Hot Summer Flings: A Spanish Awakening / The Italian Next Door... / Interview with the Daredevil

‘It wasn’t a date, he was just—’

‘I saw what he was just doing, and if you choose to have casual sex it might be a good idea to remember that drunks have a very slender grasp of safe sex!’

The accusation horrified Megan. ‘He wasn’t—’

‘Are you saying he had not been drinking?’

‘No, I’m …’ She shook her head, struggling to equate this cold, cruel critic with the person who had always had a kind word of encouragement for her in the past.

Her miserable silence seemed to incense him further.

‘Have you been drinking also?’ he asked, his hooded gaze suspicious as he studied her face.

At that point a small burst of defiance, long overdue it seemed in retrospect, came to Megan’s aid.

Planting her hands on the curve of her hips, she thrust out her chin, tossed back her hair. ‘If I wanted to have a drink, so what?’ she challenged, her voice husky as she forced the words past the aching emotional lump in her throat.

‘It’s not illegal, you know. I’m over eighteen.’

‘This is not about legality, it is about self-respect.’

Megan, unable to stand there and take the sheer breathtaking unfairness of the cutting condemnation, choked back a sob and yelled, ‘I wasn’t attending an orgy! It was just a few friends, a university thing. Actually, it’s none of your business. You’re not my father.’

Inexplicably, or so it seemed to Megan, he took her response as a tacit admission of guilt.

‘So you have!’ His eyes closed, he let his head fall back, exposing the long line of his brown muscled throat as he inhaled deeply, then slid apparently unwittingly into his native tongue, ending the tirade with a biting, ‘Well? ‘

Well, what? she thought. ‘I had one glass of wine,’ she admitted after a fulminating silence. ‘I said I’d get a taxi, but he offered—’

‘How did you expect the man to react when you look like that? It’s an open invitation to … to …’ The rest of the insult was delivered once more in his native tongue, but this time a crushed Megan definitely got the gist!

‘I said no.’

‘Clearly not loudly enough. He said …’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said you were gagging for it.’

Megan, white-faced, pushed away the images crowded into her head and refocused on the present.

‘I prefer to steer clear of the D-cup she’s-gagging-for-it look.’ As she spoke she saw the flash of shocked recognition in his eyes and wished the words unsaid.

Her intention had always been, should he ever refer to the subject—admittedly unlikely—to shrug it away as though she barely recalled it. The last thing she wanted was Emilio to guess what sort of indelible impression the incident had had on her.

‘You are speaking of that night when that little loser made a pass.’

His retrospective take on the evening drew a laugh from Megan. ‘You mean that innocent victim I led on?’ She bit her lip and thought, Could you sound any more bitter, Megan?

A nerve clenched in his lean cheek.

If it had been anyone else she would have interpreted the look that flashed across his face as discomfiture, but this was Emilio Rios, who did not know the meaning of awkward.

He dragged a hand down his jaw and expelled an irritated-sounding sigh. ‘I was angry that night.’ He had been angry that entire weekend, from the moment she had walked into the room the previous evening smelling like summer and looking like warm, inviting sin, looking as if she were made for him.

The forced admission made her laugh. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

Even now the memory of his loss of control shook Emilio. He had never before or since come closer to totally losing it. The red haze had consumed him totally.

‘The situation was …’

She angled an interrogative brow as his voice trailed away to a growl.

‘I did not handle the situation well.’

As apologies went it was pretty feeble. ‘Being my brother’s mate did not make you the guardian of my morals and you had no right to judge me!’

‘I did not judge you. I was trying to protect you, Megan.’

‘You made me feel grubby.’ She saw the flash of shock in his eyes and dropped her gaze.

‘That was not my intention.’

Not his intention, but the result nonetheless. ‘It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.’

‘Not so long ago and it clearly does matter,’ he said, feeling intense guilt as he studied her face.

‘Look, let the subject drop. Like I said, it was a long time ago.’

‘My actions were … not acceptable.’

He had been more out of control than he had ever been at any other time in his life.

When the guy had bleated out the clichéd defence and even tried to suggest Megan had not meant no, Emilio had come closer than he even liked to admit to himself to choking the life out of the sleaze.

It had not occurred to him until now that he had vented his frustration on Megan. Frustration that had been building the entire weekend. When he had come back and seen her standing there, the tears on her cheeks, her hair tangled and her mouth bruised from another man’s kisses, all that frustrated sexual hunger and guilt he had been keeping under tight control for the entire weekend had exploded.

‘And then some.’ His remorse seemed genuine, but Megan was not prepared to let him off the hook just yet. ‘I think, Megan, that you—’

She held up her hand. ‘Don’t bother, I know what you think about me. You made yourself quite clear at the time, practically telling me I was a little tart who was a danger to the moral well-being of the entire male population for a hundred-mile radius.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t say anything like that.’ Their eyes connected and he shrugged, admitting, ‘All right, I might have given that impression, but that was only because …’

‘Because you were disgusted by my slutty clothes. Well, as a matter of fact, they weren’t. They were perfectly ordinary things for—’

‘Jeans, very tight, and the clingy black top. It kept slipping off your shoulder—your bra strap was pink,’ he recited. His dark eyes drifted towards her mouth as he continued to catalogue. ‘Your lipstick was pink too. It was smeared.’ He swallowed convulsively before adding in the same flat, colourless tone, ‘And your lip was bleeding.’

Until he’d seen the blood he had been holding it together quite well. All right, not well as such, but he had been keeping his more primitive instincts in check. But those tiny beads of red on her skin had made something snap inside him.