She shrugged, dismissing the point as of no real importance. “It was always a possibility.”
He nodded consideringly. “You turned last night into a contest.”
“Did I?” She paused, her eyes mocking his view of what had happened between them. “Or did you?” She threw the question at him.
His mouth twisted. “Why do I have the feeling there is more to this encounter than you’re letting on?”
“Why worry?” she asked him flippantly. “You won the contest. You didn’t let me get to you. You stayed on top.”
“If you go, I lose,” he stated with a certainty that puzzled her.
“I’m sure you can generate great sex with any amount of women,” she said sceptically.
“No. It was the mental fight. Something... quite different.” He hesitated, seemingly feeling his way along uncharted territory. “I think I’ve been looking for someone like you for a very long time.”
The sickening irony of those words cut deep. “No, you haven’t,” she retorted with blistering certainty.
“Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?”
“If you’d been really looking, you’d have found me long before this.”
His eyes narrowed on the burning derision in hers. “Perhaps I’ve been blind.”
“No.” The bitterness of total defeat poured into words before she could stop them. “You’ve been too busy being Jim Neilson. I think you’ll never be anyone else but Jim Neilson now. So I’m leaving, because I didn’t come for Jim Neilson and I don’t belong in Jim Neilson’s life. Is that enough recognition of your name for you?”
“For whom did you come?” he asked her, homing in instantly on the one significant point.
She sighed, wrung out by this futile confrontation. She looked at him with dull, weary eyes, seeing the aggressive vitality of the conqueror determined on climbing another mountain. But her mountain had been climbed, and she was returning to the valley he’d put behind him.
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