His mouth thinned into a grim line. His eyes and silence seethed with a violent challenge to her judgment of him. And maybe it was unfair, Serena thought despairingly. He’d never said it, never implied it, never acted that way. He’d given a reasonable explanation for the way he’d quizzed Lyall. It had nothing to do with the person she was.
With those intemperate words, she had given him just cause to believe she’d been playing some vengeful game with him. And in all honesty, she couldn’t deny there had, indeed, been a payback element in letting the situation between them run on—a sense of having power over him.
She was so screwed up by his wealth and position, and the fact that he’d been a party to that devastating conversation with Lyall, it was too difficult now to separate all that negative emotional baggage from the attraction Nic exerted. It was mixed up with things she’d wanted to leave behind, except Nic had linked her back to them.
In short, she was a mess again.
Whatever Nic Moretti was or wasn’t, she didn’t have the right to pass judgment on him or teach him any lessons. Her whole approach to him had been tainted by past events and she should have stayed clear of any personal involvement. Except…
‘You weren’t the only one who was strongly attracted,’ she blurted out, shaking her head in sheer anguish of spirit.
Nic grimaced, shooting her a look of savage mockery. ‘You’ve been neatly skirting around the truth ever since you met me. I don’t even know if that’s true.’
She heaved a ragged sigh, raising bleakly derisive eyes to his. ‘Why do you think I’m here with you?’
‘It’s part of the pattern of your walking away, then making me work to get you back. That’s a power play, Serena.’
A wry laugh gurgled from her throat. ‘It’s the power you have to override every bit of common sense that tells me to stop this…this hopeless relationship. I tried to lay that out to you on Monday.’
‘My family has nothing to do with what I felt we could share,’ he cut back impatiently.
‘What? Some casual sex?’ she snapped, completely losing all sense of perspective in the face of his continued assault on her character.
‘There was nothing casual about it,’ he asserted, looking fiercely affronted at the suggestion.
And he had every right to be because that wasn’t fair comment, either. She knew the sex between them had been incredibly special, as deeply felt by him as by her. She was handling this badly, plunging straight down a destructive track and unable to pull herself off it. If there’d been any chance of reaching some understanding with Nic, it was long gone now.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said on a wave of sheer misery. Then in a last-ditch defence, she added, ‘Do you think I enjoyed stripping my soul bare for you tonight? Did it sound like a power game to you, Nic?’
His face tightened. The blaze of anger in his eyes was averted, his gaze turned to the water beyond the open deck.
Black water.
Serena wished she could drown in it.
This, too, will pass, she recited with very little conviction. She gathered the shreds of some dignity together, pushed her chair back, and stood up. The action snapped his attention back to her.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t set out to play false with you. Nor did I mean to inflict hurt. Things just…got out of hand between us,’ she said in a tremulous rush, knowing she was on the verge of tears. ‘I’m sorry about dinner, too, but…if you’ll excuse me…’
There was no time for Nic to stop her. She was off, making a fast retreat through the restaurant to the reception desk and the exit. Frustration forced him to his feet. This conflict with Serena had not been settled to his satisfaction. She was right. It had got out of hand. Precisely where and how he wasn’t sure, but be damned if it was going to be left like this.
He whipped out his wallet as he strode after her, extracting two hundred dollars and handing them to the startled receptionist as he passed her desk. ‘To cover what we ordered,’ he tossed at her in explanation.
He had no plan. His mind was in total ferment, stewing over everything that had been said and done between him and Serena. Adrenalin was charging his body with an aggressive drive to act first—catch and hold her—because nothing would ever be settled if she got away from him.
Through the glass doors of the foyer, he saw her half running, almost stumbling down the steps to the parking lot. She’d reached the shadow of the palm trees lining the driveway before he caught up with her and forcibly blocked any further attempt at escape by wrapping his arms around her.
‘Oh, please…please…’ She beat her hands against his chest. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. ‘Can’t you see this is no good?’
Her distress only served to convince Nic of the rightness in stopping this headlong flight away from him. ‘It was good!’ he fiercely insisted, the words pouring from feelings that would not be denied. ‘Earlier tonight. Last Saturday and Sunday morning… It was good! And I won’t believe anything different.’
Her resistance to his embrace crumpled, the fight draining out of her. She closed her eyes and shook her head dejectedly. ‘You make me want to forget…what I should remember. There’s too big a gap between us, Nic.’
‘No, there isn’t.’ He gathered her closer, pressing her sagging head onto his shoulder, needing to feel the physical contact that had previously bonded them to a depth of intimacy he had never known before. ‘Can you argue a gap now, Serena?’
The soft fullness of her breasts swelled against his chest as she dragged in a deep breath. The release of it in a long shuddering sigh was like a soft waft of her inner life seeping through his shirt and the words that came rawly from her throat opened the gates to understanding.
‘I didn’t want to want you.’
Pain…torment…
Like a thunderclap, it struck him that he’d delivered another kind of death to her with his careless conversation about a marriage that would have promised her every luxury money could provide. Not that he regretted for one moment that he’d been instrumental in breaking up her engagement to Lyall Duncan. She would have been wasted on a man whose ego demanded she worship the ground he walked on. But he himself had hurt her. Very badly. And unfairly. All on the spurious grounds that she was…a hairdresser.
She’d built herself a bright glittering bubble to banish the dark times and he’d burst it, stripping her of years of effort so she could step into a world he’d been born to. And what merit was there in a set of circumstances that gave him everything with no effort on his part?