The chill of the night was creeping over her bare skin. She reached for the covers to pull over them.
“Awake, are you?” He sat up and turned to look down at her. She could just see his profile, limned by the dying firelight.
“When were you going to tell me?” His voice was hard. Accusing.
Oh, God. “Tell you?” she managed in a voice that shook only a little.
“That you weren’t a virgin.”
There was a long silence. A thousand possibilities raced through Emm’s mind. But only one was the truth. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice.”
Chapter Thirteen
A girl, no virgin either, I should guess—a baggage
Thrust on me like a cargo on a ship
To wreck my peace of mind.
—SOPHOCLES,WOMEN OF TRACHIS(TRANS. E. F. WATLING)
Cal couldn’t believe his ears. “You hoped Iwouldn’t notice?”
She swallowed and nodded.
He waited for an explanation. She pulled the bedclothes up to cover her nakedness, then sat there silent and unmoving, making no attempt to explain or justify herself.
Anger licked at him. He’d striven so hard to ensure that her first time was the best he could make it—and it wasn’t her first time at all. It didn’t help to know that, far from exerting total control over himself, he’d utterly lost it.
But that was her fault, responding like... like...
He grabbed his dressing gown and flung it on, shoving his arms into the sleeves so violently he heard something tear. He didn’t care. He seized the candle, marched to the dressing room and lit it from the stub that was about to gutter.
He lit two more candles—this wasn’t a conversation you could have in the dark—and placed them where they would light her face best. He stood over her, arms folded. “Who was it?”
For a long moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer him. Her eyes were wide and dark; her skin glowed, honey and silk in the soft candlelight. Her expression was unreadable.
The scent of their lovemaking filled his nostrils. Rose and vanilla, aroused woman, and musky, salty, rawunbridled sex. His body stirred in response. He wanted her again. Already.
His patience snapped. “Dammit, I asked you a question. And don’t bother giving me a pack of lies. Who the hell was it?”
She seemed to be considering what to say. Eventually she said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll be the judge of that!”
She gave him a long, thoughtful look, tucked the bedclothes more tightly around her and said with a tiny shrug of one tantalizingly bare shoulder, “I was seventeen. I thought I was in love. There’s been no one since.”
The cool, bare-bones summary infuriated him. She showed no contrition at all. If she’d wept, apologized, begged his forgiveness, he might have, after a judicious period, forgiven her.
But this, this matter-of-fact account that explained nothing—nothing!—drove him wild.
He wanted to throttle her. He wanted to beat her.
He wanted to take her back to bed and make love to her until they were both insensible.
“We will talk of this in the morning,” he said, and stalked from the room, slamming the door behind him.
***
