Aidan stretched his legs out in front of him, giving up on the spreadsheet. ‘It’s-not-you-it’s-me type thing?’
‘Exactly.’ Her smile lit up her face.
‘Used that line a lot, have you?’
She grimaced. ‘More like that line has been used on me.’
Aidan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You’re kidding?’
She shook her head. ‘Unfortunately not. Lucilla has a theory that I date all the wrong kinds of men because I want them to reinforce my view of the world.’
‘Which is?’ Aidan’s eyes slid over her. He thought about all the reasons he shouldn’t go to bed with her and couldn’t come up with one. Yes, she was young, undoubtedly frivolous and impulsive, but so what? He didn’t want to marry her. He didn’t want to marry any woman.
‘She thinks that I’ve been let down by love too many times and now I only choose men who can’t commit.’
His eyes met hers. That just about summed him up.
‘Interesting,’ he murmured, surprised to find that he actually was. ‘And what do you think?’
She shrugged as if the whole topic meant very little to her. ‘I think that if there is a social climber or a social misfit within a ten kilometre radius, then I could find him if I was blindfolded and tied to a post.’
Aidan laughed with genuine amusement. ‘I can see why you thought you might damage my reputation. I’ve never been called a social misfit before.’
Cara giggled. ‘Well, obviously fake relationships don’t count.’
‘Lucky for me.’
‘That’s what I was thinking. So what about you?’
He looked back at her uneasily. ‘What about me?’
‘You don’t have a girlfriend right now, do you?’
Aidan raised an eyebrow. ‘I would hardly have brought you with me if I did. But no, women don’t seem to hang around long enough to become girlfriends.’
She tilted her head and her hair caught the light from the nearby lamp, the soft glow casting a strange intimacy over the room that was disconcerting.
‘Why not?’
This time he was the one who shrugged as if it didn’t matter. Only for him it really didn’t. ‘They say I work too much.’
‘And do you?’
She glanced at his computer in his lap and he laughed. ‘Possibly.’
Cara pointed the wooden spoon at him again. ‘See, now, I have a theory about that.’
‘Another theory?’ Wondering why he was still sitting on the sofa with a hot woman in the kitchen bantering with him Aidan seriously contemplated pushing his computer off his lap and replacing it with her.
‘Yes. I have a theory that when you meet the one—you know, that perfect person just for you—then you can’t not be with them.’
Aidan fought back a wry smile. ‘Drop everything, you mean. No work, no sleep, no food. Just twined in each other’s arms for ever and ever.’
‘No, of course not. I meant that you love that person so much you can’t bear to be away from them.’
‘True love,’ he mocked.
And there was the reason she was still across the room and not in his lap. The sixth sense that had stopped him from hauling her into his arms in the bedroom doorway and utilising that made-for-sex mouth of hers: she wanted everything he avoided. His worst nightmare of a woman.
She pouted. ‘You’re making fun of me.’
Surprised to find that he felt a little hollow from the revelation he’d just made about her, he smiled faintly. ‘Just a little. But are you seriously telling me that you only date men you think are going to be the one?’
‘Well, I don’t go out with men I think aren’t going to be the one.’
And by that token she probably didn’t sleep with them either. Had he so completely misjudged her last night? ‘How’s that milk coming along?’ he asked, desperate now to have her return to her room.
‘Oh!’ She yelped and pulled the pot off the stove. ‘I forgot about it. But it’s okay.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you want one?’
Aidan shook his head, bemused to have even been asked. ‘I’m good.’
‘It will help you sleep.’
Only a knock to the head would help him sleep after seeing her in that silk nightie.
‘So I take it you don’t believe in true love and have never been in love,’ she said.
He forced his eyes up from her small, high breasts. ‘I’ve dated a lot of women in my life and I can assure you that I’ve been happy to see every one of them go.’
‘Which proves my theory.’
‘I don’t see how but, pray, enlighten me.’
‘You’ve never been in love and you’ve always been happy when a relationship has ended. If you’d ever really been in love you wouldn’t be so happy right now.’