"You felt sorry for me, did you? Pitied me?"
"I didn't say that. Do we have to talk about it now? Do you want to spoil the rest of the night?"
"What rest of the night? Do you think after what happened this evening there's going to be any more fun in bed for us?"
"Be quiet, will you? Drop it. I know what it cost you to say that. You're not the kind of woman who thinks in those terms. What has happened between us meant something to me. Why can't you believe it?"
"Oh, yes—it probably did mean something. Laying a round-heels would mean something to even a young hoodlum with about as much sensitivity as a chimpanzee. It's important to the male. I've been told that."
He said nothing in reply, but he withdrew his arm from her waist, and sat very straight and still at her side. She could imagine what he was thinking. He was afraid of angering her further, of saying the wrong thing. What could he say, really? There were no right words, everything he told her would be a lie.
She'd seen the way he'd kissed Lathrup on the dance floor and the burning outrage, the shame she'd felt, after all she'd meant to him—or had allowed herself to think she'd meant to him—couldn't be driven from her mind by anything he might say.
She looked down at her legs. She had fine legs, shapely legs, and she had a good body too, a damned good body, but all that she had been able to do was unleash a savage lust in him and now that lust had been turned elsewhere.
If she'd known the truth about him at the beginning she wouldn't have allowed him to touch her. She'd have—yes, scratched his eyes out. She felt degraded, soiled, and the band of despair and bitter anger she'd felt on leaving the night club continued to tighten about her heart.
She'd ask to be taken home. She'd demand that he tell the driver to continue on to the Village. If he thought for one moment she'd go to his apartment now and spend the rest of the night with him he was a fool as well as an amorous opportunist with nothing but concealed evil in his soul.