that she wasn’t a little different from other women in his eyes, more special than they were, somehow less of a casual event in his life. He was telling it as it was and she should be grateful for that. This way she knew exactly where she stood and she wouldn’t be weaving fantasies around phone calls that would never come or surprise visits. After all, he didn’t have her phone number and even she didn’t know where she’d eventually be living. She and Jai really were ships that passed in the night.
‘I want to kiss you again,’ Jai breathed with a raw edge to his dark deep voice.
He had only one night with her, and he wanted to make the very most of the best sex he had ever had. He would move on; she would move on. That was the way of the world, yet a stray shard of guilt and regret still pierced him because she was so open with him, so impervious to his wealth and status. He would check that she was all right from a safe distance, stay uninvolved, he promised himself. He supposed there were ties between them that he was refusing to acknowledge lest they make him uncomfortable. He had vague memories of her as a child, could remember her shouting his name in excitement at sports events and could recall the way her eyes had once clung to him as though magnetised. But she had grown out of all that. Of course, she had.
‘I’m cold,’ Willow admitted, snaking back from him to tug the edge of the duvet up and scramble under it with a convulsive shiver.
Jai peeled off his trousers, shaken that in his haste to possess her he had not even fully undressed. Nothing cool or sophisticated about that approach, he told himself ruefully, wondering what it was about her that had made him so downright desperate to have her. For the first time with a woman sexual hunger had overwhelmed him and crowded every other consideration out. It was something more than looks, maybe that unspoiled natural quality of hers, not to mention her disconcerting honesty in assuring him that he was just a one-night stand and that she had no desire to attach strings to him. Jai didn’t think he had ever been with a woman who didn’t want those strings, no matter how coolly she was trying to play the game. He was too rich and too powerful not to inspire women with ambitious hopes and plans.
‘Let me warm you,’ Jai urged, hauling her into contact with his hot, muscular length, driving out the shivers that had been assailing her.
And it all began again and this time she was wholly free of tension and insecurity and the excitement rose even faster for her. The pleasure stole her mind from her body and left her exhausted. She dropped into sleep, still melded to Jai and still amazed by what had happened between them. At some stage of the night he kissed her awake and made love to her again, slow and sure this time, and achingly sexy. It occurred to her that Jai had made her initiation into sex wondrously sensual but, even then, she knew she ached in bone and muscle and would be wrecked the next morning.
In the dull light of dawn, she was surprised when Jai shook her awake. Dressed in his dark suit and unshaven, he stood over her, studying her with wolf pale blue eyes that burned. He yanked back the duvet, rudely exposing her, and said roughly, ‘There’s blood all over the sheet! Did I hurt you?’
Willow wanted to die of humiliation where she sat and she snatched at the duvet in desperation and covered up the offending stain, her face burning as hot as a furnace. ‘Of course, you didn’t. I didn’t realise I would bleed the first time,’ she whispered shakily. ‘I know some women do but somehow I assumed I wouldn’t…’
Slow, painful comprehension gripped Jai and rocked him to the depths of his being. He stared down at her in dawning disbelief. ‘Are you saying that you were a virgin?’
‘Well, it’s not something I can lie about now, is it?’ Willow muttered in embarrassment, her chin coming up at a defiant tilt. ‘But I don’t know why you would think that you have a right to make a production out of something that is my business and nothing to do with you.’
‘I would not have chosen to sleep with you had I known I would be your first,’ Jai framed fiercely.
‘Well, if that was a personal concern of yours, you should’ve asked in advance,’ Willow countered mutinously. ‘It’s not as if I dragged you into bed!’
‘How the hell could I have guessed that you were still a virgin at your age?’ Jai demanded.
‘I’m only twenty-one. Twenty-two in a few months,’ she added stiffly. ‘I’m sure I’m not that unusual.’
Jai was not appeased. She was years younger than the women he usually took as lovers, but he hadn’t registered that fact the night before, had been too turned on and in too much of a hurry to register anything important, he conceded, angry at his own recklessness.
‘Perhaps not, but I assumed you were experienced,’ he admitted flatly.
‘Well, now you know different. Can we drop this discussion? I want to get washed and dressed,’ Willow told him without any expression at all, her small, slight body rigid with wounded pride and resentment in the bed as she continued to hug the duvet to her. ‘You know last night was lovely…but now you’ve ruined it.’
‘I’ll see you downstairs,’ Jai countered grimly.
Willow scrambled out of bed as soon as the door closed behind him and then winced, her body letting her know that such sudden energetic movements would be punished. Just at that moment she did not want that reminder of the intimacy they had shared when Jai, so obviously, regretted it. She pulled out fresh clothing and trekked across to the small shower room. A damp towel lay on the floor and she bent to scoop it up and lift it to her nose. It smelled ever so faintly of Jai while her body smelled even more strongly of him. Shame engulfed her in a drowning flood of regret. Evidently in sleeping with him she had made the wrong decision, but surely it had been her decision to make?
Of course, there had been men who’d shown an interest in her in recent years, but none had attracted her enough for her to take matters any further. She had never been much of a fan of crowded clubs or parties and her father’s demand that she come home at a reasonable hour had proved to be a restriction that had turned her into a deadbeat companion for a night out. She had taken the easy way out when faced with her father’s domineering personality and she had spent her free evenings at home watching television and catching up with Shelley, none of which had given her any experience of how to handle Jai in a temper. But never again would she lie down to be walked over by an angry male, she told herself urgently. From now on she would stand her ground and hold her head high, even if she did have misgivings about her own behaviour.
Jai paced the small living room, feeling the claustrophobic proportions of its confines in growing frustration. Willow was twenty-one years old. Far too young for an experienced man of twenty-nine. Why hadn’t he remembered how young she was? What had he been thinking of? The answer was that he hadn’t been thinking, hadn’t stopped to think once. Everything that had happened with Willow had happened so fast and had seemed so deceptively natural that he had questioned nothing and now it was too late to change anything.
‘Last night was lovely…but now you’ve ruined it.’
That complaint, towering in its naivety, echoed in his ears and made him flinch. As a rule, he avoided starry-eyed girls and she was one he should definitely have avoided getting more deeply involved with. A woman who’d had a massive crush on him as a teenager? How much had that influenced her willingness to give him her body? He emitted a harsh groan of guilt and self-loathing.
A decent man didn’t take advantage of a vulnerable woman! And what had he done?
Within hours of her father’s funeral, when she was grieving and distressed, he had pounced like some sort of self-serving seducer. She had deserved more care and consideration than he had given her. Yet he had started out simply trying to offer both care and consideration and could not for the life of him explain how trying to comfort her had ended up with them having sex. She hadn’t flirted with him. She hadn’t encouraged him but she hadn’t said no either. Was that what he was blaming her for? No, he