Riccardo took a couple of steps towards her, and Charlotte swallowed hard but stood her ground until he was towering over her, face grim, ebony brows winged into a dark frown. Everything about him terrified her. Life for the past eight years seemed to have been a pleasant, trouble-free walk in the park compared to just this one single moment in time.
‘No, you’re not. You’re a woman about to be married who clearly can’t stand the sight of me and isn’t mature enough to conceal it.’
‘Can you blame me?’ Charlotte said in a high, accusing voice. Logic and common sense flew through the window, and in its place was a red mist of remembered hurt, misery and resentment. ‘You led me on…’#p#分页标题#e#
‘I promised nothing!’
‘You slept with me.’
‘I wasn’t the first!’
‘Yes, you damned well were!’ She had never told him. Now it was out, and he stared at her in shocked silence.
‘You couldn’t have been. I would have known.’
‘How?’ Charlotte demanded, her cheeks burning. ‘How would you have known?’
‘There was no…there were no signs…’
‘Oh, please! I was eighteen and you swept me off my silly feet.’
Would he have slept with her if he had known that she was a virgin? Riccardo asked himself. No. No, he wouldn’t have, because his keen antennae would have alerted him to the inherent problems. He also would have started asking a few more questions about her age because twenty-four-year-old virgins, in his experience, were pretty thin on the ground. He surfaced to find that she was still attacking him, fuelled by eight years of blistering resentment.
‘No, you don’t!’ he cut in harshly. ‘If I had known that you were a virgin, whether you were eighteen, twenty-four or fifty-six, I wouldn’t have slept with you!’
‘Because?’ She heard herself ask the question with dismay and knew that she should have listened to her head and not allowed her emotions to run wild.
‘Because you would have been vulnerable!’
‘And all you wanted was sex,’ she whispered bitterly.
Riccardo swept his fingers through his hair and flushed. ‘That is not what it was all about!’
‘No? And that would be why you stood up for me when your mother started ranting about my unsuitability?’
Riccardo released a long, audible hiss of frustration. Those big, accusing blue eyes were making him feel like a cad and, damn it, he didn’t deserve that!
‘My mother wanted…’
‘Oh, yes! I know what your mother wanted—a good Italian girl for you! Someone with all the right connections! She made herself perfectly clear on the subject. In fact, she mentioned a certain Isabella. Perfect credentials! Did she make it to the altar after all?’
‘No one made it to the altar,’ Riccardo muttered, glowering at her. Her face was suffused with angry colour. She might have changed the haircut, and swapped her tee-shirts and short skirts for a business suit, but look past that and there was still the same girl underneath.
‘You’re right,’ he said heavily. ‘I should have stuck up for you a bit more.’
‘A bit more? You didn’t stick up for me at all! In fact, if my memory serves me, you were horrified that I’d landed on your doorstep!’
‘It was unexpected.’
‘An unexpected and unpleasant surprise,’ Charlotte amended, recalling it as if it had all happened the day before. ‘Especially to a young, vulnerable kid who thought that the first man she slept with might just turn out to be somebody who cared.’
‘And I was twenty-six who thought he had been having a pleasant fling with a twenty-four-year-old woman. A twenty-six-year-old with his career stretching in front of him and no thoughts of marriage on his mind!’
‘I never said that I wanted to marry you!’ But she had wanted a relationship, not just a meeting of bodies until they went their separate ways. And where else had that been heading but down an aisle somewhere along the way? Why kid herself? She shifted uneasily on her feet and tried not to see his point of view, but like it or not it still crawled under her skin and she reluctantly had to admit that he had just run scared, confronted by someone he thought wanted to tie him down. The age thing had probably been the final straw.#p#分页标题#e#
And now there was Gina.
‘And you have to understand that my mother is a traditionalist. A young, blonde English girl appearing on her doorstep would have been her worst nightmare.’