The Thorn in His Side

‘You kissed me,’ she charged, addressing her accusation to his chest.

‘Only after you kissed me.’

The provocation brought her indignant gaze zeroing in on his face. Libby thought longingly about wiping that smug smirk off his face. ‘I’d had a shock. I thought you were dead.’ As excuses went it was pathetic, but it was all she had.

‘So that was the kiss of life?’ he said, sounding interested.

Libby, who could not think of a smart comeback and suspected that even if she had he would have come up with an even smarter one, shook her head.

‘I think we should forget it,’ she decided magnanimously.

Libby intended to, though the incident had all the ingredients of a nightmare—the sort where you found yourself in the supermarket in your underwear, and not the good stuff.

‘As you wish, though I’m insulted my kisses are so forgettable. Still, I’m a firm believer in the old adage practice makes perfect.’

Her eyes narrowed. Any more perfect and she’d have passed out. ‘So long as it’s not with me you can practise as much as you like.’

‘Relax, I only have sex with sane women.’ Not for three months, he realized. This went a long way to explaining his uncharacteristically impulsive behaviour.

He had appetites, sure, but he exerted control and, he liked to think, discrimination. The last thing he wanted was to find himself involved with some needy attention seeking bunny boiler who wanted to understand him.

Luckily there were plenty of women who shared his pragmatic attitude to sex and did not need the façade of a loving relationship to enable them to enjoy sex.

Libby tilted her head back to angle a menacing frown at him. ‘And you’re saying I’m not?’

‘You walked out in front of my car. If that doesn’t qualify as insane I don’t know what does.’

His eyes darkened at the memory of that moment when he had thought he was going to hit her. ‘What did you think you were doing? I can’t decide if you are a lunatic or just suicidal.’

The fact she fully deserved the reprimand and his anger did not make it easier to stand there meekly and take it.

‘I didn’t jump out, well, I did, but only because you were about to run over the dog and, anyway, if you hadn’t been driving like an idiot this wouldn’t have happened.’

He raised an eloquent brow. ‘So this was my fault.’

Libby felt the guilty heat rush to her cheeks. ‘Not totally,’ she admitted reluctantly.

‘And as for a dog …’ he made a show of looking around before lifting his shoulders in an expressive shrug ‘… I see no dog.’

The pink in her cheeks deepened to an angry red. ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ she asked in a dangerous tone.

He arched a brow and looked amused. ‘I am simply saying that I saw no dog …’ He turned his head from one side to the other and shrugged. ‘I see no dog.’

‘Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it wasn’t there!’ retorted Libby, really angry now. Did he really think the dog was a figment of her imagination?

‘Let’s for argument’s sake say there was a dog—’

Libby gritted her teeth. ‘There was a dog. He’s a golden Lab who answers to the name of Eustace.’

Libby saw no reason to add that he rarely answered to his name. In fact the daft animal was far more likely to run in the opposite direction.

‘So where is this dog now?’

Good question, thought Libby, scanning the lane with a worried frown. ‘God knows,’ she admitted honestly. ‘He’s not very … He was a rescue dog—he’s a little bit … highly strung.’ It sounded better than the truth, which was he was as mad as a box of frogs!

‘If a dog is badly behaved it is the owner’s fault and not the animal’s.’

Libby, her chin angled defiantly, tilted her head back to meet his golden stare. His superior attitude was really setting her teeth on edge.

‘I’m not blaming the dog for anything and I am quite prepared to admit that the accident is my fault,’ she told him haughtily.

He shook his head and flashed a wolfish white grin. ‘Has no one ever told you that you should never admit guilt?’

Libby gave a disdainful sniff and retorted, ‘No, I was taught to tell the truth and take responsibility for my own actions.’

‘Very noble, I’m impressed,’ he said, looking deeply unimpressed. ‘Not everyone realises that all actions have consequences.’

Libby regarded him warily.

‘In the litigious world of today such painful honesty can be an expensive luxury.’

Libby shivered and, hugging herself, rubbed at the goose bumps that had broken out on her arms. Some women, she was sure, would have found the resulting suggestion of something approaching cruelty in his smile attractive; she was glad she was not one of them.

But, God, he knew how to kiss!

‘Is that some sort of threat?’

Before he could reply the sound of an excitedly barking dog bursting through the bushes the other side of the road made them both turn.

‘Is he real enough for you?’ Libby raised a sarcastic brow and threw him a challenging glare of triumph as she dropped gracefully down to dog level.

‘Eustace, good boy!’

The dog continued to bark from an elusive distance.

Rafael watched her efforts to lure him closer with a critical scowl. ‘At heart a dog is still a wolf, a pack animal who needs to know who is in charge.’

Libby cast him a sideways look of dislike as she continued to make encouraging noises. ‘And that I suppose would be you.’ Admittedly if any man had pack alpha written all over him it was this one.

‘My lifestyle is not conducive to owning pets.’ That was the life he had chosen for himself, the life that suited him. No baggage, nobody to feel responsible for.

He had given responsibility a go and he had failed; the guilt of failing the person he had tried to protect had stayed with him through the years.

He had failed the only person he had ever loved.

It didn’t matter to Rafael that most people would have considered it the mother’s job to keep the son safe and not vice versa. His mother had been one of life’s fragile souls worn down by rejection and hungry for the approval of whatever man was in her life, eager to gain their approval even when pleasing them meant dumping her inconvenient child with whoever would take him.

She had always come back for him eaten up with guilt, calling him the only man in her life, and for a while things were good, but there was always another man. And then finally she had not come back and Rafael had gone in search of her, arriving too late.