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‘I know that. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier to work together. It would be horribly, hideously awkward. It’s already horribly, hideously awkward and since you obviously prefer to be blunt about the whole thing, I’ll be blunt too. I cannot believe I had sex with my boss. I cannot believe I was so unprofessional.’ She fiddled with the edge of her sweater and then turned away from him but Lucas wasn’t having that.
‘Why are you blaming yourself?’ He closed his hands around her shoulders and spun her round to face him, forcing her to look at him. ‘What happened last night was my responsibility, not yours.’
‘That isn’t true. You didn’t know what you were doing.’ She looked pale and tired and suddenly he remembered the nightmare drive she’d had to reach him the night before. That alone must have been exhausting. And then there had been everything that had happened afterwards.
He gave a humourless laugh. ‘Emma, I knew exactly what I was doing.’ Escaping. Taking ruthless advantage of a decent young woman who ordinarily wouldn’t have found herself anywhere near a man as damaged as him.
‘It was my fault. You were out of your mind with grief,’ she said softly. ‘I handled it badly.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘You told me to go away. Over and over again you told me to go. And did I listen? No, of course not.’ Her tone was loaded with self-recrimination. ‘It was so arrogant of me to think I could help. Stupid. There was nothing that could have helped, I see that now.’
‘You did help.’ And that had come as a surprise. For those moments in front of the flickering fire, the pain had eased. But at what cost? Guilt gnawed at him. ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘For what?’
‘I used you.’ His brutal honesty made her flinch.
‘That isn’t the way I see it.’
‘Well, it’s the way it was.’ He refused to gild the truth and when she tried to pull away he tightened his grip, refusing to let her duck the subject. With that in mind he asked the question that had been playing on his mind since waking. ‘I was rough. Did I hurt you?’
‘No! You were amazing. The whole thing was incredible. To be wanted like that and—oh God, I can’t believe I just said that—’ She covered her face with her hands, her moan muffled. ‘Please, just shoot me right now. Shoot me and end this. This has to be the single most embarrassing moment of my life. Please—if you’re a nice man you’ll accept my resignation and then I’ll never have to face you again.’
There was something so hopelessly endearing about her that had the situation not been so serious, he would have smiled. ‘I’m not a nice man and you’ll be facing me on a daily basis, so you might as well get used to it.’ He tugged her hands away from her face. ‘And because I’m not a nice man I’m going to embarrass you even more by asking when you last had sex with someone.’
‘That is such a personal question—’ And then she caught the ironic lift of his eyebrow and turned vivid scarlet. ‘You’re thinking that we’ve already made this personal—’
‘Just a little.’ He made a concerted effort to delete thoughts of the way her lithe, naked body had felt under his. ‘So when?’
‘I don’t know. It’s been a while.’
Which confirmed all his worst fears. ‘Why?’
‘Meeting people isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies. During the week I only meet people at work and I don’t want to have a relationship with someone I work with—’ she caught his eye and turned fiery red ‘—and before I took the job with you … well, there was someone actually,’ she admitted reluctantly, ‘but it didn’t work out and that’s probably a good thing because although I thought I was in love with him, it turned out I wasn’t.’
Love.
Hearing the word was enough to make him release her but she looked so miserable that he felt the need to lighten the atmosphere. ‘So let me guess—you met this loser at school and when he fumbled under your skirt you hit him with your pencil case and after that he could never father children.’ He was rewarded by a gurgle of laughter.
‘Close.’
‘It was a school bag and not a pencil case?’ Tara would have been bitching about how tired she was, he thought. He would have been treated to sulks and moods, not a sweet smile. And never in a million years would Tara have let him see her without make-up.
‘It was a little more mundane than that. And it wasn’t at school. I didn’t have time for boys when I was at school.’ Avoiding his gaze, she turned back to the window, staring down at the acres of parkland and woodland that wrapped itself around the castle. ‘I was fourteen when Mum got pregnant. When other girls were discovering make-up and dating, I was helping with a baby.’
