The Wedding Charade (13 page)

Jade couldn’t hold his penetrating look. She lowered her gaze to his throat, where she could see a pulse beating like a drum. She took a breath that felt rough around the edges and said, ‘I’ve never had an orgasm before. Period.’

His throat moved up and down like a piston. Seconds passed, maybe only one or two but it felt like a month of them to her. ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ he said, bringing her chin up so her gaze met his. ‘You’re not a virgin,

sì?’

Jade gave him a pained wry look. ‘No, Nic, I am not a virgin.’

He moved his mouth a couple of times, as if searching for the right words to say. ‘So, what I think you’re saying is sex has not always been pleasurable for you, is that it?’

She let out a heavy sigh and shook her head as she dropped back on the pillow.

He gently brushed back some tendrils of her hair off her face, his touch so soft it made Jade feel another wave of emotion rise to the surface. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ he asked.

Jade looked into his hazel eyes, so very dark and serious as they held hers. Most men would have continued on to get their measure of pleasure out of her body by now, but he had not. It surprised her, given his playboy reputation. ‘Don’t you want to finish this?’ she asked, waving her hand to encompass their bodies lying so close to each other.

He frowned even more darkly and got off the bed,
pulling off the condom and tossing it to one side. He reached for his trousers and pulled them on and zipped them. ‘I am not sure what sort of man you think I am, Jade, but there’s no way I am going to make love with you unless I know everything, and I mean everything.’

Jade tugged at the top sheet and pulled it over herself to cover her nakedness. Shyness was not normally an issue with her, she had grown so used to disconnecting her mind from her body, but somehow with Nic it was different. She felt exposed in a way she had never felt with anyone else. Nic saw things she wasn’t sure she wanted him to see.

‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ he suggested.

She gave him a mutinous look as she hugged her knees close to her body. ‘I don’t have to tell you anything. I wish I hadn’t told you what I did. You’re making such a big deal out of it.’

‘Damn it, Jade, this
is
a big deal,’ he said, shoving a hand through his already mussed-up hair. ‘You can’t drop a bomb like that into the bedroom and expect me to carry on as if nothing’s changed.’

She couldn’t hold his gaze and dropped her chin to rest on the tops of her bent knees. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This was too personal, too invasive. She had tried to be so strong. With any other man she would have pulled it off, but not with Nic. He was her nemesis. She had always suspected it was the case. He would totally unravel her, leaving her vulnerable and exposed.

‘Tell me, Jade,’ he said, his voice lowering to a gentle burr. ‘Tell me why it is that with the kind of reputation you have—which, I might add, you have not in any way
discouraged or taken any action to defend yourself—you have not until this point enjoyed sex fully.’

Jade slowly lifted her head off her knees. It seemed she was not going to get out of this after all. She knew Nic well enough to know he would stand there and wait for her to tell him, no matter how long it took. It was her fault for letting him get under her radar. She should have known he would be the one to see through her party-girl pretence. Shame coursed through her but she made herself meet his dark gaze. ‘Do you remember the night of my sixteenth birthday when I tried to seduce you?’ she asked.

He nodded grimly. ‘It’s not something I like to think about too much. I tried to do the right thing by you. I know I was a little hard on you. I’ve often thought if I had handled it better you might not have rushed off with Riccardo.’

Jade got off the bed, dragging the sheet with her as a drape. She wanted her clothes on but dressing in front of him was out of the question. She felt far too exposed as it was.

‘Here,’ Nic said, handing her his bathrobe from the back of the door to the en suite bathroom. ‘Put this on.’

Jade slid her arms into the sleeves and tied the ends around her waist. It was far too big for her; she felt as if she were wrapped in a circus tent.

‘You look like Ella playing dress-ups with her mother’s clothes.’

She gave him her version of a smile: sad and wistful. ‘I wish I could go back to her age and start again. Maybe I wouldn’t make the same mistakes.’

His brow tightened again with a frown. ‘We all
make mistakes, Jade. It’s what life is about: living and learning. We can’t grow until we realise where we went wrong.’

She hugged her arms close to her body. ‘I should have listened to you that night,’ she said, no longer able to meet his eyes. ‘I should have taken on board everything you said. But I didn’t. Instead, I did the very opposite. I was so rebellious, so determined to show you and everyone I could do what I wanted. But I was wrong—so terribly, terribly wrong.’

Nic felt a tremor of unease pass through his insides. This was a side to Jade he had never seen before: the vulnerable side. Gone was the tough don’t-mess-with-me-I-couldn’t-give-a-damn-anyway wild-child; in her place was a young woman who looked as if the world had let her down in a very bad way. He didn’t say anything. He kept silent to let her continue, but he felt his throat tighten as he swallowed, as if a rough hand had grasped him by the neck and squeezed until he could hardly breathe.

She looked up at him, her forest-green eyes filled with pain. ‘Sleeping with your friend is something I have always regretted. It was nothing like I thought it would be. I wanted to get back at you for rejecting me, but instead I was the one who got hurt.’

The hand around Nic’s neck tightened another notch. ‘Did that bastard hurt you?’ he asked.

She tugged at her bottom lip with her teeth for a moment before answering. ‘No, at least not by intention. You were right, Nic; I was too young to be having sex. I wasn’t ready emotionally. I allowed someone I hardly knew to use my body. I was so ashamed when it was over. I cried for hours. But then, instead of learning
from my mistake, I did it again. I was suddenly popular. I was the IT girl when for so long I was the one on the outside. I suppose it was a way to get attention.’

Nic momentarily closed his eyes. He opened them to find her looking into the distance, as if she were time travelling to the past. ‘Jade … ‘ he began and took a step towards her but she held up her hand like a stop sign.

‘NO,’ she said. ‘Let me get this off my chest. God knows, it’s about time.’ She gave a harsh-sounding laugh that contained no humour in it at all. ‘For all these years I have pretended to live like a tart. I let the press portray me like that. I actively sought that sort of reputation by being in all the hip places, dressing provocatively, flirting, teasing, acting as if I was the most popular girl in town. I guess that’s the way I saw myself: the cheap, shallow socialite, the reckless, uncontrollable wild-child who didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about her.’

‘But you do care about what people think of you, don’t you, Jade?’ Nic said. ‘Your father, for instance. For all these years you’ve been acting out to get his attention, but it hasn’t worked, has it?’

She gave him another world-weary twist of her lips. ‘He’s never quite forgiven me for not going on that holiday. If I had been with Jon he wouldn’t have gone to that particular ski run. Jon was always my father’s favourite. I knew that. Jon knew that, but he tried his best to compensate by being the best brother you could imagine. Without him, I was like a rudderless boat. I couldn’t seem to stop from hitting the rocks. It was like I was determined to self-destruct or something.’

‘You are not to blame for your brother’s death,’ he
said. ‘There is no way you should be blamed by anyone for that, especially your father.’

‘I can’t turn back the clock,’ Jade said sadly. ‘I wish I could, not just with that holiday but everything really. I wish I had had more time with my mother. I think I would have fared better if she hadn’t died when she did. She would have helped me with my—’ She stopped and bit her lip again.

‘Helped you with your what, Jade?’ he prompted.

She met his gaze. ‘Um…with my art work.’

He frowned. ‘Your art work?’

Jade felt her face grow warm. ‘Yes, I sort of dabble in watercolours. I’m not very good. I haven’t taken any lessons or anything. It’s just a hobby. Actually, I’m totally rubbish at it. I would never show anyone my stuff. It just fills in the time for me. I enjoy it, you know, the creative part of it.’

‘I am sure you are being unnecessarily harsh on your talent.’

‘I have no qualifications,’ she said. ‘Not unless you count hours, if not days, wandering around galleries and art shows. I just know what I like and what I like to paint. That’s all, really. I don’t even have a proper studio.’

He looked at her for a long moment. ‘Would you like to have a studio of your own?’

Jade felt a frisson of creative excitement rush through her. She also felt a flutter of something deep inside her heart—a feeling of gratitude that he hadn’t laughed at her or ridiculed her painting but instead was offering his support. ‘Do you think I could use one of the rooms in your villa in Rome as a studio?’ she asked tentatively.

‘I’ve brought some stuff with me here but we won’t be here long enough for me to set up properly.’

‘Use whatever room suits you, both here and in Rome. Do you need anything? Art supplies and so on?’

‘No, I have everything I need,’ she said. ‘I packed it all when I left London.’

He looked at her in silence for another moment or two. ‘You really are full of surprises, aren’t you,
cara?’
he said.

Jade felt the warm glow on her cheeks intensify and quickly lowered her eyes. ‘We all have our secrets, I suppose.’

‘What you see is what you get with me, I’m afraid,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Shallow and selfish is what the press call me, isn’t it? And, let me tell you, it’s not far off the truth.’

Jade meshed her gaze with his. ‘I don’t believe that.’

He raised his brows at her. ‘You don’t?’

She shook her head. ‘You are a lot deeper than you allow people to think. Sensitive too, much more sensitive than people give you credit for.’

He gave her a guarded look. ‘What makes you say that?’

She kept her eyes trained on his. ‘You are not like the other men I know or have known in the past. I’ve always felt like that about you. You stand apart from everyone.’

A flash of something moved across his features. ‘Listen, Jade,’ he said. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas about me settling down and playing happy husband for ever. This is the shallow, selfish part of me I warned you about talking here, and it’s the real me. This marriage
is solely to access my share of my grandfather’s estate. It is not about building a future together or falling in love. Are we both clear on that?’

Jade schooled her expression into blankness, but inside she felt the pain of rejection eat away at her like sharp little teeth. It was like all those years ago, but worse somehow. She wasn’t good enough for him. She was never going to be good enough for him. Telling him why she had acted the way she had had made it worse, not better. He was sympathetic and supportive and she was grateful for that, but she was fooling herself if she thought such a heart-to-heart confession was going to make him fall in love with her. He was not interested in settling down, and certainly not with someone who had acted with such impropriety for as long as he had known her.

‘Jade?’ He pushed up her chin with his finger.

She jerked her head away and got to her feet. ‘What do you take me for, Nic?’ she asked. ‘I told you before, I’m not some naive schoolgirl with a crush. So we had sex, or at least you pleasured me. Thanks, by the way. It was great. Very memorable, but it doesn’t mean I have feelings for you.’

He watched her for a beat or two before he responded. ‘Just keep a lid on it, that’s all I’m saying, Jade. I know what happens when women find a lover who finally ticks all the boxes for them. The lines get blurred. Sex for me is a physical thing. I love it, not necessarily the person I am having it with.’

Jade folded her arms across her body. ‘I’m not going to fall in love with you, Nic.’
Because a part of me has already gone ahead and foolishly and irrevocably done so,
she thought in silent despair.

He walked to the bedroom door but stopped and turned around to look at her before he opened it. ‘The money is not just for me,’ he said. ‘If I lost my share of the Sabbatini Corporation it might have put my brothers at risk of a one-third takeover. These have been pretty rough financial times in recent years. It is not sound business sense to be off your watch, even for a moment. My grandfather knew that and used it to get me to do what he wanted. He had a fantasy about you and me making a match of it, but that’s all it was: a fantasy. None of this is real, Jade. It’s like acting a role in a play. Our primary job is to get through this year and collect our earnings at the end.’

Jade lifted one of her finely arched brows. ‘Does that mean you will no longer require my services in bed? I too can separate the act from the emotion. I’ve been doing it all these years. I am happy to oblige. After all, I owe you one, Italian boy.’

He frowned at her choice of words. ‘Don’t play the cheap tart with me, Jade. It doesn’t suit you.’

She threw him a what-would-you-know look, but he had already gone.

J
ADE
didn’t bother leaving the comfort of Nic’s bed, even though she was uncertain of what he expected of her now. Their relationship had stepped to a new level, but it wasn’t quite where she wanted it to be. Sharing a room and a bed was not going to be enough for her. She knew it would break her heart the longer it continued, but right now she couldn’t bring herself to leave the sheets that smelled of him. Her body was still tingling from the earth-shattering experience of his touch and caresses. She squeezed her thighs together, marvelling at the way her inner body still pulsed and ached for more of that delicious pleasure.