Page 68

“But you’ve been with a lot of women?” she finally asked in a rush like it was a tide she’d been holding in. “Like, you’ve slept around?”

My free hand moved from the back of her head to grip her nape.

I tried to choose my words carefully. This was a touchy subject with any sexual partner, let alone one you’d taken the innocence of. “I haven’t been a fuckboy,” I began. “That really was a joke. I don’t lie to anyone. I don’t play games. I’ve never led anyone on or treated them badly. But I’ve only been in a few long-term relationships, and the rest of the time I’ve been single. I have a very healthy sex drive, and when I’m single I still . . . need a lot of sex.”

Fuck. I could tell with the way she was stiffening under my hand and the arrested expression on her face that I was fucking up badly.

Brutal honesty was not the way to handle this, I realized.

Perhaps another flavor of honesty was.

“Listen, I can’t do anything about my past,” I tried again. “Yes, I’ve slept around. I’ve had a lot of casual sex, but none of that has anything to do with you and me.”

“But am I—are we having casual sex?”

I was massaging her nape almost roughly now, bending her forward with the force of it. “No,” I said sharply. “That’s not what I was saying. I’ve never been like this with anyone else. Never been able to express my best and worst, to be both tender and also play out every dark fantasy like this. I’ve never felt this free sexually with anyone but you, okay? You’re the best I’ve ever had. Like no one else. Does that answer your question?”

Her eyes were warm on me, and she was practically crawling into my lap.

“I think so,” she said quietly. “Does that mean you’re not sleeping with anyone else?”

That got a reaction out of me. I wanted to shake her. “Of course not. How exactly do you think I could pull that off? My dick’s inside of you practically every waking hour.”

“So we’re exclusive,” she said, rubbing my dick through my swim shorts.

I realized she’d been leading me in that direction rather skillfully.

“I’m not sleeping with anyone else,” I reiterated stubbornly. “And this is not a good time,” I warned her sternly. “It’s going to be hours before I can do anything about a hard-on so I’d appreciate you not making it worse.”

“How about I make it better then?”

“No,” I said firmly. I really didn’t want to, but I made myself force the word out and her hand away. “We can go a few hours without getting off. Until we get back home, we’re going to keep this strictly platonic. No touching, remember?”

We did fine with the no touching rule for the first half hour. We drank virgin piña coladas and waded in the ritzy rooftop pool.

The second we’d been led to our cabana and I got a good look at it, I’d headed straight for the water. If I got inside of that thing with her and took the curtain down, we were going to fuck. The only solution was to avoid it altogether.

Nova had followed me without complaining. In fact, she rarely complained. I knew that was because she’d had no one for so long that she expected nothing, and that opened the soft spot in my heart for her even wider. As unfair as it was, I wanted her to expect things from me. Above all, I never wanted to let her down.

We were standing a foot apart, out of earshot of anyone else. There was no homework around to worry about, no manuscript within reach, and I couldn’t put my dick in her for at least a few hours.

I took the rare opportunity to try to get some new information out of her. “So your aunt and uncle are really your only living family?”

I had a huge, loud, wonderful family, so this fact seemed particularly tragic to me.

She shrugged, not looking at me. I could tell she didn’t like the question but she answered me. “I have a grandma, aunt, and some cousins in Columbia, but I don’t hear from them much. I know they’d take me in, but I’m not moving there. I’m not even fluent in Spanish, much to my abuela’s disappointment.”

“So your mother was Columbian?” I gave her an encouraging smile. She was so closed off that anything she shared about herself was a treat that I gobbled up.

“Yes,” she answered, not elaborating.

“What about your dad?” I tried, hoping she stayed in a sharing mood.

“Scottish and Dutch, I think, and some other stuff. Just white, ya know, like you.”

I laughed. “Well my origins are English and Italian, to be precise, if that was your way of asking.”

She gave me her sweet smile, the one I couldn’t get enough of. She didn’t look at anyone else the way she looked at me, and I never wanted that to change, though of course that was unlikely, to say the least. “It kind of was,” she admitted. “Do you have a big family?” she asked.