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She held her T-shirt protectively in front of her. ‘Is there a bathroom I can use to change back into my own top?’
He kept one mocking brow raised. ‘Isn’t it a little late for modesty when I’ve already seen you naked?’
Her cheeks warmed hotly. ‘Not completely!’
Jonas gave a shrug. ‘The part you’re going to expose, I have.’
Mac’s mouth set determinedly. ‘Would you just tell me where the bathroom is?’
‘The nearest one is down the hallway, first door on the right,’ he told her before turning away.
It was a cold and uninterested dismissal, Mac realised with a frown as she turned and walked out of the kitchen. Anyone would think that being a virgin at her age was akin to having the plague! Maybe in his eyes it was…
She wasted no time in admiring the luxurious bathroom as she quickly pulled off Jonas’s overlarge T-shirt and replaced it with her own white one, a glance in the mirror over the double sink showing her that her hair was in too much of a mess for her to do any more than plait it loosely in an effort to smooth it into some sort of order.
Her face was very pale, her eyes huge and slightly red from the tears she had shed earlier, her lips full and swollen from the intensity of the kisses she had shared with Jonas.
Most of all she looked…sad.
Which wouldn’t do at all, Mac decided as she set her shoulders determinedly before leaving the bathroom to go back to the kitchen. She was a mature and confident woman—even if, horror or horrors, she was still a virgin!—and she intended to act like one.
Jonas was still sitting at the table surrounded by the remains of their meal, although the level of wine in his glass had definitely gone down in her absence.
Mac placed his T-shirt on the back of one of the other chairs. ‘Thank you,’ she said stiltedly, her face averted as she sat down to begin pulling on her leathers.
This, putting her clothes back on in a strained and awkward silence, had to be one of the most embarrassing and humiliating experiences of her entire life. More embarrassing than if she and Jonas had actually made love completely? Probably not, she acknowledged with a self-derisive grimace, as she could only imagine his reaction if he had discovered her virginity when it was too late for him to pull back.
Once again Jonas watched Mac broodingly through narrowed lids, easily able to read the self-disgust in her expression, the underlying hurt. Damn it, he had never meant to hurt her. Hadn’t wanted to hurt her. He just knew he had nothing to offer a woman like Mac. Beautiful. Emotional. Virginal…
His relationships were always, always based on a mutual attraction and physical need. That desire definitely existed between himself and Mac, but the fact that she was still a virgin, and had been willing to give that virginity to him, had also warned him that if they made love together then she would probably want more from him than that. Much more.
Jonas didn’t have any more than that to give. Not to Mac or any other woman. But that wasn’t her fault.
‘I’m sorry.’
She gave him a sharp glance as she straightened from lacing her boots. ‘For what?’
Jonas grimaced. ‘For allowing things to go as far between us just now as they did. If I had known—’
‘If you had known I was a virgin then you wouldn’t have invited me up to your apartment at all!’ she finished knowingly as she stood to zip up her leathers.
Jonas winced at the bitterness he could hear in her tone. ‘None of what happened was premeditated on my part—’
‘No?’ she challenged.
‘No, damn it!’ A scowl darkened his brow.
Mac shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it, Jonas. Not all men are as fickle as you; I’m pretty sure I can find one who’s more than willing to become my first lover. Maybe I’ll come back once I have, and we can finish what we started?’ she taunted.
Jonas pushed his chair back noisily to stand up. ‘Don’t be so stupid!’ he rasped harshly.
Mac’s chin tilted with determination as she looked up at him. ‘What’s stupid about it?’
‘You can’t just decide to lose your virginity in that cold-blooded way!’
‘Why can’t I?’
He shook his head. ‘Because it’s something too precious to just throw away. It’s a gift you should give to a man you care about. That you love.’
Mac felt a clenching in her chest as she acknowledged that she did care about Jonas. She didn’t think she was in love with him yet—it would be madness on her part to fall in love with him!—but she definitely cared about him. About the hurt child he had once been, and the disillusioned man he now was.
She looked him straight in the eye. ‘I believe that’s for me to decide, Jonas, not you.’
‘But—’
‘I would like to leave now,’ she told him flatly.
Jonas stared down at her in obvious frustration. ‘Not until you promise me that you aren’t going to leave here and do something totally reckless.’
‘Like taking a lover?’
‘Exactly!’
Mac gave him a pitying glance. ‘I don’t believe that anything I do in future is any of your business.’
His mouth was set grimly, a nerve pulsing in his tightly clenched jaw. ‘If you’re really that desperate for a lover—’
‘Oh, I’m not desperate, Jonas,’ she said coolly. ‘Just curious,’ she added, deliberately baiting him.
Jonas wanted to shake her. Wanted to grasp the tops of Mac’s arms and shake her until her teeth rattled. Except that he didn’t dare touch her again. Because he knew that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to stop…
He sighed heavily. ‘I thought you understood after the things I told you about my childhood. Mac, I’m not the man you need, and I never could be.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t believe I ever asked you to be anything to me,’ she pointed out.
‘But you would.’ That nerve continued to pulse in his jaw. ‘Perhaps you would enjoy the novelty of the relationship at first, the sexual excitement, but eventually you would want more than I have to give you.’
‘You know what, Jonas,’ she said conversationally, ‘I think you’re taking an awful lot for granted in assuming that I would have wanted to continue a—a sexual relationship with you after tonight. I mean, who’s to say I would actually have enjoyed having sex with you? Or is it that you’re under the illusion you’re such a great lover that no woman could possibly be left feeling disappointed after sharing your bed?’
Jonas felt the twitch of a smile on his lips as Mac deliberately insulted him. ‘That would be a little arrogant of me, wouldn’t it?’
‘More than a little, I would have said,’ she shot back. ‘So, how do I get out of here?’ She moved pointedly across the room to stand beside the doorway out into the hallway.
This evening had been something of another disaster as far as he and Mac were concerned, Jonas acknowledged ruefully as he preceded her out of the kitchen and walked with her to the lift.
She grimaced once she had stepped inside the lift. ‘I’m not sure if I said this before, but thank you for sending Bob over this afternoon to fix my window.’
Jonas had totally forgotten that was the original reason she had followed him home! ‘But don’t do anything like it again?’ he guessed dryly.
‘No.’
He nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. I—If I don’t see you again before then—Merry Christmas, Mac.’
She eyed him quizzically. ‘And I’d already marked you down as the “bah, humbug” type!’
‘I am the “bah, humbug” type,’ he admitted with a quirk of his mouth.
Mac nodded as the lift doors began to close. ‘Merry Christmas, Jonas.’
Jonas continued to stand in the hallway long after she had gone down to the car park and no doubt driven away on that powerful motorbike as if the devil himself were at her heels.
He liked Mac, Jonas realised frowningly. Liked the way she looked. Her spirit. Her independence. Her optimism about life and people in general. Most of all he admired her ability to laugh at herself.
Unfortunately, he also knew that allowing himself to like Mac McGuire was as dangerous to the solitary lifestyle he preferred as having a sexual relationship with her would have been.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS late in the morning when Mac parked her four-wheel-drive Jeep next to her motorbike in the garage on the ground floor of the warehouse after arriving back from a three-day pre-Christmas visit to her parents’ home in Devon.
She had felt the need to get away for a while after the disastrous and humiliating end to the evening spent with Jonas at his apartment. And as the men had duly arrived the following day to install the alarm system to the warehouse, and the exhibition at the gallery was going well—Jeremy had informed Mac when she spoke to him on the telephone that the paintings were all sold, and the public were pouring in to see them before the exhibition came to a close at Christmas—she was free to do what she wanted for the next few days, at least.
Just as she had hoped, the time spent with her parents—the normality of being teased by her father and going Christmas shopping with her mother—had been the perfect way to put things in her own life back into perspective. For her to decide that her behaviour that evening at Jonas’s apartment had been an aberration. A madness she didn’t intend ever to repeat. In fact, she had come to the conclusion that ever seeing Jonas Buchanan again would be a mistake…
Which was going to be a little hard for her to do when he was the first person she saw as she rounded the corner from the garage!
Mac’s hand tightened about the handle of the holdall she had used to pack the necessary clothing needed for her three days away, her gaze fixed on Jonas as she walked slowly towards him. She unconsciously registered how attractive he looked in a brown leather jacket over a tan-coloured sweater and faded jeans…
Any embarrassment she might have felt at seeing him again was forgotten as she realised he was directing the actions of the two other men, workmen from their clothing, who seemed to be in the process of building a metal tower beside the warehouse. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mac demanded.
‘Oh, hell!’ Jonas muttered as he turned and saw her, his expression becoming grim. ‘I’d hoped to have dealt with this before you got back.’
‘Hoped to have dealt with what? What on earth…?’ Mac stared up at the wooden sides of the warehouse. Her eyes were wide with shock as she took in the electric-pink and fluorescent-green paints that had been sprayed haphazardly over the dark wooden cladding.
‘It isn’t as bad as it looks…’
‘Isn’t it?’ she questioned sharply, the holdall slipping unnoticed from her fingers as she continued to stare numbly up at that mad kaleidoscope of colour.
‘Mac—’
‘Don’t touch me!’ She cringed away as Jonas would have reached out and grasped her arm. ‘Who—? Why—?’ She gave a dazed shake of her head. ‘When did this happen?’
‘I have no idea,’ Jonas rasped. ‘Some time yesterday evening, we think—’
‘Who is we?’
‘My foreman from the building site next door,’ he elaborated. ‘He noticed it this morning, and when he didn’t receive any reply to his knock on your door he decided to report it to me.’
Mac swallowed hard, feeling slightly nauseous at the thought of someone deliberately vandalising her property. ‘Why would anyone do something like this?’
‘I don’t know.’ Jonas sighed heavily.
‘Could it be kids this time?’
‘Again, I have no idea. These two men are going to paint over it. They should be finished by this evening.’ He grimaced. ‘I had hoped to have had it done before you got back—’
‘I thought I had made it plain the last time we met that I would rather you didn’t go around arranging things for me?’ Mac reminded him coldly.
Jonas eyed her with a frown, the pallor of her cheeks very noticeable against the red padded body-warmer she wore over a black sweater and black denims. He didn’t like seeing the glitter of tears in those smoky-grey eyes, either. But he liked the cold, flat tone of her voice when she spoke to him even less. ‘Would you rather I had just left it for you to find when you got home?’
‘I have found it when I got home!’ Her voice rose slightly, almost shrilly.
Jonas shook his head. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to be back just yet; I had hoped it would be later today, or even better, tomorrow morning.’
Those huge grey eyes settled on him suspiciously. ‘How did you even know I had gone away?’
Jonas knew he could have lied, prevaricated even, but the suspicion he could read in Mac’s expression warned him not to do either of those things. ‘The Patels,’ he revealed unapologetically. ‘Once I had seen the mess, and you obviously weren’t at home, I went to their convenience store and asked if they had any idea where you were.’
Those misty grey eyes widened. ‘And they just told you I had gone away for a few days?’
He gave a rueful nod. ‘Once I’d explained about the vandalism, yes.’
‘Tarun always puts a daily newspaper by for me,’ Mac muttered absently. ‘I cancelled it while I was away.’
Jonas smiled. ‘So he told me.’
She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. ‘Nothing like this ever happened before I met you—’
‘Don’t say something you’ll only have to apologise for later,’ Jonas warned through suddenly gritted teeth.
‘Even before,’ Mac continued as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘when your assorted employees came here to try and persuade me into selling the warehouse, nothing like this happened. It’s only since actually meeting you—’
‘I said stop, Mac!’ A nerve pulsed in his tightly clenched cheek.
Her gaze narrowed as she focused on him. ‘Since meeting you, I’ve had my window broken and my home vandalised,’ she said accusingly. ‘And now some helpful soul has decided to redecorate the outside of the warehouse for me. Bit too much of a coincidence, don’t you think, Jonas?’ Her eyes glittered with anger now rather than tears.
Jonas had known exactly where Mac was going with this conversation, and had tried to stop her from actually voicing those accusations.
Damn it, he had considered himself well rid of her once she’d left his apartment on Monday evening. He’d had no intention of going near her on a personal level ever again if he could avoid it. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to avoid coming here, at least, once he’d received the telephone call earlier this morning from his foreman.
He certainly wasn’t enjoying being the object of Mac’s suspicions. ‘Only if you choose to look at it that way,’ he bit out icily.
She eyed him challengingly. ‘Did you report this to the police?’
Jonas narrowed cold blue eyes. ‘I have the distinct feeling that I’m going to be damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.’
Mac raised questioning brows. ‘How so?’
‘If I did report it then I was probably just covering my own back. If I didn’t report it, then again, I’m obviously guilty.’
