One Night with Morelli(23)

                ‘Not.’

                He thought she was beautiful?

                ‘And you did not drink any champagne.’

                Her accusing green stare settled on his face; it was nice just for once to be the one on the offensive. ‘How do you know?’

                ‘I’m an observant man.’

                Her eyes narrowed. ‘You were watching me!’ she flung, quivering with a combination of outrage and excitement that tied her stomach in knots and brought a flush to her pale skin.

                ‘And you knew I was.’ His retort was unanswerable for someone who was not a good liar. ‘It is the game men and women play, cara,’ he drawled.

                Eve felt as if she had just stepped out of the training pool into the deep end. She struggled to fight her way through the panic that was closing in on her and remain calm and in control. ‘I’m not playing games.’

                He looked at her for a long moment, acknowledging a flicker of uncertainty as the extraordinary possibility that she was telling the truth occurred to him. She could not be that inexperienced, surely? But looking deep into those big emerald eyes, he saw she wasn’t trying to hide anything—or perhaps she didn’t know how…?

                A word popped into his head: innocence.

                He straightened up, pulling away from her in more than the physical sense. He had thought they were on the same page but he had been wrong; he had seen that sultry mouth but not the emotional baggage that came with it. It was a good thing he had discovered his error now, before things had gone too far, he told himself.

                She was high maintenance, and he was a bastard who had no intention of changing. Always better in his experience to call a spade a spade.

                ‘Will you do something for me?’ he asked.

                He was not about to make an indecent proposal with his daughter just outside the door but even so her heartbeat kicked into a higher gear. ‘That depends.’

                ‘Smile and try not to look so tragic.’

                She stiffened, her spine snapping to attention. ‘Pardon me?’

                ‘I’d like to stay a hero for as long as I can in my daughter’s eyes, so I’d be grateful if you could suck it up and look like I waved my magic wand and made everything better. It’s not as if you’re the only one who doesn’t like weddings. I suspect with me it’s that they remind me too much of my own,’ he admitted with a frankness she was beginning to find disturbing.

                It was a day he was able to think about with a degree of objectivity now, but for a long time it hadn’t been that way. Now he was able to admit that he had known halfway through exchanging his vows that he was making the biggest mistake of his life, and it was doubtful it would even have got that far if his parents hadn’t been so against it, and delivered an ultimatum.

                He had been twenty and had thought he knew everything. Their parental disapproval had been like a red rag to a bull, and what better way to display his maturity than to get married against their wishes and show them how wrong they were?

                ‘Suck it up?’ she repeated in a low, dangerous voice. ‘Suck it up? What the hell do you think I’ve been doing all d-d-day? As for your marriage, I…I…spare me the details.’ She glared at him, daring him to comment on her stutter. These days it rarely surfaced but she was always conscious that it could at any moment—and it was his fault that it just had.