Man of Ice by Diana Palmer

fixture overhead. “It’s…not France.” She choked. Her eyes closed. “Oh, thank God, thank God!”
    Dawson got up from the bed and moved to the window. He moved the curtain aside and looked out into the darkness. He wasn’t looking at anything. He was seeing the past, the horror in Barrie’s eyes, the pain that he’d caused.
    Barrie sat up. She noticed his lean hand clenching the curtains. It had gone white. He looked beaten, exhausted.
    She swallowed hard. Her hands went to her pale cheeks and smoothed over them and then pushed back the tangled dark hair that fell over her breasts. She was wearing a long cotton gown that completely covered her except for her arms and a little of her slender neck. She never slept just in her briefs these days, not even in summer.
    “I didn’t realize that you still had nightmares about it,” he said after a minute. His voice was dull and without expression.
    “Not very often,” she said. She couldn’t tell him that most of them ended with her losing the baby, crying out for Dawson. That hadn’t happened tonight, thank God. She couldn’t bear for him to know it all.
    He turned away from the window and moved back to the side of the bed, but not close. His hands closed in the pockets of his robe.
    “It wouldn’t be that way a second time,” he said stiffly.
    Her eyes widened in fear, as if he’d suggested seducing her all over again. The realization infuriated him, but he controlled the surge of anger. “Not…with me.” He bit off the words, averting his face. “I didn’t mean that.”
    She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. The sound of the fabric sliding against her skin was abnormally loud. She glanced up at him and the memories began to recede. If she was hurting, so was he. He couldn’t fake the sort of pain she saw in his drawn face.
    “Haven’t you even been curious since then, for God’s sake?” he asked. “You’re a woman. You must have friends, people you could ask. Surely someone told you that first times are notoriously bad.”
    She smoothed one hand over the other. Her body slumped with a long sigh. “I can’t talk to anyone about it,” she said finally. “I only have one best friend. And how could I possibly ask Antonia, when she’s known us both for years? She wouldn’t need two guesses to figure out why I was asking.”
    He nodded. “You were a virgin. You needed time to be properly aroused, especially with me, and I lost control much too soon,” he added. His eyes searched her face grimly. “That was a first for me. Until you came along, there had never been a woman who could throw me off balance in bed.”
    Her face lowered. It was an accomplishment of sorts, she supposed.
    “I damaged both of us that night,” he said gently. “Until I had you, I genuinely thought you were experienced, Barrie, that you were only teasing on the beach when you had to be coaxed into removing your top.”
    That brought her eyes up to his, shocked. “But I would never have done such a thing!” she protested.
    “I had to find that out the hard way,” he replied. “Maybe I used it as an excuse, too. I wanted you and I convinced myself that you’d surely had men at your age, that it had all been playacting on your part, all that coy shyness. But it didn’t take me long to realize why you’d given in without a struggle. You loved me,” he said huskily.
    Her eyes closed. She couldn’t bear to hear him say it again. He’d taunted her with her feelings after that disastrous night.
    She felt the bed depress as he sat down slowly beside her. His hand tipped her head back toward his, making her look at him. “Guilt will drive a man to violence, Barrie,” he said, his voice deep and soft in the silence of her room. “Especially when he’s done something unforgivable and knows he’ll never find forgiveness for it. I taunted you because I couldn’t live with what I’d done to you. It doesn’t make much sense, now. But at the time,