Bittersweet Love - Cathy Williams [45]
Natalie looked away miserably. ‘I can’t.’
‘Dammit, Natalie,’ he muttered, and he sounded frustrated and uncertain. ‘It’s just sex.’
‘That’s exactly it,’ she responded, ‘just sex. But I’m not built like that.’
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘you’re not, are you? It’ s commitment or nothing, isn’t it?’
She shrugged. ‘Is that so bad?’
‘Why deny yourself pleasure simply because you want marriage at the end of it?’ He knelt down by the bed and she could feel the urgency seeping out of him. ‘Last night was wonderful. We could continue to enjoy each other; why spoil all that because you want to attach strings?’
‘It’ s just the way I am,’ Natalie said in a small voice. ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand. I know it’ s a dent to your pride…’
Kane gave a short, ironic laugh. ‘My pride? Believe me, I think my pride will recover.’
‘Yes,’ she muttered, ‘there will be enough women available to help you along the way, I’m sure.’
She edged across to the opposite side of the bed and they stared at each other like wary adversaries.
‘What do you think I’m going to do?’ Kane asked tersely, his mouth twisting. ‘Rape you?’
After persuasion, Natalie thought, comes anger. Whatever he said, his pride would have been wounded by her refusal to have a shortlived affair with him.
‘I think it’s best if you left,’ she said, ignoring his gibe. ‘Talking about this isn’t going to change my mind.’
He continued to stare at her for one long moment, then he picked up his various bits of clothing, sticking them on with jerky movements, not looking at her at all until he was standing by the bedroom door.
‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ he said, his face clenched in angry lines.
‘Right now,’ Natalie replied with a great deal more bravado than she was feeling, ‘I know exactly what I’m doing.’ He had slipped on his clothes, a ridiculous outfit at five-thirty in the morning, and she felt a pang of pain so intense that she could scarcely breathe.
Was he right? Should she indulge her own physical desire for him to the detriment of everything else?
I’ve already done too much, she thought with bitterness. I’ve already let him see just what he can do to me. That had been a mistake.
She watched in silence as he let himself out of her bedroom, shutting the door behind him without a backward glance, then she got up from the bed and began straightening the room. With any luck she might just be able to straighten it all so much that she eradicated his presence completely. When she had done that, she sat on the bed and remained there, hearing all the little noises of the world outside coming to life.
She moved in a daze for the rest of the morning, shopping for food for the weekend, going to the gym where she rigourously worked out for over an hour, and for the first time ever didn’t feel in the slightest bit better for it She had to keep reminding herself that she had had no alternative but to ask him to leave, that her own stupidity had landed her in the mess, and it was just a good thing that some scrap of dignity and wisdom had given her the strength to salvage at least some of herself out of the disaster.
Several times the telephone rang, and each time she eyed it warily, half hoping it was Kane, but knowing realistically that it wouldn’t be, and in no mood to talk to anyone at all. So she allowed it to ring.
By Sunday evening, she felt as though she had spent fifty years in solitary confinement. She was consoling herself with a cup of coffee, wondering whether a glass of wine might not be more appropriate and then remembering that there was none, when the doorbell went.
She jumped and stared at the door apprehensively. It couldn’t be Kane, could it? It certainly wouldn’t be Eric. He had told her that he would be visiting his parents in Shropshire on Sunday and Monday.
There was another demanding shrill from the doorbell and Natalie stood up. Why was she so scared? It was probably someone totally innocuous, maybe the