His anger seemed to burn out of him almost as rapidly as it had blazed to life. He slumped back onto the couch and rubbed his eyes.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” he muttered after a half minute of silence.
“It’s okay. You were mad. So was I.”
When she turned to look at him he was watching her with weary eyes.
“I’ve done some things in my life that I’m not proud of, Megan. When I was younger I used to party as much as I breathed. My ‘fuck the world’ attitude almost got me killed more times than I’d like to admit. I was never as promiscuous as the tabloids made me out to be but I was selfish a few times when it came to women. I must have made myself fair game for the media. By the time I grew up…by the time I wised up enough to be worthy of a good woman’s love, the damage had already been done. When the press sprang a big story about my supposed affair with an Italian model that I’d met only briefly at a mutual friend’s party the woman that I just mentioned believed every word of it.”
Megan just stared at him. She knew there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t sound trite. His misery was palpable. She touched the back of his hand softly then covered it with her own. They sat in silence for several minutes. She knew how different Christian and she were. She couldn’t even imagine some of the things he’d experienced in his life.
So she couldn’t understand how it was possible to feel so close to him.
He turned over his hand and returned her caresses. She realized he sha
red in their profound mutual awareness of each other.
“I should go,” she murmured.
“Don’t.”
His soulful one word reply was more than just a request not to leave for a few more minutes and Megan knew it. Part of her wanted to stay more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life. She’d never felt closer to Christian than she had at this moment. The attraction between them was tangible, like an invisible thread that was attached somewhere high inside both of their ribcages, a thread that was shrinking with every moment that passed, pulling tauter, making it almost impossible to resist the inevitable impetus drawing them together.
“Are you still mad at me?” he rumbled.
Megan’s hair fell against her cheeks when she shook her head. “Are you still angry at me? For letting Hilary influence my opinion?”
“No.” His hand slid behind her neck and brought her against his chest. “Just do me a favor and tell me if there’s something bothering you.”
“I will,” Megan whispered. Now would be the perfect time to express her many uncertainties about them becoming involved. Instead, she pressed a kiss into his chest. She closed her eyelids when she felt him shudder beneath her touch. “I’ll help you clean up before I go,” she offered shakily.
“Next time. The guest of an honorary dinner is excused from cleaning up.”
“Really?”
Megan glanced up into his face when Christian didn’t answer her for several seconds. He looked strained, like he wanted to do something and was struggling not to. He finally replied after taking a deep breath and letting his hands drop to the couch. The absence of his touch was like a pain.
“You don’t know that rule? The only time my mom ever let Katie, Mary and me off of dish duty was on our birthdays or graduations, things like that.”
“Katie and Mary? Your sisters?”
Christian nodded.
“What are they like?” she asked.
”Katie’s a little older than me. She lives in Burr Ridge and has two rowdy little boys, Eric and Nick. Mary is eleven years younger than me, and almost as much of a hell-raiser as I was at her age. Would you like want to meet them?”
“Yes.”
He brushed her cheek with warm fingertips then dropped his hand. “Good, I’ll try to set it up for next weekend. It’ll have to be Friday. I’m…busy on Saturday night.”
“That should be fine,” Megan murmured. Their conversation was casual, but the messages their eyes were exchanging were far from mundane. She was a coward, keepings things so surface, so sterile…so safe with him. Her conversation with Tina earlier today leapt into her mind. Nervousness joined the chocolate cake in her belly.
“I’m going to leave now. But there was something that I wanted to say before I left. I wanted…to tell you about…that is…” She glanced away and swallowed thickly. Her courage failed her. “…I wanted to thank you for the lovely dinner and the beautiful book.”
“You’re more than welcome.” His brow furrowed with concern and puzzlement as he watched her. “What is it, Megan?”
“Nothing.”