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concentrate upon anything other than their beloved.’
    ‘Perhaps it’s just as well then that you are in love with your career,’ Samantha suggested, adding before Liam could comment, ‘You have to admit that you’ve always given it far more attention than you have any woman.’
    ‘Sam...’ her mother objected, but Liam simply shook his head.
    ‘No wonder you’re no good at chess,’ he taunted her, ‘making a move on your opponent is no good unless you keep yourself protected and have the next move already planned. I could point out that you are equally bereft of a partner and that you, too, would appear to have sacrificed your most personal intimate relationships in favour of your career.’
    ‘Not in the way that you have, I haven’t,’ Samantha objected hotly. ‘You deliberately pick women who you know you’re going to get bored with. You don’t want a serious relationship. You’re a commitment phobic, Liam,’ she told him dangerously. ‘Secretly you’re afraid of giving yourself emotionally to a woman.’
    ‘Oh, then it seems to me that we have something very much in common.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Samantha asked him challengingly.
    ‘It’s so obvious that the kind of man you need is one who’d keep you earthed, provide a solid base to offset your own more tempestuous one, but instead you always go for the same type, emotionally unstable, manipulative, lame dogs. My guess is you feel more passionate about them as a cause than as men.
    ‘You accuse me of being afraid of giving myself emotionally to a woman, Samantha. Well, I’d say that you are very much afraid of committing yourself, of giving yourself wholly and completely, sexually, to a man. Excuse me.’ Without giving her any opportunity to either defend herself or retaliate, he stood up, politely excusing himself to her parents.
    ‘I’ve got some work I really need to do. I’ll see you in the morning, Stephen, and I should have those figures you were asking me for by then.’
    As he walked around the table and gave her mother a brief kiss on the cheek Samantha wondered if her face looked as hot with chagrin as it felt. How could he have said something like that to her, and in front of her parents? It wasn’t true, of course, how could it be?
    It wasn’t, after all, as though she was some timid, cowering virgin who had never known physical intimacy. She had lost her virginity in the time-honoured way as a sophomore at college with her then boyfriend whom she had been dating for several months. And if the experience had turned out to be more of a rite of passage than the entry into a whole new world of perfect love and emotional and physical bliss and euphoria, well, then, she hadn’t been so very different from any of her peers, from what she had heard.
    True that, unlike Liam, she didn’t have a list of sexual conquests as long as her arm. True, her own secret, somewhat mortifying view of herself was as a woman to whom sex was never going to be of prime importance, certainly nothing as important as emotional intimacy or as the love she would have for the children she would bear. But was that so very wrong? Did putting sex at the top of one’s list of what was important in life truly make for a better person? Samantha didn’t think so and she was certainly not going to pretend to either a sexual desire or a sexual history she did not possess simply because it might be expected of her.
    * * *
    ‘Y OU KNOW , IT ’ S at times like this that I wonder if you’re actually a teenager or really in your thirties,’ Samantha heard her father remark ruefully as he, too, stood up.
    Imploringly she looked at her mother.
    ‘That’s not fair, Mom. It was Liam who started it and...’
    ‘Your father does have a point, darling,’ her mother interrupted her gently. ‘You do tend to ride Liam rather hard at times.’
    ‘ I ride him! ’ Samantha objected indignantly, and then she suddenly felt her face flooding with scarlet colour, not