LITMIR.BIZ

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the scales in my favour,’ he murmured. ‘Where’s the crime in that?’ He was standing right in front of her now and he could almost feel the war raging inside her. Flee or stay put?

      She wasn’t running.

      Because, like it or not, she wanted him as much as he wanted her and getting all worked up about the whys and hows didn’t make a scrap of difference. The power of lust.

      ‘I’m accustomed to getting what I want and I want you. And, yes, I did consider holding the offer of financial help over your head in exchange for that glorious body that has disturbed far too many of my nights, but I didn’t.’

      ‘Arrogant...’ Sophie muttered. But she reluctantly had to concede that at least he wasn’t trying to economise with the truth and the fact that he had used whatever ploys he had at hand to get what he wanted was all just part and parcel of his personality. There wasn’t a scrap of shame or sheepishness in his voice.

      He shrugged and smiled. ‘Tell me you don’t like it.’

      ‘No one likes arrogance.’ Her heart was beating madly. In the space of a heartbeat, the atmosphere had shifted right back to the sexy intimacy they had been sharing only moments earlier, before everything had gone downhill.

      Before she had told him that she was a virgin.

      ‘I’ve always been arrogant and you weren’t complaining seven years ago. Why did you tell me that you were a virgin?’

      ‘Because it’s the truth,’ she whispered stiltedly. ‘I know you probably find that hard to believe.’

      ‘Try impossible.’

      ‘Roger...he...’

      She wasn’t lying or making up something to try to pique his interest. She was telling the truth. He could see it in her face and hear it in the clumsy awkwardness of her voice.

      ‘Sit down.’

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘You look as though you’re about to collapse.’ He guided her away from the bed with all its heated connotations of sex towards a chair that was by the window, facing into the room. Perhaps she sat there in the light evenings and read a book. It was the sort of thing he could picture her doing.

      What he couldn’t picture her doing was marrying some man only to spend her married life in a state of frustrated virginity.

      Who the hell did something like that?

      ‘You hadn’t slept with the man before you...agreed to walk up the aisle with him?’ This when she was sitting on the chair like a fragile wooden doll and he had dragged over the only other chair in the room, which had been in front of the oversized, dark mahogany dressing table.

      ‘He... I...’ The weight of all those nagging thoughts that she had temporarily pushed aside surged forward in a rush that made her breath hitch in her throat. She couldn’t even remember what she had expected from her doomed marriage to Roger. She had half believed her parents when they had told her that her feelings for Javier were just an adolescent crush, the result of being away from home, being free for the first time in her young life. It happened to everyone, they had insisted, and it would blow over in due course. She would gravitate back towards someone on her own level, from her own social class, and the thrill of the unknown would fade away in time.

      They had been very convincing, and as all those other reasons for marrying Roger had piled up, so had the tug of war going on inside her intensified.

      But had she ever foreseen a satisfying sex life with the man she should never have wed?

      Had she properly considered what married life was going to be like for her? Had she simply assumed that forgetting Javier would be as easy as her parents had said it would be and so all those feelings would, likewise, be easily replaced, transferred to Roger? What a complete idiot she had been! Foolish and naïve.

      She now knew that what she had felt for Javier hadn’t been a passing crush. She had fallen in love with him and he had been spot on when he had told her, just then, that his arrogance had never bothered her when they had been going out.

      It was just something else she had adored about him. That and his utter integrity, his dry wit, his sharp intelligence and his sense of fair play.

      She was still in love with him and all those traits that should have turned her off him but didn’t. He had become the billionaire he had quietly always known he would end up being, and of course he had changed in the process. How could he not? But underneath the changes was the same man and she was still in love with him.

      And just acknowledging that appalled and frightened her.

      Because things might have stayed the same for her but they hadn’t stayed the same for him.

      He really did want completion. He hadn’t stayed celibate over the years. He was a powerful, wealthy man now who could have any woman on the planet with a snap of his fingers. She was the one who’d got away, and he was determined to put that right, so he was having a little time out with her.

      He didn’t love her and whatever feelings he had had for her in the past had disappeared over the years. He’d made that perfectly clear. But she still loved him and that was a dreadful state of affairs.

      Whilst one part of her realised that she must look very strange, just sitting with a blank expression on her face, another part recognised that there was nothing she could do about that because she couldn’t control the racing whirlpool of her thoughts.

      One thing was emerging very fast, though. She couldn’t let him know how she felt. If he could be cool and controlled, then she must be as well. There was no way that she would allow him to see just how weak and vulnerable she was inside.

      ‘There’s no need to explain,’ Javier said gently. He was beginning to feel all sorts of things and top of the list was intense satisfaction that he was going to be her first. He’d never thought that he was the sort of primal guy who would actually be thrilled to the core by something like that but he had clearly underestimated his own primitive side. Under the civilised veneer, he was as untamed as they came.

      ‘What...what do you mean?’ Sophie stammered. Of course, he had no insight into her murky past, but she still had a moment of wondering whether he had somehow worked everything out, including her feelings for him.

      ‘I don’t suppose you ever anticipated entering into a sexless marriage.’

      Sophie went beetroot-red and didn’t snatch back her hand when he reached out and idly played with her fingers.

      ‘I...er...I...’

      ‘No.’ He stopped her mid awkward sentence. ‘Like I said, there’s no need to explain because I understand.’

      ‘You do?’

      ‘You were young. You weren’t to know that it takes all sorts to make the world go round and some men find it harder than others to face their sexuality.’

      ‘Sorry?’

      For the first time in living memory, Javier wasn’t seeing red when he thought about the loser she had tossed him over for. In many ways, he felt sorry for her. With financial problems surfacing on the home front, and a man with control over purse strings her family needed, she had failed to see that he had his own agenda and had tied the knot in the expectation that life would be normal.

      She’d been sorely mistaken.

      Javier shunted aside thorny questions about whether she had loved the guy or not. That was then and this was now and, in the interim, she sure as hell had had her wake-up call on that front.

      A virgin widow and now here she was. Here they both were...

      Sophie was reeling from the series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Red-blooded alpha male that Javier was, he had jumped to the simplest conclusion. She was good-looking, she and Roger had married... The only possible reason they might not have consummated their marriage would

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