Two-Timing Love. Kate Proctor

I was a tearaway as a kid, and yes, I have had possibly more than my fair share of women—but I can assure you, Jenny, not one of them is a floozie—’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she cut in hastily, shame staining her cheeks. ‘I had no right to say that…it’s just that I feel so responsible for Jonathan.’

      ‘And you think I don’t?’

      Jenny opened her mouth to protest, then clamped it firmly shut. There was no way she was going to allow herself to be manoeuvred into accepting Mandy as a nanny, simply because she felt guilty over referring to her as a floozie.

      ‘Yes—well, that resounding silence manages to speak volumes,’ he noted sarcastically. ‘The point that seems to have escaped you—though mercifully not the rest of the village dears—is that I am now a fully fledged adult and perfectly able to take on the responsibilities that go with that status, should the need arise.’

      He rose from the bed and for an instant Jenny was convinced he was about to stride from the room in disgust. Then he turned and grasped her without warning by the shoulders.

      ‘Tell me, Jenny, does it make you feel safer, kidding yourself I’m still an irresponsible tearaway?’ he asked softly. ‘Was I so irresponsible when I refused the very considerable charms you once offered me?’

      ‘I wondered how long it would be before you dragged that up again!’ she spat, struggling dementedly to free herself.

      ‘I keep referring to it because it was something of a milestone in my life,’ he replied, the tightening of his arms rendering her struggles ineffectual. ‘I readily admit that twenty-seven is a little late to be reaching mental maturity—but that was the night I finally grew up.’

      ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she croaked, a tiny part of her stalling against the seeming inevitability of his kissing her while the rest of her tensed in breathless expectation of it.

      ‘It’s supposed to mean that even irresponsible Jamie had enough sense to realise that the consequences of deflowering a nineteen-year-old ingénue might be more than he could handle.’

      ‘You wouldn’t have been deflowering me—as you so gallantly put it!’ she lied, goaded by a sense of helpless outrage.

      ‘I can assure you I’d not have been so damned gallant had I known you were experienced at the time,’ he muttered, drawing back slightly from her with a rueful laugh. ‘I used up more self-control that night than I ever knew I possessed.’

      Jenny felt her pulse-rate shift into a higher, almost painful gear. ‘Now you really are being gallant,’ she managed and was appalled to hear a note of wistfulness in her slightly breathless words. ‘You swatted me aside with about as much thought as you’d have given to an irritating fly.’

      ‘If you say so,’ he stated in oddly clipped tones, pulling her heavily against him. ‘Who am I to argue with someone who knows me as thoroughly as you do? And who cares anyway?’

      There was a heated turbulence in his kiss that contrasted oddly with the cool carelessness of his words; and, as that heat permeated and possessed her, she felt its swift destruction of those self-protective layers built up so painstakingly over the years.

      Yet, even as her lips and body were responding with eager spontaneity to the urgent surge of passion in his, she was unable to silence the doom-laden voice within her warning that she was as besotted with this infuriatingly exciting man now as she had ever been.