’
‘Yes.’ She held his gaze, her eyes showing hurt and betrayal. ‘I woke up and you were gone! You don’t think I have a right to be angry?’
A muscle twisted at the base of his firm, square jaw. ‘We agreed we would just spend the weekend together.’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t tacit approval for you to slink out in the middle of the night.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I did not slink.’ And then, as if bringing himself back to the point, he was calm again, his arrogant face blanked of any emotion once more. ‘And it was best for both of us that I left when I did.’
It was strange, really, how she’d been pulling her temper back into place, easing it into the box in which it lived, only to have it explode out of her, writhing free of her grip with a blinding intensity. ‘How? How was you disappearing into thin air best for me?’ she demanded, her voice raised, her face pale.
He sighed as though she were a recalcitrant toddler and his impatience at fraying point. ‘My life is complicated.’ He spoke without apology, words that were cool and firm and offered no hint of what had truly motivated his departure. ‘That weekend was an aberration. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have let it happen. I had no business getting involved with someone like you.’
‘Someone like me?’ she repeated, the words deceptively soft when inside her cells were screeching with indignation. ‘But it was fine to sleep with someone like me?’
‘You misunderstand my meaning,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘And that is my fault.’
‘So what is your meaning?’
He spoke slowly, carefully, as though she might not comprehend. ‘I wanted you the minute I saw you, Frankie, but I knew it could never be more than that weekend. I believe I was upfront about that; I apologise if you expected more from me.’ He went to move closer but she bristled, and he stilled. ‘There are expectations upon me, expectations as to who I will marry, and you are not the kind of bride I would ever be able to choose.’
She spluttered her interruption. ‘I didn’t want to marry you! I just wanted the courtesy of a goodbye from the man I lost my virginity to. When you crept out of that hotel suite, did you stop to think about what I would think?’
She had the very slight satisfaction of seeing something like remorse briefly glance across his stony features. ‘I had to leave. I’m sorry if that hurt you—’
‘Hurt me?’ She glared at him and shook her head. It had damned near killed her, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘What hurts is your stupidity! Your lack of decency and moral fibre.’
He jerked his face as though she’d slapped him, but she didn’t stop.
‘You were my first lover.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Sleeping with you meant something to me! And you just left.’
‘What would you have had me do, Frankie? Stay and cook you breakfast? Break it to you over scrambled eggs and salmon that I was going to go back to Tolmirós to forget all about you?’
Her stare was withering. ‘Only you haven’t forgotten me, have you?’
She held her breath, waiting for him to answer, her lips parted.
‘No,’ he agreed finally. ‘But I left because I knew I needed to. I left because I knew what was expected of me.’ He expelled a harsh breath, then another, slowly regaining control of himself. ‘I didn’t come here to upset you, Frankie. I’ll go away again.’
And at that, true, dark anger beat in her breast because it simply underscored their power imbalance. He’d come to her and so she was seeing him again, and he’d touched her as though desire was still a current in the room—it was all on his terms. All his timeline, his power, his control. He thought he could leave when it suited him and have that be the end of it.
Well, damn him, he had no right! ‘Did you even think about the consequences of that night, Matt? Did you so much as give even a second thought to whether or not I would be able to walk away from what we shared as easily as you did?’
FOR THE BRIEFEST of moments he misunderstood. Surely, he’d misunderstood.
As the heir to the throne of Tolmirós, Matthias had never taken any risks with sex. That weekend had been no different. He’d employed protective measures. He’d been careful, as always.
‘I knew there would be no consequences,’ he said, shrugging, as though his heart hadn’t skidded to a dramatic halt seconds earlier. ‘And I truly believed a clean break would be better for you.’
And for himself. He hadn’t trusted his willpower to so much as call her, to explain who he was and his reasons for needing to disappear from her life.
‘How did you know that?’