The Virgin's Proposition (13 page)

“I wasn’t going to drown.” She twisted again and he let her go this time because holding her was not a good idea.

She didn’t even seem to notice. “I did exactly what I was supposed to do. It had to be done, and you needed to steer. But—” now she paused and beamed at him “—thank you for worrying about me.”

“I was worried about
me,”
he said gruffly. “Your old man would probably have had me guillotined. Or do it himself.”

“Papa is very civilized.”

“I wouldn’t be,” Demetrios muttered under his breath and knew it for the truth. He glared at her standing there in her bikini. The rain was getting colder now, and her nipples were standing up against the thin fabric. “And for God sake, go get dressed!”

Thank God she did, though not without arching her brows and looking at him thoughtfully for a long minute before she left. Thank God she didn’t say anything else, either, but just let it ride.

Demetrios did not want to talk. He did not want to deal with the roil of emotions churning inside him. Did not to face the maelstrom of feelings or the woman who was causing them.

Of course he had to follow her below because he could think of no excuse for staying up on deck in the middle of a pounding rain. Fortunately she was in her cabin. He went to his. He would have stayed there all evening, but she tapped on his door an hour later.

“Dinner’s ready.”

He hauled himself off his bunk, where he’d been trying with no luck at all to focus on his screenplay, and opened the door a few inches. “We ate.”

She shrugged. “Fine. If you’re not hungry.” She was still looking at him speculatively. “I made bruschetta.” A pause. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

He muttered under his breath. “Just don’t do it again.” He came out and sat down at the table. The rain still pounded down, but the wind seemed to have slacked off a bit so the boat didn’t heel over quite as much. It didn’t bobble and tip constantly. It made the meal easier to serve and to eat. But he wasn’t particularly hungry.

He was distracted by what he was thinking, by what he was feeling. By how badly he didn’t want to be thinking and feeling any of it.

Anny was making an effort at conversation. He recognized a couple of her “conversation starters.” Questions that invited participation, that welcomed a response. She used them when he wasn’t cooperating. Next thing you knew she’d be reduced to asking him what he was thinking.

And there was no way he was telling her that.

She’d barely finished her last mouthful when he stood up. “I’ll clean up. You go ahead and work.”

Her eyes widened. “Work?”

“Aren’t you writing a dissertation?”

The eyes widened a fraction more. Then they narrowed and she looked at him the way his mother had when he’d been a particularly fractious child. But unlike his mother, Anny didn’t say anything. She dumped her plate in the sink and gave a small shrug. “Well, you know where to find me.”

Anny went straight into her cabin and shut the door. Hard.

What was his problem? She could hear him banging plates and silverware in the galley. If he kept that up, he’d break something, she thought, wincing as she heard a particularly loud clank.

Well, if he did, he could buy Theo whatever it was he’d broken. She wasn’t going to do it. Whatever was eating him, it wasn’t her fault.

She tried not to care. Tried not to think about it. But like all the rest of her waking moments since he’d swept her away from the Ritz that first afternoon, these moments, too, were filled with Demetrios.

A lot of good not going to bed with him had done—because despite her better judgment and best efforts, she’d fallen in love with him. Not the young man from the poster, though he was part of it, too. But the man who’d taken time for the children at the clinic, the man who had told her not to make decisions that would cause her to regret her life, the man who had offered her refuge on his boat, who made her laugh and made her wistful, who had one night made beautiful love to her, who had been frightened for her. Who had held her in his arms.

Who hadn’t kissed her, she reminded herself.

No, he’d held her tight, reassured himself that she was fine, then abruptly let her go. Because he cared. She couldn’t say he didn’t care. But he wasn’t in love with her the way she was with him.

The clanking and clattering in the galley finally ceased. The cabinet door banged shut one last time. Then she heard the door
to Demetrios’s cabin open and close. And then silence—except for the wind and the rain.

Anny started to reach for her laptop, told herself she might as well work. He was right that she did have her dissertation to do. And it was a part of her future even if he wasn’t.

And then she heard the door to his cabin again, then his feet on the companionway stairs heading to the cockpit. Probably checking everything one last time before he battened down for the night.

The splash surprised her.

The boat dipped and it sounded as if he’d thrown something overboard. But what? And why?

It was dark so Anny had to turn off the light to peer out the porthole. At first she couldn’t see anything except the lights of the village beyond the harbor and the streaks of reflections across the water.

And then, suddenly, rising out of the water she saw the silhouette of a man’s head.

She pressed her nose against the porthole, disbelieving. Then she turned, jerked open the door and pounded up the steps. “Demetrios!”

She reached the cockpit and scrambled over the side onto the deck. “
Demetrios
!”

She scanned the choppy dark sea desperately. What had possessed him to come up on deck? And what had he been doing to fall overboard? He’d been the one worried about her and now—

“Demetrios!” She spotted him now. He was a good twenty yards off the starboard bow and against the streaky reflections she could see his arms stroking in quick rhythm as he cut through the water.

Swimming!
Away
from the boat!

“Demetrios!” Princesses didn’t yell. Anny had never bellowed so loudly in her life. “
Demetrios
!”

This time he heard. And slowly, almost reluctantly, it seemed, he turned toward her, treading water. He flicked his hair back off his forehead and slowing, lazily began stroking back toward the boat. “What?” There was a note of annoyance in his voice.

He
was annoyed? She thought he’d fallen overboard! And he’d dived in on purpose?

She leaned her forearms on the railing and glared down at him, furious.
“What the hell are you doing?”

He was beside the boat now, his hair plastered to his skull, droplets glistening against the stubble on his jaw. He looked up at her but he made no move to climb aboard. “Taking a swim,” he said, as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

“Now? After dark? Alone? In this weather?” Her voice was shrill. She couldn’t help it.

“I felt like some exercise.”

“You should have said so,” she said through her teeth. “I’d have come with you.”

He muttered something she didn’t hear.

“What if you’d drowned?” she demanded.

“I wouldn’t have drowned.” He sounded sure of it. “I’ve been swimming all my life.”

“Then you should know that you shouldn’t swim alone! Especially in the dark.”

“I was fine.”

“I was fine on the bow tonight,” she reminded. “You got angry then.” She narrowed her gaze down at him as he trod water beside the boat. “Is this payback?”

“What? No. Of course not.” He looked indignant.

“Then what is it?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he turned and started to swim parallel to the boat as if he were going to continue on past it.

“Swim away and I’m coming after you,” Anny warned.

He turned back. “You jump in and I’ll drown
you
.” There was a level of fury in his tone that didn’t make sense to her. The whole stupid episode didn’t make sense. But he was a man—that probably explained everything.

“Fine,” she said. “If you’re so desperate to swim, go right ahead. I’ll just sit right here and watch.”

“What? And play lifeguard?” He gave her an exasperated look. “Going to hold the life preserver?”

She shrugged. “Why not? I won’t say a thing, and I’ll only throw it to you if you start to drown.” She gave him a saccharine smile.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” He took three strokes, reached the side of the boat, then hauled himself up and over the side. Water streamed off his bare legs and dripped from the hems of his shorts. He glared down at her, then shook himself like a dog, showering her with more water than the sky was presently providing.

“Happy now?” he snarled.

Anny stared at his hard muscled body and could barely find the spit to get a single word out of her mouth. “I—”

But Demetrios didn’t wait to hear her answer. He vaulted over the side into the cockpit and pounded down the steps to the cabin without another word.

When she dared to follow him a few minutes later, he was already in his cabin. The door was shut. The shower running.

A while later she heard it shut off. There were a few more noises, a cabinet door banging.

Then silence.

Silence as long as she stood there, listening.

“Demetrios?” Her voice came, soft but firm, from the other side of the door. “We need to talk.”

No, that was the last thing they needed to do. “Go to sleep,” he called.

“I can’t.”

“Well, I’m going to sleep.” He flipped off the light, rolled onto his face, and pulled the sheet over him.

She knocked again. And again.

“Damn it, princess!”

“Please.”

The perennially polite royal. Damn it. Demetrios rolled over again, then scrubbed his hands against his hair. “Hang on.”

He flicked on the light again, dragged on a pair of boxers and some shorts, pulled a T-shirt over his head, then sucked in a deep and, he hoped, sustaining breath, and cracked open the door.

“What?”

She was looking at him the way she’d looked that night on Gerard’s yacht. Worried. Bewildered. Almost as if she was in pain. The last thing he wanted now was a woman in pain.

“I’m confused,” she said with her best finishing school eloquence. “And I was hoping you’d enlighten me.”

“I’m not very enlightening, princess,” he said roughly. “And I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I wanted a swim. I needed some exercise. I’m safe and back on board. So could we maybe do this tomorrow and—” He started to shut the door.

She put her foot in it.

They both looked down at her bare toes. Nails painted a delicate peach color. After a moment, she wiggled them experimentally, then looked at him again. Waiting. Foot not moving.

Demetrios sighed heavily. Then he turned her around and put a hand against her back, moving her out into the main cabin where he pointed her to a chair and sat down opposite. “What do you want to know, princess? On what subject am I supposed to ‘enlighten’ you?”

She leaned toward him. “Why are you angry at me?”

“I’m not angry at you.”

“You’re angry at someone.”

“No.”

But she clearly wasn’t buying that. “Not me, then. Yourself?” she ventured. “For letting me come along?”

“No. Yes. Hell, this isn’t twenty questions.”

“Until you start volunteering something, it will be. We were getting along very well. And now we’re not. So what’s wrong?”

He narrowed his gaze at her. “Why? Do you think you can fix it?”

“If you won’t tell me, we won’t know, will we?”

He scowled, then ground his teeth in the face of her gentle, curious, bloody innocent smile. He shoved himself out of his chair, paced the length of the galley, then spun around and snarled, “It’s elementary biology, princess.”

Her eyes widened. She stared. “It is not.”

He blinked, momentarily nonplussed at her denial. “Of course it is. Men. Women. Desire. Surely you remember propositioning me the night we met.”

“Yes, and you argued vehemently against it,” she replied, color high in her cheeks.

“But apparently not hard enough,” he said with a sardonic smile. “Because we had sex.”

She opened her mouth, and he wondered if she was going to correct him, use the words she’d used at the time: make love. But she didn’t. She said, “And it so thrilled you that you didn’t care if we ever did it again.”

Now it was his turn to stare. “What?”

“You said it was up to me,” she reminded him.

“Because I wasn’t making it a condition for you coming along. I said I’d be glad to do it anytime! Just say when, remember?” He arched a brow at her.

She shrugged, then stood up and met his gaze. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

He stopped dead still. Couldn’t believe his ears. “What did you say?”

She lifted her royal chin. “I said, let’s do it.” Her gaze was unblinking, her stance defiant.

He felt instantly wary. “You said you needed to protect yourself,” he told her, doing his best to reconstruct her argument.

She gave a negligent lift of one shoulder. “Didn’t work.”

He braced a hand on the galley cabinet. “What do you mean, it didn’t work?”

“I fell in love with you, anyway.”

He felt as if she’d punched him in the gut. His knees felt weak. Slowly, dazedly, he shook his head. “No, you haven’t.”

“Clairvoyant, are you?”

“Damn it, Anny. You can’t.”

“I tried not to,” she agreed. “Didn’t work. My problem. Not yours. So—” she held out a hand toward him “—shall we?”

He couldn’t move. Felt as if he had a rock the size of
Gibraltar stuck in his throat. He took a deep breath. Then another. And another.

“No,” he said.

They stared at each other then. Her blue eyes were wide and disbelieving. He didn’t blame her. He wasn’t sure he believed himself.

“You want me,” she said, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced.

“Wanting and doing something about it are two different things,” he told her in no uncertain terms. He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

Outside the rain continued to pelt down. But the wind had slackened. The boat barely rocked.

“I don’t understand,” she said after a long moment.