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‘When exactly?’
‘Any point in the last fifteen years would have been good.’
She let out a sharp laugh. ‘Right. Because that wouldn’t have been embarrassing.’ She tilted her head, her chin still up and her expression still challenging. ‘In any case, why should I have told you?’
‘Because I’d have told you that there wasn’t a bet.’
She frowned. ‘What?’
‘There wasn’t a bet.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Really. I swear.’
She stared at him and the seconds ticked by as she absorbed the truth of it. ‘Then why did you say there was?’
Marcus inwardly winced at the memory of his arrogant, reckless, out-of-control and hurting teenage self. ‘Bravado.’
‘Bravado?’
‘I was eighteen. Thought I knew it all. When you pushed me away it stung. Battered my pride. It hadn’t happened before.’
‘I can imagine,’ she said dryly.
‘Your knock-back hit me hard.’
‘I find that difficult to believe.’
‘Believe it.’
‘You called me a prick-tease.’
Marcus flinched. Had he? Not his finest moment, but then there hadn’t been many fine moments at that point in his life. ‘I’m sorry. I wanted you badly. You seemed to want me equally badly. And then you didn’t. One minute you were all over me, the next you basically told me to get off you and then shot out through the door.’
‘It wasn’t entirely like that.’
‘No? Then what was it like? Why did you stop me that night?’
‘I was a virgin. I got carried away. And then I suddenly realised I didn’t want to lose my virginity to someone who’d probably be in bed with someone else the following night.’
‘I might not have been.’
Celia rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, sure.’
And actually, there was no point denying it, she might well be right. At eighteen, with the death of his father six months before and his mother’s all-consuming grief that had left no room for a son who’d been equally devastated, and ultimately no room for life, he’d been off the rails for a while. The night of Dan’s eighteenth birthday party, which had fallen on the anniversary of the date his father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he’d been on a mission to self-destruct, and he hadn’t cared who’d got caught up in the process. In retrospect Celia had had a lucky escape. ‘Well, I guess we’ll never know.’
‘I guess we won’t.’
‘I was pretty keen on you, though,’ he said reflectively.
‘Were you?’
‘Yup. Even though you were Dan’s sister and therefore strictly off-limits.’
‘Not that off-limits,’ she said tartly. ‘If I hadn’t put a stop to things we’d have ended up in bed.’
‘No, well, I didn’t have many scruples back then.’ As evinced by the fact that following Celia’s rejection he hadn’t wasted any time in finding someone else to keep him company that night.
‘And you do now?’
‘A few. And you know something else?’ he said, taking the fact that she was still standing there, listening, as an encouraging sign.
‘What?’
‘Despite everything that’s happened between us over the years it turns out I still am pretty keen on you.’
FOUR
Just when Celia didn’t think she could take any more shocks to the system, bam, there was another one.
She was still trying to get her head around the fact that Marcus thought that what she’d achieved with her career was impressive. That she’d got quite a large part of him badly, badly wrong. That there’d never been a bet and the enormity of what that meant. That ever since that night her attitude towards him—and men in general—had been fuelled by one tiny misunderstanding and could have been so very different if teenage angst hadn’t got in the way.
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