Nicola Marsh - Hot Summer Flings

The man she slept with would be the man she fell in love with, and as the only man she’d ever fallen for had been married she had accepted it might never happen and she was fine with that, or so she had told herself. There was more to life than sex and there were few things worse in life, it seemed to her, than sex with the wrong man.

There had been a lot of wrong men for her mother, a parade of ‘uncles’ whom Megan could recall appearing and disappearing at intervals. The eternal optimist, Clare Smith had always embarked on a new relationship believing it was the one, only to end up crushed and heartbroken when things fell apart.

As she got older and recognised the destructive pattern Megan, not sharing her mother’s optimism, had begun to dread seeing a new man appear. Some of the youthful anger she felt had been aimed at her mother; she wished very much now she had been more understanding.

‘Why do you need a man?’ she had yelled. ‘Why can’t I be enough? ‘

The stricken look on her mother’s face had stayed with her and she had never had an opportunity to retract it. Her mother had slipped off a crowded pavement at rush hour and under the wheels of a passing bus.

A hissing expletive left Emilio’s lips as, face dark with wrath, he stared at her, the muscle in his lean cheek spasmodically clenching and unclenching.

He looked ready to implode.

Megan struggled to respond to the blunt statement of her virginal status without blushing and failed. ‘Guilty as charged,’ she joked in an attempt to play the subject down.

Megan bit her lip. So much for lightening the mood!

‘You think this a joke?’ he grated. ‘Your first time should be special.’

Megan stared and thought, And he thinks it wasn’t?

‘I may not have used the word,’ she told him in a voice that shook with the emotions she was struggling to suppress, ‘but if you’re talking special as in unique and outstandingly brilliant, I do seem to recall saying something along those lines, quite loudly actually.’

‘You’re blushing, all over.’ The discovery appeared to distract and amuse him, though a moment later he was looking darkly sombre once more as he picked up a theme that Megan found acutely uncomfortable.

‘Your first time only happens the once, and … and I …’ His face contorted with a grimace of self-disgust, he broke off and dragged a hand down his jaw. Hearing the sound in his head, he felt as if he’d never be able to forget her sharp cry. His voice dropped as he accused, ‘You wept.’

Silently, and he had held her shaking body and felt like a total animal.

Megan laid a tentative hand on his shoulder; his muscles felt rock-hard and rigid. ‘It wasn’t because you hurt me,’ she protested, stunned by his reading of the situation.

‘If I had known—’ His jaw clenched; the knowledge that he had hurt her felt like a blade sliding between his ribs. ‘But how could you be … Why? ’

Megan groaned and scanned his face. ‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’

He looked at her as though she had just announced she was actually a Martian. ‘Let it go!’ He’d waited two years for that moment and when it had happened he had blown it! When he thought of the way he had … ‘Por Dios! I think you owe me an explanation,’ he announced grimly.

Her eyes slid guiltily from his. I’m yours and I love you. I actually pretty much always have, was a fairly accurate summing-up of the situation, but she doubted it would go down too well.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that you—?’

Her voice tight with humiliation, Megan cut across his incensed demand. ‘You didn’t seem all that interested in conversation at the time.’

The line of colour across the angle of Emilio’s cheekbones deepened as their glances clashed. Even now the air between them hummed with a sexual tension that was almost tangible. Despite the intensity of their lovemaking it had not even taken the edge off his hunger for her.

He did not need reminding that his actions had been ruled by his own selfish carnal desire, a carnal desire that after two years of denial had been stripped to its primitive and most basic form.

It had been a point of pride with Emilio that he had never been a victim of his hormones. He had certainly never lost control in bed before, and now the one time he should have shown restraint with a woman, when he should have been gentle, he had snapped. His relentless, ravenous need for her had made him utterly blind to her inexperience until that last moment.

There must have been clues? How had he missed them? Missed the opportunity to make her initiation special.

‘And you were not acting like a virgin,’ corrosive shame made him retort defensively.

‘Know a lot about virgins, do you?’

His eyes narrowed as his eyes drifted to her tender lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘Nothing, as it happens,’ he said, thinking it seemed he also knew even less about women, or this one at least.

‘You’re making a big thing of nothing. Being a virgin isn’t like having a contagious disease. It’s not obligatory to go into isolation.’ Her mouth settled into a mutinous line of defiance as she tried to hide her hurt. ‘I’m sorry you feel cheated and short-changed but I’m not about to say sorry.’

His brows lifted. ‘What are you talking about now? Cheated …?’ he asked irritably. ‘You are not making sense.’

Face scrunched in an effort to hold back the tears that threatened to spill over, she lifted her chin and blinked hard.

‘Well, so sorry,’ she drawled, ‘if I’ve lost my edge of clinical objectivity, but I’ve never been in this situation before.’

‘And you think I have?’

‘Yes, I get it, you don’t need to spell it out.’ She had been slow but the penny had finally dropped. She knew why he was acting this way. ‘You thought you were getting someone who knew what she was doing in the bedroom and instead—’ she broke off to give a loud sniff and passed a hand across her suspiciously bright eyes as she gulped ‘—instead you got me.’

She heard the unattractive, self-pitying whine in her voice and shook her head, mumbling, ‘Even you could not have got it perfect your first time.’

He probably had. Megan closed her eyes, hating the woman he had got it right with.

Torn between frustration and tenderness, Emilio levered himself into a sitting position with the fluid grace that typified all his actions.

‘Have I got this right?’ he asked, placing one hand beside her head as he looked down at her. ‘You think I feel short-changed? Short-changed?’ he repeated, shaking his head as he added something, not appearing to realise he had slipped into his native tongue, and laughed. ‘The way your mind works, querida, is a constant source of amazement to me. Listen, you may not value what you gave me highly, but I do.’

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