The Last Guy She Should Call by Joss Wood Page A

from your bed to someone else’s?’ Rowan laughed and the sound didn’t hold a teaspoonful of mirth. She held up a hand. ‘No, don’t answer that, because I’m very close to smacking you silly! What a joke!’
    If it was, he failed to see it.
    Rowan shook her head, snapped a set of car keys off the hall table and picked up the bag that she’d hung on the coat stand. She walked towards the door.
    Seb was thinking of how to keep her in the room when she turned around abruptly and looked at him with blazing eyes. ‘No, I’m not going to do this again.’
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Leave you to your assumptions. I think that’s a mistake I keep making over and over with you and my family. I allow you to jump to these crazy assumptions about me because...because of habit, maybe. Pride, maybe. But this—you thinking that I treat sex casually just because we had a great time in the sack—I can’t let this ride. The reason we had great sex is because we obviously—who knows why?—have amazing chemistry. Why we have this chemistry when I think you have the personality and charm of a horse’s ass is a mystery for another day.’
    ‘I—’
    ‘My turn.’ Rowan cut him off with a sharp wave of her hand. ‘As for my sexual history—do you know how hard it is, as a female travelling on her own, to get laid?’
    She looked as if she was waiting for a response so Seb thought it was safe to say: ‘Uh...no?’
    Rowan looked momentarily triumphant. ‘Hah! Of course you don’t. You just assume that it’s what we travellers do.’ Her chest rose and fell with temper. ‘Every man I meet—all the time—is a stranger. I don’t know him. I’m not given the time to know him. I can think he’s cute, but psychos come cute as well. Now, say I decide to take a chance... I have to get into a room with him—because, you know, I like a bit of privacy with my sex. That means I put myself in danger every time. And do you want to know how many times I’ve done that?’
    Seb, now feeling like a first-prize fool, shrugged.
    ‘None, Seb. I’ve never done it. I’ve had a couple of relationships over the years with guys I’ve known for a long time. I don’t do hook-ups. It’s a dangerous and stupid thing to do when you don’t have any friends or family to rescue you if something goes horribly wrong.’
    Seb scrubbed his face with his hands, feeling equally relieved and foolish.
    ‘And, just so that I’m very clear about this, we rocked it because you have a heck of a bod and you are a good kisser and I haven’t had any for a while.’
    Okay, how deep was that hole he’d dug for himself and when could he throw himself into it?
    But Rowan wasn’t quite finished; she still had another layer of skin to strip off him. ‘And I’m not going to a bar, you moron. I’ve got a job tending bar so that I can make some cash to pay you back and get out of your stupid, judgmental face!’
    With that last verbal slap—which he so deserved—Rowan turned on her heel and walked out of his house.

SIX
    Rowan, exhausted and smelling of beer and bar, walked back into the hall of Awelfor shortly after twelve-thirty and sighed when she saw Seb standing in the doorway to the small TV lounge, dressed in casual track pants and a loose-fitting T-shirt.
    She was still feeling raw, hurt and angry that Seb—smart, smart Seb, who apparently had the emotional intelligence of an amoeba—had assumed that she was backpacking baggage with the morals of an alley cat. She was exhausted from not sleeping much last night, from careering around Cape Town today picking up all the equipment she needed—haybales, paint guns, food—for the party the next day, and she was depressed that she hadn’t had a second to research the netsuke and that she’d been reduced to serving beers and martinis again. Dammit, she was twenty-eight years old—not nineteen.
    ‘I don’t want to fight, Seb.’ Rowan dropped her bag to the floor and rubbed the back of her neck. ‘If