A Spanish Awakening by Kim Lawrence

dropped her gaze from his as she felt the shamed colour fly to her cheeks. She was not the sort of girl who went around mentally undressing men.
    ‘It’s the effect you have on me,’ she mumbled, struggling to find a plus side to this situation. He couldn’t read her mind, though sometimes when he looked at her she did get the uncomfortable feeling that she had no secrets from him.
    ‘It was not my intention to …’ His voice faded as she began to nibble nervously at her full lower lip.
    The silence stretched way beyond dramatic pause and into nerve-shredding territory until finally Megan could bear it no longer.
    ‘Not your intention to what?’
    Her voice dragged Emilio from the hot place his thoughts had gone. He blinked and met her eyes, still imagining her lips parting to allow his tongue deep inside.
    ‘Not my intention to—’ He paused again and exhaled slowly.
    He could have said lose the thread … lose the plot. Both, to his intense shock, were true. He could sit in ahigh-powered meeting that went on into the small hours and when others faded, not miss a beat, stay on top of every detail discussed, some buried in a mass of techno babble, yet he looked at Megan’s mouth and his brain was mush.
    Emilio chose to fast-forward the conversation. ‘I find your self-deprecating attitude annoying. You are a beautiful woman and, believe it or not, I was trying to help that night, not judging.’
    Megan gave a derisive hoot. ‘Sure you weren’t.’
Beautiful?
Her stomach muscles did a shimmy as she directed a wary look at his face, waiting for the punchline and telling herself not to start seeing or hearing things that weren’t there.
    ‘It was not your clothes that night,’ he said abruptly, ‘though they were enough to—’ He inhaled, turning his hand away sharply, providing Megan with a view of the nerve pulsing in his hollow cheek and the cords of tension standing out in his brown throat.
    ‘Of course, I can see the sense of power you had discovered must have been intoxicating,’ he conceded, struggling to be fair-minded and failing big time as he thought of Megan enjoying her feminine power in the arms of men like that creep he had dragged from the car.
    As he remembered the fear in the said creep’s eyes he smiled thinly, not regretting having put it there—at least he knew there would be one less guy supplying willing arms.
    She gave a baffled shake of her head, confused as much by his strained manner as his peculiar choice of words.
‘Intoxicating? ‘
    ‘You’d pretty much been invisible at home all through your adolescence and, I assume, school.’ Recalling the slights and snubs he had witnessed and imagining the ones he had not, Emilio struggled to keep his voice impassive.
    ‘Thanks.’ Megan finally saw where he was going with this. It was always good to be told you were a needy and pathetic outsider. ‘So you’re suggesting at some point I morphed into an equally pathetic attention seeker with self-esteem issues.’ She wasn’t sure which was worst.
    His lips twisted in a spasm of impatience. ‘Don’t spin my words. I’m
saying
that the tables were turned. You weren’t the one doing the vying. It was not surprising that, after years of being overlooked, being the focus of male attention should go to your head. You wouldn’t be the first person deprived of parental approval to confuse sex with love. Sex is only ever a short-term fix.’
    The expression in his eyes when he drew this bleak conclusion made Megan wonder if this was personal.
    Was Emilio thinking of the women he had slept with since his marriage collapsed when he spoke of short-term fixes? Was Rosanna the only woman he had ever loved? It was obvious after the airport debacle that, whatever he said, he was not over her.
    ‘It is hard to recover your self-respect, Megan, once you have lost it.’
    ‘Is that a polite way of saying you think I’m a tart?’
    ‘Do not put words in my mouth,’ he responded