of wine he had opened the previous evening.
‘I don’t drink, remember?’ She took a deep breath, lowered her voice from the shrill, unattractive level it had risen to and reminded him, ‘We agreed that when this didn’t work we would simply call it a day. Look, I know it must be strange because you assumed—actually so did I—that it would be you who ended things.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she added earnestly.
He studied her face for any sign of irony but there was none. ‘Well, I do want a drink,’ he said, pouring the remnants of the bottle into a glass and swallowing the contents without tasting.
‘So nothing personal, which of course makes all the difference,’ he drawled, setting aside the glass with elaborate care while in his head he saw it smashing to a million pieces as he threw it into the fireplace.
‘Please don’t be like that,’ she begged. ‘This is hard.’ She bit her trembling lip. She could not afford to lose her focus now, she could not afford to allow him to touch her…
‘This is bloody ridiculous,’ he contended, thrusting his balled fists into the pockets of his well-cut trousers and glaring at her.
Zoe recognised the cause of his belligerence but she was not in the mood to show much understanding for injured male pride. So maybe he had just been dumped for the first time in his life. There were any number of nubile women who would be gagging to massage his ego.
She, on the other hand, might never fall in love again. This man was her soulmate, and all he could do was sulk while her heart was damned well breaking.
Well, at least he should remember her, though for all the wrong reasons—as the woman who dared to dump him!
‘I know you said we could stay on here,’ she said formally, ‘but that wouldn’t be right. I have made alternative arrangements.’
‘You have what?’ he roared as his smouldering temper sparked into full-blown conflagration. ‘Since when is this not working?’
She kept her chin up, not easy when a man who appeared to be ten feet tall was towering over her like some sort of damned volcano. ‘Since Harry came home with a black eye and a split lip after brawling with a boy who called me a cheap tart, among other things.’
Isandro took a step back, the air leaving his lungs in one audible, sizzling hiss.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘IS HE ALL RIGHT?’
Mingled with the protective outrage Isandro felt was a surge of pride that the boy had stood up for his aunt; he had protected her honour.
Which was more than he had done. The guilty knowledge that this situation was one of his making scratched away at Isandro’s conscience like a nail on a blackboard.
No complications? He had known that was a total impossibility from day one. He had tried extremely hard to tell himself otherwise but he had known that this thing could get very complicated. He had taken refuge in technicalities—Zoe no longer worked for him; he never spent the entire night. He should have seen this coming. But he had wanted her…needed her with a hunger that was totally outside his experience. And in order to satisfy that hunger he had been prepared to break any and all rules.
She nodded, the concern now in his dark eyes making her tear up. ‘He will be.’
She rubbed a stray tear with the back of her hand, and the gesture made Isandro’s throat tighten.
‘This is a small village and people gossip. It was unrealistic of me not to expect this, and selfish of me not to consider the effect this sort of affair would have on the twins.’
‘So you think that nobody in this village has sex outside marriage?’
The sarcasm in his voice brought a flush to her pale cheeks. ‘That’s not the point.’
‘What are you going to do—take a vow of chastity until the twins leave home? No boyfriends? That is your idea of preparing them for the real world?’
‘You’re not my boyfriend. We don’t have a relationship—we have sex.’
‘Or do you need a ring on your finger? Is that what this is about?’
‘Of course not. It’s not sex outside marriage, it’s sex with you!’ she yelled before she remembered the sleeping children.
He did not respond to her announcement at all, though his feet-apart stance and stony, tight-lipped silence did not exactly convey happiness.
‘I don’t want to argue.’ She gave a weary sigh and looked at him through her lashes, head tilted a