He thought back to that time, to how much he’d wanted her, yet had resisted, and he couldn’t say why, except it had felt somehow important to wait. To show her that she was different to the many women he’d slept with before her.
But he was quiet too long, and apparently Annie drew her own conclusions from his silence. ‘Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but if you thought I’d gone and gathered a heap of experience in the last five years, you were wrong.’
‘You are twenty-seven,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘I’m just trying to understand—’
‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t,’ she said, but her voice wobbled a bit, belying the anger she was trying to infuse into her words. ‘Maybe you should just stick to what you’re good at and keep being an arrogant bastard.’ She sniffed, and he had a sinking feeling that she was about to cry.
Hardly how he would have wanted her first time—or any woman’s—to go. Guilt tore through his gut, along with a very familiar sensation from his childhood. A sense of not being able to keep precious things and people safe, of not being able to do the right thing by anyone. Of being not good enough.
‘Excuse me, but I’ve had enough swimming for one day.’ He didn’t look back over his shoulder to see if she was following him; he told himself he didn’t care, either way.
Chapter Eight
‘WE’RE LEAVING FORAthens in an hour,’ he said, later that morning, interrupting a long stretch of silence that had been seriously grating on Annie’s last nerve. Yet she hadn’t dared be the first one to break it. Not after the beach.
Sex with Theo had been paradigm shifting. Wonderful, physically. Fulfilling and perfect and achingly good. But it had also been complicated and awful, because of how it had been afterwards. The accusation in his voice, the anger. She’d felt like a total inconvenience, and it was all she could do to remember the moment he’d pulled out of her, clearly without experiencing his own climax, and started tearing strips off her.
Except, he hadn’t been mad, he’d been confused and judgemental, and she’d felt like a child who’d been caught doing the wrong thing.
‘Annie, did you hear me?’
She glanced up at him slowly, then nodded.
‘The silent treatment?’ he said, the same scathing tone in his voice that made her feel like a misbehaving teenager.
‘Fine.’ She pasted a saccharine smile on her face. ‘Thank you for consulting me, by the way.’
He stared at her, obviously pissed. ‘Well, Annie, wouldyoulike to stay on this island another night, after what just happened?’
‘What just happened?’ He dragged a hand through his hair. ‘We had sex—isn’t that what you wanted?’
‘It’s what we both wanted.’
‘I’m not saying otherwise. But what about my virginity changes the fact we both knew what we were doing?’
‘Ididn’t. You took away my ability to know and act accordingly.’
‘It’s just sex,’ she spat out.
‘Your first time is different.’
‘I never had you pegged for such a romantic.’
‘It’s not romance, it’s—’ But he faltered, and she knew she’d caught him out. ‘Just how it is.’
‘Oh, really? Was your first time some big, special, candlelit affair?’
He made a noise of dark amusement. ‘Hardly.’
‘So, what’s the problem? Why the double standards?’
‘Because you deserved better,’ he shouted, silencing her, so she blinked up at him, and he frowned, shaking his head, like he wanted to take the words back.
And was it little wonder? He was still so angry with her, angry enough to blackmail her into this marriage, and yet there he stood, admitting that she deserved better? ‘That’s why I didn’t sleep with you back then, Annie. I wanted your first time to be special. I wanted you to understand thatyouwere special. I wanted you to know that I saw it, and would wait for you, that nothing mattered more to me than taking care of you. And even though that was many years ago, and I feel very, very differently now, apparently, there is still a part of me that cares. That wants to know you have what I believed you deserved in life, even when I have no interest in being the one to provide it.’