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‘Well, it is daft, isn’t it?’ she observed with a smile. ‘It’s not as if it’s a date. We have established that we don’t do dates.’
She watched with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach as his expression changed, the humour wiped out to be replaced by a dark scowl.
‘So you wish to leave your options open. If you go alone you can leave with who you wish.’
His interpretation immediately fired Jane up. She was spending all her time and energy trying to maintain the boundaries and keep to the rules and Draco seemed not even to recognise they were there! If they came down she would have to see that all those self-imposed lines were not just invisible, they were utterly useless. She didn’t want her delusions to be revealed, because then she would have to admit she was not in control of this situation. She was not in control of anything. Her emotions didn’t recognise any lines, invisible or otherwise, and at some point this was going to hurt.
All over again!
‘That’s a crazy, not to mention insulting, suggestion!’ she retorted, her voice shaking as she clung to her control by her fingernails. ‘Be careful, Draco, or I might walk away with the idea you are jealous,’ she threw out in frustration, not expecting her words to find a mark.
The words stopped Draco cold.
An image flashed into his head, his father consumed with jealousy demanding that his wife, her bags packed, tell him who the man was she was leaving him for. And she had laughed contemptuously at him, falling to his knees begging her to stay, degrading himself, literally crawling after her.
He stood there trying to shift his brain into gear, the pressure in his chest heavy.
‘I am sorry to disappoint you but I do not do jealousy,’ he said finally.
She saw his closed expression and asked herself what else she had expected. ‘I am aware.’
He looked at her through narrowed eyes. ‘Do you still feel guilty for having sex with me so soon after your partner’s death? Is that what this is about?’
‘I have no idea what the “this” you are talking about is,’ she replied, guilt putting an acidic note in her voice. ‘And I resent being looked at like I’m a bug under a microscope...a...psychological experiment.’ And a liar. She felt several kinds of terrible for taking refuge in a lie that just seemed to grow and grow the longer she hadn’t addressed it.
Now it was too late.
‘Which is why you can’t meet my eyes?’
She met his eyes then, her green eyes sparking fire, and directed a defiant look at him. ‘This is not something I want to discuss with you. People do not—I don’t feel guilty, Draco. I feel—’ She paused and thought, I feel scared stiff, because the illusion that I can have sex and not fall in love with you is making me feel ill, especially as I never fell out.
For a split second she wondered what he’d do if she voiced the words out loud. He might really think he wanted to know what her motivations were, mainly because he couldn’t believe that any woman would say no to him. But he would regret it if I did, she thought grimly.
‘So you will have sex with me, but you won’t walk a few hundred metres and enter a cocktail party beside me.’
‘I suppose that about covers it,’ she said, noting her deliberately cheery delivery was making him look even more bad-tempered, in a way that beautiful people and sleek jungle cats looked bad-tempered. ‘And will you lower your voice? Mattie is just settling. He has been a bit cranky today.’
Draco watched her look down at the baby in her arms, concern pleating her brow, and something shifted in his chest. It was happening a lot.
She was, he had to admit, a perfect mother.
Some masochistic impulse made him throw salt in the open wound as his inner voice said, A mother, but not of your babies.
Fine by him. He didn’t want babies.
When had he decided that he would leave the passing of their dubious genes to his little brother?
Could that change of heart have anything to do with the only woman he had ever imagined being the mother of his children leaving him standing at the altar?
Ignoring the taunting voice in his head, he ground out a frustrated, ‘This is absurd.’
‘What is absurd?’
‘You are being absurd. Are you trying to make some sort of point?’
The moment he flung the words it hit Draco that he could just as easily ask himself the same question.
Why was he getting so hung up on this? It wasn’t as if hewanteda relationship. Or was it thatshevery obviously didn’t that was getting to him?