Page 20 of Legacy of His Revenge
‘Please, Matias...what?’ He deposited her very gently on his bed, as though she were as fragile as a piece of porcelain, but he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he was once again kneeling in front of her and he then proceeded to take one foot in his big hand, to inspect it closely for wayward glass.
It was ludicrous!
But the feel of his hands on her...wreaked havoc with her senses and also felt just so...sexy.
Something that sounded very much like a whimper emerged from her throat and their eyes met.
Understanding passed between them, as loud and clear as the clanging of church bells on a still Sunday morning.
Desire.Loud and thick and electric and definitely mutual.
‘We can’t,’ was what Sophie heard herself whimper, breaking the silence between them. She didn’t even bother to pretend that she didn’t know what was going on any more than he pretended not to recognise the capitulation behind that ragged, half-hearted protest.
‘Why not?’ Matias had thought about sleeping with her for his own purposes but now he couldn’t remember what those purposes were because cold self-control had been replaced with a raging urgency to take her to bed whatever the cost.
‘Because this isn’t a normal situation.’
‘Define normal.’
‘Two people who want to have a relationship.’
‘I won’t deny that I don’t do relationships, but sex doesn’t always have to lead to a once-in-a-lifetime relationship.’
‘Not for you,’ Sophie whispered as her resolve seeped away the longer he looked at her with those dark, sinfully sexy eyes. ‘But for me...’ She turned away and swallowed painfully.
Matias joined her on the bed and gently tilted her head back to his. ‘For you?’
‘My mother wasn’t careful when it came to men,’ she told him bluntly. ‘She was very attractive...she had thatsomethingthat men seem to find irresistible...’
‘You talk as though thatsomethingis something you don’t possess.’
‘I don’t,’ she said simply, raising her eyes to his and holding his gaze with unwavering sincerity. ‘Men have never walked into lampposts when I sauntered past, they’ve never begged or pleaded or shown up with armfuls of roses in the hope that I might climb into bed with them.’
‘And they did all those things for your mother?’
‘She had that effect on them.’
‘If that were the case, why didn’t she and your father marry...considering he fathered a child with her?’
Sophie opened her mouth to tell him that James Carney had fathered more than one child but something held her back. What? Was it her fierce protectiveness over Eric? A need, born of habit, to save him from the curiosity of other people, even though he wouldn’t have cared less?
Or was it a hangover from the way Alan had ended up reacting to her disabled brother?
Sophie told herself that she didn’t care one way or another what a perfect stranger thought of her situation, least of all someone like Matias. She told herself that if he planned on doing business with her father, then the presence of her disabled brother wouldn’t matter a jot, and yet she pulled back from the brink and swallowed down the brief temptation to spill her guts. She was a little startled that she had even been tempted to tell him at all.
‘James always thought that he was too good for my mother.’ Sophie hid the hurt behind that crisply delivered statement of fact. ‘He was rich and he was posh and he didn’t think that my mother was the right sort of woman for him.’
Matias’s jaw clenched because this came as no surprise at all to him, and Sophie saw his instinctive reaction with a trace of alarm as she remembered how important it was for him to inject money into her father’s nearly bankrupt company.
‘It happens.’ She shrugged and moved on quickly. ‘You might fancy me, but you can’t pretend that you don’t feel the same way about me as he did about my mother. You’re rich and powerful and it doesn’t matter who my father is or isn’t—the fact is that I have never grown up in the sort of circles you would have moved in.’
‘You don’t know what sort of circles I moved in as a child,’ Matias heard himself say. He was uneasily aware that this was a deviation from his normal handling of any sort ofsituationwith a woman. Since when had he turned into the sort of touchy-feely person who wanted to waste time talking when a perfectly good bed beckoned?
‘I can guess. I’m not stupid.’
‘You’re anything but stupid. Although itwasfairly stupid of you to be driving without insurance.’
‘Please don’t remind me.’
