A Price Worth Paying(51)

Her panicked brain morphed to anger. ‘How could you do that?’ she cried. ‘How could you be so stupid?’

Her answer was the thwack of the flat of his hand high above her head against the beam supporting her. ‘Did you ask me to put on a condom?’

‘And so it’s my fault—?’ even though she hadn’t given protection a thought, and she knew she hadn’t, but damned if she was going to accept the blame ‘—because you can’t control yourself?’

‘And you didn’t want it?’

‘Did I ask for it? Did I ever ask for sex from you, or did you simply demand it, as you always did?’

‘You enjoyed it. You know you did.’

‘That’s not the same thing and you know it.’

He turned away from her then, his shoulders heaving, and she sensed the loss of him even as she celebrated the relief that came from the distance between them, and she wondered at the tangle of those conflicting emotions and wondered if love made sense of it all.

Ever since that first day in his apartment it had been the same, the relentless push and pull confusing her thoughts and tangling her intentions.

But now there was something else to confuse her thoughts and add to the tangle in her mind.

What if she were pregnant?

She’d lived this nightmare once before—the overwhelming fear of being pregnant to a man who didn’t want her—the fear, the terror of thinking that she was, the utter helplessness at not knowing.

But beyond that, the endless soul-searching at being tempted to do something she knew she could never do. She wasn’t a religious woman, her parents had brought her up with no particular belief systems that told her she should act one way or another and she had grown up believing she could do anything she wanted in the world. But, when push came to shove, she had learned that there were some places she could not go, some lines she could not cross.

What were the chances?

Luck had been with her that time, sending her a belated period that had been accompanied by a torrent of tears—grateful tears. As it was, she had held herself together these last few months by a tenuous thread. She could not have coped if she’d been pregnant with Damon’s child.

And now the nightmare was happening all over again. Again the fear. Again the hoping. Again the anxious, endless wait and the anguished sleepless nights until she knew, one way or the other.

She couldn’t be pregnant. She was leaving when this was over. She had to leave. She had to get away before he discovered the truth.

Because falling in love with Alesander had never been part of the deal.

‘It was wrong of me,’ he admitted suddenly, completely blindsiding her. ‘I should never have made love to you. Not here. Not like this.’

She channelled shock into rational thought and turned her panicked mind to calculating dates, needing to be able to hope. ‘It might be okay,’ she said, needing to believe it. ‘It’s early in my cycle. It would be unlucky.’ But then she’d been lucky last time. Did this kind of luck get balanced out? Was it her turn to be unlucky?

He had his back to her, refusing to look at her.

Two facts that didn’t escape her. ‘Luck does not come into it. It shouldn’t have happened!’

She swiped up her knickers from the ground with as much dignity as she could muster, balling them in her fist, not bothering to further humiliate herself by stopping to tug them on now. ‘You’re so right,’ she said. ‘Maybe you might try remembering that next time.’

Alesander swung around. There wouldn’t be a next time. Damn her, there shouldn’t have been a this time!

He was a man of needs, it was true. He always had been. But never since his first wild encounter with a woman, when he’d barely been a teenager and she was a wanton who’d let his night time fantasies play out in her hot hands and hot mouth and who’d given him a gold-plated initiation to the pleasures of the flesh, had he been so unprepared and made such a mistake. He’d used up all the luck he was planning on ever needing that time.

Because he wasn’t a teenager any more.

There were no excuses.

Except to blame her.

That was the one thing he could do.

Because she did this to him. She was the one who reduced him to his basest level and his basest needs. She was the one who drove him crazy and made him blind with lust when he needed to be thinking straight.

‘There can be no child!’