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“She must be a good person.”

“She is. I had to do a lot of reflecting after that, and I didn’t like a lot of what I realized about myself.”

Abby’s coy smile nearly undoes me. There’s something so incredibly sexy about everything she does and says.

“I do like a good tortured hero,” she says.

Boom. I’m in.

“I’m imperfect, but trying every day to make up for what I’ve done.”

I furrow my brow, going for earnest and vulnerable. I hold her gaze, leaning in to kiss her.

“I don’t fuck my partners,” she says, turning back around and putting her feet back on the floor of the car.

What in the whiplash?

She digs through the massive gray leather bag she brought on board with her, pulling out a nail file.

“It’s so dark in here.” She squints at her hand, filing a nail.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask, dumbfounded.

“Let’s just get it out of the way. You want us to fuck, and it’s a no for me.”

She just lured me in, only to cockblock me. What was the point of it? I’m disappointed and offended at the same time.

“How many ILF partners have you had?”

“Just you.”

She holds her hand out in front of her, inspecting her nails.

“So you didn’t really care about Blue Arrow Island. You just needed a way to reel me in so you could reject me.”

She gives me an amused look. “Pax. You’ve been acting like a dog in heat since we met.”

“Fuck you. Only female dogs have heat cycles. And I come on to every woman I meet; it’s a reflex.”

“Ew.” She blows on the nail she just filed, tiny nail particles flying into the air. “And I do think your island is interesting. Sounds like you came on to every woman there, too.”

I scrub a hand down my face, aggravated. “That was because of my aromium. We were all like that until we took the stabilizer made from Briar’s blood.”

She gives me a skeptical, brows-raised look. “I bet you were at the top of the leaderboard.”

I just shake my head, unsure how to respond. It’s true, but not because I was trying to fuck more women than other men there.

“They enjoyed it,” I say, wishing I didn’t sound so sulky.

She laughs. “All women fake orgasms.”

“You’re full of shit. Women can’t make themselves squirt.”

“Again—ew. I didn’t say every woman fakes every orgasm. But every woman has sometimes faked, for everyone’s own good.”

That can’t be true. Abby’s young; she thinks she has it all figured out.

“I read your file, too,” I say. “I’ll try not to be offended that you don’t want to fuck me even though it’s the most used tool in your spy toolbox.”