The Virgin: Redemption (7 page)

He was still damn beautiful.

Sighing, I reached up and traced my finger down the line of his nose. It wasn’t a perfectly straight nose. It was just a bit crooked, right there in the middle, like it had been broken once. His lashes fluttered and a second later, his eyes opened and I found myself staring at him, his gaze hazy with sleep.

For a moment, we just looked at each other and then he blinked. “You’re still here.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

“I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.” The arm on my waist tightened and he rolled onto his back, pulling me with him.

His clothes had ended up in a trail from the living room to here sometime during the night and I’d never bothered to put anything on, either. That made this position very interesting. Bracing my hands on his chest, I sat up. I had to take a moment to appreciate the nuances of
that
particular movement, the heat centered between my thighs, the way his cock was rubbing against me, already pulsing. I felt an answering throb echo through me and my voice wasn’t completely steady when I spoke. “If you were dreaming, we got a problem, because I had the same dream.”

“Shared dreams. Strange stuff.” His hands gripped my hips, fingers sinking in as he arched up. “Take me inside you, Shan.”

My breath caught. I’d…ah. Part of me thought we’d talk some. Figure out just what was going to come next. “Now?”

“Doesn’t seem like a better time.” His eyes watched me, all but challenged me.

Okay. Talk could wait. A little while. We were going to have to talk, but why now?

It didn’t really seem the time over breakfast, either, but I forced myself to do it.

With coffee in hand and scrambled eggs on a plate, I cleared my throat and made myself meet his eyes. “I don’t know where any of this leaves us.”

Drake had been in the middle of getting the bacon from the stove—my belly rumbled as if on cue—but at the sound of my voice, he paused. It only lasted a moment and he continued on to the table.

“Is it supposed to leave us anywhere?” he asked.

Licking my lips, I carefully said, “It feels like it should.”

“Meaning…?”

“Our relationship hasn’t exactly been normal.” I reached for one of the pieces of bacon he’d just put on my plate, nipped off a bit at the edge. Bacon was one of the four basic food groups as far as I was concerned, but it tasted like sawdust. “I lived angry over what happened ten years ago. So angry I ended up pulling a total bitch routine just to get back to you. And…”

I stopped, blew out a sigh as I put the unfinished piece of bacon down. “I don’t even know how you feel about me.”

A chair scraped against the floor. There was nothing but silence for the next the thirty seconds, but I could feel the weight of his stare.

Slowly, I turned my head to look at him.

He reached for the cup of coffee and stared down into it, brooding over it like he expected to find the answers to everything inside. Caffeine did have miraculous properties, but I didn’t think he’d find the answers we needed in that cup.

“I could have told you how I felt about you ten years ago,” Drake said after almost a full minute passed. “I could have. But it would have been wrong.”

My heart slammed against my ribs as he lifted his head. The intensity of his stare slammed into me, practically pinning me in place. “I fell in love with you that summer. And not a damn thing has changed. Not for me.”

For one brief, bright moment, hope burned inside me.

Then it felt like the very world was going to crumble beneath my feet. Once again, familiar words started to echo in the back of my mind. Harsh, brittle, so very mocking.
I don’t fuck naïve little virgins, Shan.

The pain, the shame I felt then, came rushing back, every bit as deep and cutting. Slowly, I pushed back from the table. My head spun in dizzying circles and I tried to breathe in. It hurt, a band around my chest making it all but impossible to take a deep enough breath.

“Shan.” His voice, low and quiet, cut through the noise in my head.

“Don’t,” I said, shaking my head. I turned away, desperate to be alone for a few minutes. I needed to think. I so badly needed to think. This…this should make it better, right? I’d mattered then, if he could be believed. This should make it better. So why did I feel like he just slashed my heart open all over again.

I made it two steps before he came up behind me, his arms coming around me. “Let me go,” I said, forcing the words out through a throat gone tight with emotion. There was something trapped inside me. I didn’t understand it. Was it a scream? Was it a sob? I didn’t understand.

“No.” The words were spoken against my hair. “I had to do that once—it was wrong then. Even if I hadn’t been here to buy this place, I was too old for you. It was all wrong. But it didn’t change how I felt. One look at you and I was done for.”

“Let me go.” The shaking started deep inside me and I couldn’t stop it. If he didn’t let me go, and
now
, I was going to break. Right here. Right now.

“Why?” He spun me around and caught my face in his hands. “You came after
me
. You came to
me
last night. You’re the one who was just sitting there telling me you didn’t know how I felt and now I tell you and you want me to let you go.”

I blinked and when I looked back at him, it was through a veil of tears. I reached out, fumbling for anything that would push him away, anything that would give me the distance I needed to think. I just needed to think. “You’re lying. You son of a bitch. You told me that night that you don’t fuck naïve little virgins. Fine. I get it. I wasn’t sophisticated enough, old enough for you. But don’t you dare stand there and tell me you loved me when you were that cruel—”

“I don’t give a damn about how
sophisticated
you were. None of that mattered to me.”

His voice was like a slap in the air and I flinched.

Furious with myself, I continued to push. “So it was the age thing. How noble of you. You could flirt with me, make out with me, let me shove my hand down your pants, but the fact that I was a seventeen-year-old virgin—
that
was your stopping point. It was okay to be cruel, though.”

“Oh, fuck this,” he muttered.

“I don’t think so.” I shoved in front of him as he would have left. Pride drove me as I shoved my hands against his chest. “So it’s okay to be attracted to stupid little virgin, okay to be cruel, but no fucking her, right? She’s too young. Have I got it right?”

He grabbed my arms, jerked me close. “I never meant any of it to go as far as it did,” he rasped, his breath coming in heavy pants against my mouth, his brow pressed to mine. “I told myself, every time, I’d end it. I’d pull back. And all I did was get tangled up in you. I didn’t know how to handle…”

“What?” I demanded, my voice thick with derision. “A teenaged girl with a crush?”

“It was more than that, and you know it. It was always more with us.” He crowded me back against the counter and the heat of him, the length of his body pressed to mine all but knocked the breath out of me.

“Well.” I leaned back, desperate to get some room between us but all I managed to do was put myself in a position that had my pelvis pressed flush to his while I had a painfully intimate view of his face. My heart pounded, hard and fast, as I looked at him and his eyes glittered over brightly as he watched me. “I guess you’d be the better judge. I didn’t have jack to compare it to, after all.”

He shoved a hand into my hair, fisted it. My breath lodged in my throat as he pressed his mouth to mine. “Neither did I, darling,” he rasped.

“What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Drake just barely lifted his head, enough that I could see his eyes, but his face filled my vision. I saw nothing but him. He had become my entire world. But then again, it felt like it had been that way from the moment I’d met him.

His hands came up and closed around my waist, boosting me up onto the counter. I felt the imprint of each finger, like it had been seared onto my skin. Felt the rub of material as he moved between my thighs. “I think you know exactly what it means.”

My heart tripped inside my chest as the blood roared inside my ears.

“Spell it out.” The words came from me in halting, unsteady gasps.

“You weren’t the only virgin on the beach that night.” His eyes cut into me. “The problem was…
you
were still a kid. I was seven years older and as much as I wanted you, I knew it wasn’t right.”

The mad rhythm of my heart suddenly slowed. “That…” Images flooded me. The memory of his hands on me. How it felt when he touched me. The
way
he’d touched me. “That’s bullshit.”

“Is it?” A mocking look entered his eyes. “You always called me the Boy Genius. You don’t know how right you are, Shan. You got any idea what it’s like, being eleven years old when you start high school? Graduating when you’re fifteen? The girls might think you’re cute…but I’m talking puppy dog cute. Girls don’t want to date a kid like that. They might pat him on the head and tease him, but they don’t want to
date
him.”

He slid his hands down, rested them on my thighs as he studied me through veiled eyes. “I was in the same graduating class as one of my older brothers. You can imagine my…social life was more than a little awkward.”

Our gazes locked, held.

Then, just like that, he turned away.

My heart stuttered, like it fumbled to even work for the next thirty seconds. Then, finally, as it settled into something close to normal rhythm, I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to speak. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Just how much detail do you want on this?” he asked, tipping his head back as he stared up at the exposed beams of the ceiling. “You want to hear about the gorgeous cheerleader I had a crush on my senior year? I finally hit puberty—she was dating my brother and she’d always give me a hug. You can imagine how much I liked that—right up until she told me how she thought I’d just love to date her baby sister—who was twelve.”

He shot me a sardonic look. “Or maybe you’d like to hear about how my mom tried to make me go to the prom and I decided I’d get myself sick just to get out of it, so I wouldn’t have to sit on the sideline, so I didn’t have to have people looking at me and making fun of me—or worse, have my brother get into a fight over me…again. I calculated just exactly how much Ex-Lax I could take and make myself just this side of
too
sick. It worked so well, I did it again at my senior graduation party.”

“Drake…”

He settled his hips back against the island, pinning me with a cool stare. “College was a lot of fun. All those keggers most freshman attended? The one time I tried? A girl did come on to me. She was eighteen. It was just a couple of years’ difference, right? I’d actually started to look like I wasn’t a kid, or so I thought. I was wrong. I woke up dressed in her cheerleader uniform and so drunk, I was sick for two days. Pictures were all over campus; for months, just seeing her was enough to make me sick.”

The words were coolly delivered, his face like a stone mask. No emotion shone in his green eyes. If this had ever affected him, you couldn’t tell.
I
was affected, though. The dry, almost sardonic humor in his voice cut into me and left me bleeding; but at the same time, I wanted to find that girl and bash her head against a wall.

“What was her name?” I asked.

He cocked his head and looked at me curiously. “Why?”

Baring my teeth at him, I lied. “I just wanted to know.”

“It’s been a while.” He shrugged and looked away. “I only saw her the few times and we never had classes together.”

He was lying. I saw it in his eyes. I couldn’t push, either. He’d already started to regale me with more—more things I didn’t want to hear. But a horrified part of me had to hear this.

How many times had I wondered what his life was like? He’d talked about his brothers, and his parents; I’d seen the affection in his eyes. He was more reluctant to talk about himself, but I’d always assumed he was just…reserved. Calm. In control.

I’d never seen the loneliness that made him into who he was.

“I graduated college without ever spending more than an hour or two alone with a girl,” he said, his eyes resting on my face. I had the unsettling feeling he could see every thought I had.

I looked away, but I could still feel him watching me. Watching, waiting.

“I stayed in my room, or in the library, surrounded by my books or with my eyes glued to the computer. And every chance I had, I left campus. Most kids are desperate to get
away
once they graduate high school. All I wanted to do was go back home.” He laughed softly. “Of course, that didn’t happen. I graduated at nineteen and my gift was a condo in Chicago, just a few blocks from the company headquarters. I had a job waiting for me. That had always been the plan. That was just what we did. Just like my brothers, I’d work my way around the company and see where I would fit in the best.”

A soft sigh slid through the room. I looked over to see him stroll over to the windows, looking cut off, completely isolated, as he stared outside. Sun shone down on the waves, glinting back faceted lights of silver and blue. “I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. Alex had gone into law and he wanted to handle our legal interests, so that’s where he went. Max wanted to be more hands on, out in the field, so he does that. The hotels…that was an idea Mom and Donovan had. It was their baby, and Donovan is the one who oversees it. Gallagher Enterprises has always been about design, but they had this idea of growing, doing more. I just drifted. I never settled anywhere.”

Drawn to him, I moved closer, but the look he gave me, distant and closed had me going still. “I drifted, from marketing to design, though every department we had. I went with my father to meetings, I flew out to travel with Max, I hit the hotels with Donovan. Nothing clicked. Donovan set me up on my first date, while we were in St. Augustine. He was interested in some land there, but passed it up.” A sour laugh escaped him.