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It was a nice thing to say, but she couldn’t stifle her laughter. “No, you wouldn’t. You would have been one of the popular people. You couldn’t have helped yourself. You wouldn’t have even noticed me.”
“I noticed you in college and you had not appreciably changed by then I think.”
“True.” Why was she sharing her past again when he wasn’t going to be in her future? “Are you sure you want to hear this? It’s old news anyway.”
“Tell me about this bet.”
“The year I was a sophomore, the senior boys had a bet going on for who could bag the most virgins.”
“Bag?”
“Get in the sack…have sex with.”
“I see, and clearly at that age, you were a virgin.”
“I was. When the senior boy who decided to make me one of his conquests started flirting with me, I had no clue what was going on. It was only the middle of the school year, but by then, most of the students knew about the bet, so girls were wary of these boys.”
“But you are not a gossip and you pay little attention when it goes on around you.”
“Right. So I didn’t know. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I thought he just wanted to be my friend. And the funny thing? We ended up enjoying each other’s company a lot. He became my best friend.”
Asad winced. “Then you had sex.”
“Yes. Despite my naïveté, I wasn’t an easy mark—simply because the idea he’d want sex with me was so completely outside my thought process.”
“And sex would have been an intimate encounter for you, something you’d already learned to avoid.”
“You understand me so well.” She bit her lip. “So did Darren. We finally had sex the week before graduation. It only happened once. I didn’t like it very much.”
“He was harsh?”
“No. He tried to make it good for me. He kept asking me if I was okay. He wasn’t a cruel boy, not really. But it was my first time and I wasn’t doing it because I wanted him. I never desired anyone that way until I met you. I just wanted to be close to him.”
“What a little bastard.”
“No. Selfish and thoughtless? Yes.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know about the bet until two days later when one of the other boys in the competition came up to me and complained about how he’d had it in the bag until I won it for Darren.”
“The little prick.”
“Yes, he was. He wanted me to hurt, to know the sex hadn’t been about love, but in that, the joke was on him. I never thought Darren loved me.” She’d thought he was her friend and she’d felt enough betrayal from that, though they’d worked through it in the end.
“Yet you had sex with him.”
“He was leaving.”
“So you gave him your virginity?”
“I don’t expect you to understand.” Darren had, though. He’d known how hurt she was by the bet too, even though she’d pretended indifference. “Darren’s guilt was way worse than my embarrassment.”
“Don’t tell me you forgave him?”
“He’s one of my dearest friends.” Though they hadn’t seen each other more than a handful of times in the intervening years, they stayed in touch with email and telephone.
He’d invited her to his wedding and introduced Iris to his wife as the girl who had made him the man he’d come to be. That bet had had a transforming influence on Darren, changing forever the way he related to others and decimating the power of peer pressure in his life.
He’d told her once that she’d freed him. She’d told him he was an idiot, but knew deep down that in a way he was right. Only it had been his own deep regret at hurting her and the other girls that had truly set him free.
“You cannot be serious.”
“I can. Darren learned not to use people.” Iris hadn’t been so lucky. She hadn’t learned not to be used, not then anyway.
“You cannot be this disgusting boy’s friend. I forbid it.”
She laughed, finding the telling easier than she’d expected it to be. “Too late. And he’s no longer a boy. He’s an adult man, married with two children and working in the diplomatic corps.”
“I will see about that.”
“You will do no such thing. Darren hurt me, but he didn’t abandon me, not like you did. The boy who told me about the bet? Darren disowned their friendship.”
“He was quite the tarnished knight,” Asad said with heavy sarcasm.
“He apologized. We moved forward.”
“I too apologized.”
“And I’m lying here in your bed. What more do you want, Asad?”
CHAPTER NINE
THE question took Asad by surprise. Surely she knew exactly what he needed from her. “Your forgiveness.”
She stared up at him in silence for several long seconds, her captivating blue eyes weighing him in a way he rarely encountered and then said, “I forgive you.”
Could it truly be that easy? “You don’t mean that.”
“Would I be here if I didn’t?” she asked, again referring to her place in his bed, their naked bodies pressed together, her gorgeous red tresses spread over his sheets.
“You forgive too easily.”
“Not really.”
“Yes.” And why he should chide her about that when he was benefitting, he did not know.
“Are you saying you want me to go back to ignoring you?”
“No.” He wanted her to trust him and somehow he knew her forgiveness did not come packaged with that commodity. “I want you to take me into your body.”
It wasn’t all he wanted, but since he wasn’t sure what exactly that did entail, he didn’t try to enlighten her.
Her answer was to shift under him, opening herself to him, but there was a part of herself she held back, a shadow in her eyes that had never been there in the past. Probably inevitable considering their history, but Asad did not have to like it.
Her trust was no longer on offer. And only now did he realize it had been a gift he’d taken every bit of as much for granted as that stupid high school boy had done. But Asad had been old enough to know better.
He would make up for it and he would regain that part of their friendship that he had found so comforting, but had been too blind to see the importance of, six years ago.
If she could forgive the little prick who had taken her virginity, call him friend and mean it, she could learn to give true forgiveness to Asad.
Asad reached for a condom. It was time to join their bodies in a way she could not hide from, could not pretend did not matter. Not his Iris.
He had brought her to the pinnacle of pleasure twice already because he knew he would not last long. Asad had o
nly known his own hand for sexual release since well before Badra’s death. It was not enough, especially now that he had Iris in touching distance again.
The idea of taking another lover, one that might betray him, or even worse, his daughter, had been anathema to him. Nawar’s needs had to come first. Leaving her in order to enjoy liaisons to slake his physical hungers had not appealed to Asad.
He guided his head to Iris’s soft opening, pressing forward into the heated honey depths he could never forget, no matter how hard he tried. Her body encased him in pure pleasure and he had the undeniable sensation of coming home.
This was where he belonged. For now, anyway.
Iris gasped as his body claimed hers and he kissed the sound right from her lips.
The baffling sense of coming home was so strong, once he was seated fully, he could not move. Despite the need clamoring in his body for release, he remained still, savoring the sensations that came from amazing sex.
“I will not abandon you again,” he promised with the full force of his Bedouin honor. “I will be your best and truest friend.”
“Possessive.”
“I am.”
“You always were.”
He could not deny it.
Her voice was strained when she asked, “Are you going to move, Asad?”
“You wish for me to do so?” he taunted.
The clenching of her inner body was his only answer, but her eyes demanded he listen.
So he did, making love to her with less finesse than need. And instead of being bothered by his loss of control, he reveled in it. This was what had been missing for so long in his sex life.
Primitive, ungovernable passion.
In this, Asad’s Bedouin heritage ruled, not the urbanity Badra had demanded.
His pleasure built like a volcano inside him, his balls burning with the need to erupt. He gritted his teeth, holding off the explosion as he did his best to bring his aziz to climax one more time.
Their mouths joined in a primal echo of what their bodies were doing, sweat slickening the skin between them as he thrust into her.
He felt her climax like it was his own and pleasure boiled up out of his cock with all the power of Mt. Vesuvius.
He shouted his triumph even as she continued to convulse around him.
