He gathered himself into a haughty cloud of resentful humility. “Why do you think I tried to stop you that night in Charleston?” he growled. “I thought you were reaching for him. I won’t be his stand-in.”
Her mouth opened, but whatever words she might have found caught in her throat. She had never seen Paolo anything but aristocratic and arrogant and entitled, but right now his pride lay on the floor between them as clearly as a skinned hide. She had to tread very carefully.
He rubbed his face. “Dio! Perhaps we should be ashamed of ourselves for falling into bed that night without considering who it could hurt, but what we did there...don’t be ashamed of that, Lauren. I tried to tell you once before, I like that you respond to me as strongly as I respond to you.”
Then why did you walk away tonight? she wanted to shout, while the rest of what he’d said set a lump of emotion into her throat. “Ryan wasn’t home enough for me to take for granted he would be in my bed. Of course I knew it was you.” That’s why she had reached for him. It had been the culmination of a thousand repressed fantasies.
“And I knew it was you,” Paolo stated forcefully. “You’re not some meaningless hookup, Lauren.”
She searched his closed expression, yearning to believe he was telling the truth, but it seemed so implausible. She was a boring, small-town goody-goody.
Paolo could barely breathe. His lungs felt as though they were being sawed in two while guilt and other emotions tried to smother him. Lauren was pushing him into a territory of self-examination where he didn’t want to go. Yes, there had been a lot of women. Yes, it was true that making love with them had never been an act of making love. He had never seen anything shameful in it because the women he’d been with had all been looking for what he also wanted: physical release.
Suddenly he was deeply ashamed though. His very active, if well-protected sex life was sordid when held up to her making love means something to me.
But that was another way of saying that Ryan had meant something to her. He hated knowing that she might be angry with her dead husband, but still had feelings for him.
Sex always demanded emotion from a woman, though. Paolo knew that. They put their small frames at the mercy of a much stronger being. That required a level of trust men didn’t need. Men weren’t vulnerable when they stripped and covered a woman. They were indomitable. That’s why they liked sex so much.#p#分页标题#e#
With Lauren, everything was different. Paolo’s inner warrior became defenseless, making him balk at revealing any signs of weakness, but he’d dented her self-confidence tonight. That demanded that he set aside his shields and make things right.
“You want me to say that making love to you was more important than marrying you first, but I can’t,” he admitted gruffly, facing a demon he hadn’t fully confronted until now, when he couldn’t avoid it. “I need you to have my name. I won’t have Mrs. Bradley in my bed again.”
Her jaw slacked and her face paled to white before outraged color flooded in. “That’s disgusting!”
He rushed her, taking her arms. “I’m not proud of this jealousy,” he bit out. “But we’re being honest here.”
“Jea—” She stilled her struggle and lifted her gaze to his, wary. “It’s not just a competition thing?”
“What? No! He’s not even here to see that you’re mine now.”
“Exactly. He’s not here, so how could you feel jealous of a name that I’m not even using?”
Dio! Her naïveté astonished him.
“I’ve always been jealous,” he elaborated.
Lauren’s fingernails hurt. She realized distantly that she had her fists knotted in Paolo’s shirt, her grasp so hard her nails were bending, but even while tension held her in its silent grip, deep inside she unfurled a bit. If he was being honest...
“I don’t have any right to it,” Paolo allowed begrudgingly, “but from the moment he slid into our booth and you barely looked at me again, I have been eaten up with it.”
Lauren forced herself to release him, unnerved by what he was saying. Logically she knew there was nothing particularly reassuring about a man revealing his territorial streak. Jealousy was a sign of distrust, not love, but a nebulous hope tried to take root in her breastbone, painful in its worming to take hold. It seemed like a start.
“Did he know?”
“What do you think?” he retorted flatly, letting his hands drop away from her to find his pockets.
The moments following their kiss at the wedding came back to her, both men crackling with territorial aggression. And then there was that conversation she and Ryan had had in the bridal suite later on, when he’d casually revealed that Paolo had tried to talk him out of going through with the wedding. She’d interpreted it as Paolo trying to save his friend from a woman he deemed unworthy, but now it took on a different connotation as did the way Ryan had watched her so closely as he relayed it.