At His Service: His 9-5 Secretary: The Billionaire Boss's Secretary Bride / The Secretary's Secret / Memo: Marry Me?

‘How?’

‘How can you tell if a woman is looking for something permanent or just a roll in the hay?’ she asked baldly.

He looked askance at her. ‘I hope it’s never anything as crude as “just a roll in the hay”,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’m a man, not an animal. I’ve never yet taken a woman just because she’s indicated she’s available.’

This self-righteous side of him was new. Gina fixed him with purposely innocent eyes. ‘So you have to get to know someone first? Find out if they can provide mental as well as physical stimulation, perhaps? Make sure their slant on life and love is the same as yours?’

He stared at her as though he wasn’t sure whether she was mocking him or not. After a moment, his eyes glinting, he said, ‘You make it sound very cold-blooded.’

In for a penny, in for a pound. ‘Perhaps because it is?’ she suggested sweetly.

‘I prefer to think of it as honest, and if this man you’ve been involved with had done the same you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in now,’ he ground out somewhat grimly.

‘But attraction, love, desire, doesn’t always fit into nicely labelled little packages, does it?’ Gina countered, the feeling that she’d hit him on the raw wonderfully satisfying. ‘It can be a spontaneous thing, something that hits you wham-bang in the heart and takes you completely by surprise. Something so overpowering and real that everything and everyone else goes out of the window.’

He folded his arms over his chest, settling more comfortably in his seat as he studied her flushed face. ‘It can be like that,’ he agreed after some moments. ‘But, if it is, things inevitably go wrong.’

‘Of course they don’t—’

‘Was it like that for you with this man?’ he interjected swiftly. ‘A head-over-heels thing?’

She hesitated, and immediately he seized on it. ‘You see?’ he said coolly.

‘What I see is that your attitude is a wonderful excuse for playing the field without fear of reprisals.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Refusing to be intimidated by his growl, Gina met his glare without flinching. ‘You have the best of all worlds, Harry, you know you do. You can wine, dine and bed a woman as often as you like, and then walk away with a smile and a “I told you what to expect” when you’ve had enough. I find that … distasteful.’

‘Distasteful?’

If the situation had been different, she could have laughed at the sheer outrage on his face. Funnily enough, his mounting temper had the effect of calming her. ‘Yes, distasteful,’ she said firmly. ‘You can’t tell me some of your girlfriends haven’t fallen for you because, whatever modern thinking tries to promote, sex means more to a woman than a man in the emotional sense. Just the sheer mechanics of it means a woman allows—’ She stopped abruptly as he raised a sardonic eyebrow.

‘Yes?’ he drawled with suspicious blankness.

‘It means a woman allows a man into her body,’ she said bravely, wondering why she was giving Harry—of all people—a biology lesson. ‘Whereas, for a man …’

‘It’s possession, penetration?’

Ignoring her fiery cheeks, Gina nodded sharply. ‘Exactly.’

‘You don’t think the man feels anything beyond physical satisfaction?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ He knew she hadn’t said that. ‘But it is different.’

‘Vive la difference.’

Her embarrassment seemed to have restored his equanimity. Drawing on her dignity, Gina said flatly, ‘I’m sorry if you find it old-fashioned or amusing, but I happen to think that love should enter the equation however things turn out in the end. And I know there’s no guarantee with any relationship; I’m not in cloud cuckoo land.’

He looked at her quietly for a moment. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you, Gina.’

And pigs fly.

‘In fact the time was I might have expressed the same views myself, but—’ He paused. ‘People change. Life changes them.’

Gina said nothing. In truth she was startled by this last remark. His tone of voice, the look on his face, was different from anything that had gone before.

‘I guess I’ve become self-sufficient, independent. I like my life the way it is, and to share it with another person would be at best inconvenient and worst a nightmare.’

She wished she’d never started this conversation. Breathing shallowly to combat the shaft of pain that had seared her chest, Gina said quietly, ‘You missed out cynical.’

‘You think I’m cynical?’

She nodded. ‘Not just from what you’ve said tonight, but more over the last twelve months. I wonder, actually, if you really like women much, Harry.’

For a moment he didn’t react at all. Then he said softly, ‘I assure you, I’m not of the other persuasion.’

‘No, I didn’t mean—I—I know you’re not—’

He cut short her stammerings with a dark smile, his voice self-mocking when he said, ‘I know what you meant, Gina. It was my way of prevaricating.’

‘Oh.’ Sometimes his innate honesty was more than a little disturbing.

‘Because you’re right. I am cynical where the fair sex is concerned.’

Why was being proved right so horribly depressing? Hiding her feelings, Gina nodded slowly. Picking her words carefully, she said, ‘Bad experience somewhere in your long-lost youth?’ She hoped to defuse what had suddenly become an extremely charged atmosphere with her tone, knowing he wouldn’t want to talk about it in any detail. The last year had proved he was a master at deflecting questions about his past.

This time he surprised her. Nodding, he leaned forward, taking one of the mints the waitress had brought with their coffee and unwrapping it before he said, ‘Her name was Anna, and it was a wild, hot affair. We were crazy about each other at first, but we were young; I’d just left uni when we met. I thought it would go on for ever, made promises, you know? But after a year or so I found my feelings were beginning to change. I still loved her, cared about her, but I wasn’t in love with her. That something had gone. Perhaps it had only ever been lust, I don’t know.’

‘And Anna?’

‘She said she loved me with all her heart. Then she got sick. A rare form of cancer. Although, she wasn’t. I only found out she’d lied to me after we’d married. One of her friends told me when she was drunk, she thought it was hilarious. I was a joke, apparently.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She was. His voice was painful to hear.

‘So far from Anna only having a few short months to live, months she’d begged me to spend with her as man and wife, she was as healthy as the next person.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told her I was leaving. That night she cut her wrists in the bath.’

Unable to believe her ears, Gina could only stare.

‘And so it began. Months of manipulation and tears and threats and rages. Two more supposed suicide attempts when I was going to leave. Damn it, I was young, little more than a kid. I was in way over my head, and I was stupid. I really thought she might kill herself. Eventually it came to the point where I began to fear I was going mad. That was the point I walked out. Went abroad.’

‘What … what did she do?’

He shrugged. ‘Took me for every penny she could get, and made sure my name was mud, then married some other poor sop.’