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“Making you scream my name like that? Never.”
She smirked, but shook her head. “No. Sleeping with me.”
His frown formed a groove between his brows. “Why would you even ask that?”
“I mean, you hadn’t been with anyone since Cressida. I guess this is complicated for you, even when we both don’t want it to be…”
“It’s not that.”
His voice was gruff. Dismissive. As though her very suggestion was anathema to him.
“But something is bothering you?”
He pushed up onto his elbow then, so he was looking directly at her, their bodies like bookends. “Why do you say that?”
“I can just tell.”
He studied her, and nodded, slowly. Her heart sank.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” His frown deepened. “But you deserve to know, if only because—” he stopped abruptly and his frown took on a life of its own, grooving deep in his face. “Because I hate dishonesty. Even the hint of betrayal.”
Her breath didn’t just snag in her throat, it blocked her airways. “Betrayal is a serious word.”
She half-expected him to make a joke, but instead, his lips just tightened and his eyes moved over her face with more intensity.
“What happened?” she asked, mentally putting space between them. Bracing herself, drawing her shields up.
He frowned. “Cressida came to see me. She was upset.”
Tia’s heart hammered but she kept her expression impassive. “Tonight?”
“After dinner. I thought it was you, when she came out.”
She was silent.
“She’s having a hard time with their situation. Us being here has complicated things.”
She heard the softness in his tone, the sympathy, and even though she understood it, and felt it to some extent herself, it was the last thing she wanted to hear from Hamish in that moment.
“She kissed me.”
No. That was the last thing she wanted to hear.
They were lying naked in bed together, having just made glorious love, and yet he’d come straight from Cressida?
“She was drunk, it was a mistake.”
Tia’s lips parted. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how she felt, only that she did, indeed, feel—and that was something she did her best to avoid when it came to men. She pulled away slightly, on the pretence of rearranging the sheet.
“She’s married,” she pointed out, to play for time.
“As I told her.” He reached out and put a hand on her cheek, to draw her attention to him. “And I’m married too.”
Her heart slammed into her ribs. Panic tightened in her chest. She had to push this back into the box it was meant to exist in, to clean up the smudged lines they were starting to make. She forced a smile. “Well, in name only,” she said, pleased that her voice only shook slightly. “Theirs is a real marriage, with love and shared history and a future they planned for.”
She was watching him closely and saw the way his eyes shifted ever so slightly, narrowing a little, before his features resumed an impassive mask.
