Page 20 of Marrying the Enemy

“Are you trying to ration our food? How long do you think we’ll be here?” she asked with alarm.

“I’m trying not to get drunk enough to make a pass at you,” he said through his teeth.

She clenched her hands around the edge of the counter, aware of how her outstretched leg left her thighs open.

“You don’t even like me.”

“Yes, I know that, Evie. But this—” he waved at his crotch “—isn’t listening.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHE AVERTED HER GAZE, MUTTERING, “Quit calling me that.”

“Evie? Why?”

“Because it implies we’re more familiar with each other than we are.”

His hoot of laughter cracked the air like a gunshot.

“Would you stop,” she implored. “You’re behaving like a child.”

“No, you are. Budapest happened, Evie. Walk out of every restaurant in Manhattan just because I’m there. Tell people you don’t know me and look right through me. I don’t care. It doesn’t change the fact that we turn each other on. Or that I hate it as much as you do.” The bitterness in his voice was an insult.

But she knew exactly why he was being so acrimonious. She resented him for still enthralling her after all this time. She despised him for making her feel more during the dispassionate wrap of her ankle than any other man had ever made her feel with French kisses or romantic gestures.

And she was so tired of feeling stuck and frozen. Rebuffed. Denied. She was stunted by her experience with him because he had been the first and only man she had wanted to have sex with. He had taken her to a height she hadn’t known existed then plunged her abruptly back to earth before abandoning her altogether.

She’d never recovered. It wasn’t even a matter of courage when it came to other men. She simply didn’t want them. She only wanted this man. She feared that would never change and that filled her with despair.

“Well, I’m not going to have sex with a man who is involved with another woman so...” She said it as much to forestall any ideas that might crop up in her own mind as his.

“Cat and I aren’t involved,” he muttered.

“Oh, please. You’re her date for a wedding.”

“Because the timing worked with my takeover of the resort in Airlie Beach.” He was staring dourly toward the water. “My sister has been trying to set us up for a while. I had dinner with her twice before this. We’re not sleeping together. Either,” he added with quiet significance, alluding to her arrangement with Logan.

That shouldn’t make a difference, but it did. There was no obstacle of other people that would have kept her from sleeping with him. Now there was only a potent silence that thickened with sexual tension.

“So what?” she blurted. “We have sex just to get it over with?”

“Possibly the sexiest invitation a man has ever received.”

“Oh, go to hell, Dom! You just said you hate that you feel this way. You think that was the romantic sentiment I’ve been waiting for?”

She immediately wanted to bite back her words, thinking they were too revealing. She braced herself for some arrogant, sarcastic remark, but he only expelled a grim curse.

“We’re like cats in a cage, aren’t we? We’re going to keep swiping at each other until it happens.” He didn’t even turn his head to look at her, but he seemed to cast out a net that snared her.

She felt his proximity. She refused to look at him, either. She was fearful he’d see the tears of frustration standing in her eyes.

Outside, the clouds had turned sooty and thick. The wind was gusting hard enough to pick up the awning and make the shack rock on its pontoons.

“Do you have more condoms?” Dom asked gruffly. “If you don’t, that will end this. I cannot get you pregnant.”

A pang hit deep in the bottom of her heart while a fearful excitement filled her lungs.

Lie, she told herself. Just say no.

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