He was trying to scare her off but it wasn’t going to work.

The only thing that frightened her about working in A and E was being close to him.

Especially the way he was acting at the moment.

Like a madman.

As if he wasn’t the man who’d taken her virginity and then walked away without a backward glance.

She cast him a confused look. ‘Why are you being like this?’

His gaze was hard and unsympathetic. ‘Because this is a horrifically busy department and frankly I don’t have time to nursemaid someone who’s main concern in life is whether she needs to file her nails.’

He made her sound frivolous and shallow, but maybe she’d seemed that way to him when he’d known her at eighteen. One thing was sure, if they were ever going to be able to work together effectively, they had to get the past out of the way.

‘You don’t know me any more.’ She kept her tone conciliatory, the way she did when her father was in one of his scary moods. ‘It’s been eleven years since you last saw me. Maybe we should talk about what happened, Jago.’

Maybe he could explain why he’d walked away.

Jago’s eyes were cold and his broad shoulders were rigid with tension. ‘The past is history. There’s nothing that I want to talk about and if you’re trying to convince me that you’ve changed, you’re wasting your breath. You’re forgetting that I met the man you’re engaged to.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘That in itself was enough to prove to me that you haven’t changed one little bit.’

Maybe he had changed, she reflected. Despite his Spanish ancestry, Jago had always been so emotionally controlled that in the past she’d longed to do something which would shake him out of his almost permanent state of indifference. Yet she sensed that at this moment he was hanging onto control by little more than a thread. For the first time she was seeing a hint of that volatility that was supposed to characterise Mediterranean men.

But what she didn’t understand was why. Something had obviously really challenged his legendary cool and she had absolutely no idea what. And his lack of remorse about the way he’d treated her still puzzled her. He seemed so hard.

She forced her mind back to the subject. ‘You don’t know anything about Freddie.’

‘I know he’s the man your father’s chosen for you.’ That burning dark gaze locked on hers with all the lethal accuracy of a deadly weapon. As he stepped even closer to her his voice dropped to a low purr, like a tiger soothing its prey before the kill. ‘Does he make you hot inside, Katy? Does he make you so desperate that he has you panting and ripping at his clothes?’

Powerful images exploded in her head and her face burned with shock and embarrassment at his explicit words.

‘Have you finished?’ Determined not to betray just how uncomfortable she felt, she looked him straight in the eye. It was a mistake.