CHAPTER THREE
‘WANT YOU BACK? Want you back?’ Abigail fought the heat suffusing her body and pushed him away but her hands were shaking as she busied herself trying to rearrange her clothing.
In response, Leandro planted both hands on either side of her, caging her in, and he looked at her without batting an eyelid. ‘Shameful admission, I know,’ he murmured. ‘But the truth, nevertheless. I know you’re not acquainted with the fine art of truth telling, but personally I find it rarely pays to ignore it. And the truth is that we’re still where we were a year and a half ago—burning up for one another.’
This time Abigail did laugh. ‘How can you call me a liar in one breath and then tell me that I’m still stupid enough to fancy you in the other?’ Backed against the wall, and trapped by the sheer steel wall of his body inches away from her, she folded her arms defiantly and stared at him.
‘Because lust has nothing to do with whether you like someone or not.’
‘Maybe not for you!’
‘Shall we put that to the test? Oh, we already did. You failed.’
Abigail could feel the little nerve jumping in her neck. She should really hate all this cave man, macho stuff but the truth was that Leandro did it all so well. He’d always had that intensely masculine air of cool self-assurance and a careless assumption that the world would jump when he told it to. She’d found it novel, strange and a massive turn on all at the same time and she hadn’t even been able to work out why. She just had.
Now, he was exercising that self-assurance again and she could feel herself getting addled.
‘Leandro, this is crazy,’ she muttered. ‘If it hadn’t been for your ex-fiancée, I wouldn’t even be here. We wouldn’t have met again.’
‘I wish you’d stop calling her my ex-fiancée,’ Leandro said irritably. ‘That was all wishful thinking on her part.’
‘You were very well suited.’
‘Really? I had no idea you knew her.’
‘Oh, stop being so sarcastic, Leandro. You know what I mean.’
Leandro flushed darkly. In the space of only a handful of weeks, she had become the only woman who had never shied away from saying exactly what she thought. She hadn’t been impressed into obedience and he had liked that. ‘We’re moving off topic here,’ he drawled. ‘We were talking about this thing that’s still here between us. You were busy trying to pretend that there was nothing and I was on the brink of proving to you that there is.’
‘I didn’t say that there was...that there was nothing,’ Abigail denied in a harried undertone. ‘But whatever there is, it’s inappropriate.’
‘I don’t care about what happened in the past,’ Leandro lied smoothly. He cared all right but, in the end, this was an even better situation in a way. Shorn of emotion, this became a sating of their physical appetites and the most natural thing in the world. It was unthinkable that she would dig her heels in and deny what was obvious and, if she did, then he had every intention of using every bit of ammunition to hand to batter down her defences.
She was probably right. If she hadn’t shown up on his doorstep, their paths would never have crossed again.
But she had shown up and he had seen in a blinding flash that she was still in his system and would always be in his system unless he did something about it.
‘But I do,’ Abigail said stubbornly. ‘I didn’t have the greatest of backgrounds, and I was a coward for not admitting that to you from the beginning, but I didn’t deserve...’ She looked away, bright red, teetering between calling him out for the blind loyalty to his sister which had made him judge her without giving her a fair hearing, and just running as fast as she could away from him and the crazy feelings he had stirred up in her. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she muttered, staring down at her feet. Her heart was beating like a drum inside her chest and her fingers were digging into her forearms as she continued to focus on the ground while his dark gold eyes raked over her.