“Thanks,” she said, reaching for it and shoving both arms into the sleeves before slipping off the bed and tying the belt of the robe at her waist.
His features were tight, closed off as if he were carefully preventing whatever he was thinking from showing on his face. Which only served to really irritate Keira. A few minutes ago, they’d shared something truly amazing. They’d been as close as two people could get. Yet now…he was looking at her as if she were a stranger.
A really unwelcome stranger.
“Nathan, what’s going on?”
“Not a thing,” he said and started for the bedroom door and the stairs beyond. “But I promised you food, didn’t I? I’ll check out the kitchen. See what I can find.”
Very nice, Keira thought. He’d shut her out so politely, so neatly, she had to wonder if maybe his hideous grandmother, who’d shipped him off to boarding school with hardly a wave goodbye, had taught him how to do that? How to push people away without even breaking a sweat.
Well, she wasn’t going anywhere. Not until the storm stopped. And to be honest, even if the storm stopped right this minute, she wouldn’t have been going anywhere. Not until she found out what the hell had happened to send Nathan from orgasmic to crabby in no time at all.
She followed him down the stairs, keeping one hand on the banister to make sure she didn’t fall down the damn stairs and break her neck before she got some answers. She made a sharp right at the bottom of the stairs just in time to see his black robe disappear into the distant kitchen.
Well, if he thought she was that easy to get rid of, he really didn’t know her well at all. Walking quickly, her bare feet hardly making a sound on the area rugs tossed across the gleaming wood floors, Keira got to the swinging door to the kitchen, slapped her palm against it and sent it crashing open.
He was at the fridge and raised his head to look at her when she stepped into the room. Then he dismissed her coolly, reached into the freezer and pulled out a long, flat aluminum tray.
“The housekeeper fills the freezer for me once a week. I think this is…” He read the label. “Fettuccine Alfredo with grilled garlic chicken. It’s from the Clearwater, the restaurant you seem so fond of.”
“Their fettuccine is great,” Keira said, walking toward the granite counter and one of the stools pulled up beneath it. She sat down and tucked her bare feet up to get them off the cold floor.
“Glad you approve,” he said, and turned to quickly take off the lid, turn on the oven and pop the tray inside. “Shouldn’t take too long,” he said, and walked to the wine cooler along the wall. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Sure,” Keira said, trying to figure out a way to get past the wall he’d erected around himself so quickly and so completely. “Nathan, is everything all right?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You’re just acting a little…weird.”
One black eyebrow rose as he set a bottle of white wine on the countertop. He opened a drawer, took out a corkscrew and then tore off the foil top from the bottle. Keira shivered a little and he said, “Cold?”
“A bit.”
There was another fireplace in the kitchen, but this one was cold and dark. Beyond the windows leading to the covered deck, the world was a whirl of white. Light faded from the sky, the heavy clouds dropped even lower, and the flurries of snow were thick enough that it looked as though someone had hung a sheet from the edge of the patio cover.
“There’s extra firewood on the deck. I’ll get some.”
“Okay, fine,” Keira said as Nathan walked to the back door, “but first, tell me what you were going to say upstairs. When you were looking at me so funny. When you said, ‘oh, it’s nothing, never mind.’”
“Keira,” he said with a sigh, “just let it go.”
“Oh no,” she assured him, shaking her head at the sheer folly of the man. “That’s never gonna happen. So it’ll be quicker and easier on both of us if you’ll just spit it out.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Then say it,” she insisted.
One hand on the doorknob, he stared at her for a long moment, as if trying to decide whether to speak or not. At last, though, he nodded and said, “Fine. I was thinking about the sex. And I wondered just how far you were willing to go to get me to stay here for the whole month.”
Keira felt the slap of his words like a physical blow. Stung, humiliated and furious, she glared at him with enough heat that, if there were any justice at all, he would have been a pillar of fire. “Are you serious?”
“You asked what I was going to say,” he said and watched her through narrowed eyes.
“I didn’t know you were going to say that!”
“Don’t sound so offended.” Nathan looked at her for a long minute. “It’s not like I’m surprised.”
“Is that right?”
“For God’s sake, Keira, you think this is the first time a woman’s used her body to get me to do something for her? We’re both adults. You wanted something from me and you used sex to get it.”
Fury whipped through Keira. “You…you…”
He shrugged and headed for the back door. “It was good for both of us. We each got what we wanted. No point now in trying to make it something it wasn’t.”
He opened the back door to a gust of icy wind and said, “Look, let’s just forget it, all right?”
“Sure,” she whispered as she watched him hurry barefoot across the icy deck toward the neatly stacked pile of firewood. As he gathered up a few logs and some kindling, the wind whipping the edges of his robe around his calves, Keira jumped off her stool, crossed the floor and quietly closed and locked the back door.
Instantly he straightened up, whirled around and shocked, stared at her through the glass. He crossed to the door and gave the knob a turn and a shake. “Keira, open the damn door.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, folding her arms over her chest and tapping one bare foot against the cold wood floor.
She’d never been so mad in her whole life. Or so humiliated. For God’s sake, she’d let him do things to her no one had ever done before, only because she’d felt a connection to him somehow. Some minuscule, apparently clearly one-sided, feeling. How could he ever think that she would have slept with him just to make him stay?