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His heart fell into his shoes. “What?”
“I have conditions.”
Relief flashed through him. Okay. Conditions. He could deal with conditions. Conditions weren’t a no. “All right.”
“I’m going to give you an out,” she said simply.
He frowned, the words like a straight pin to his balloon of relief. “What?”
“Thirty days.” She shifted against him and her pulse beat frantically at her throat, but there was resolve in her voice. “I want to do this, but in thirty days, I will walk away from this and so will you. You’ve already got your exit strategy in place.”
“An exit strategy? I don’t need—”
She pressed her fingers to his lips, hushing him. “Listen to me. You already know how this will end. I’m telling you that you’ve got a guaranteed out. We won’t let this get messy. But since I’m giving you that, if we do this, I need you to leave the other stuff behind, those things that keep this neat for you. I deserve more than neat and so do you.” Her fingers twitched against his lips but her gaze didn’t falter. “I want the Donovan I knew in college, the one who operated on gut and didn’t orchestrate everything to make it fit into a certain schematic. The one who showed me that passion isn’t just a word in books. And the one who wasn’t afraid of being human in front of me. I know he’s still there. I see him sometimes. I saw him just
now.”
The words pinged through him, setting off a cut-and-run reaction. She knew more than he thought, saw more. Right through him, in fact. She wanted him. Not the doctor or the trainer or the mythical Orgasm Whisperer. She wanted Donovan West, the geeky kid who lost his parents, wore Freud T-shirts, and used to sleep in a tiny office because he had nightmares about the boogeyman. He didn’t know if he was capable of that anymore. He’d been so fucking vulnerable back then. That kid had shored up his life with duct tape and a coat of paint, thought he was managing in the rough winds, and then Mari had set him all off kilter. She was doing it again. This was the girl he remembered. The one who had pushed every one of his buttons, gotten him to talk about things he never had, given him her virginity, and then walked off like a boss. Bold bravery wrapped in a quiet, steel-lined package.
His heart beat loud in his ears as she lowered her hand from his mouth. He drew his tongue over his lips, tasting the salt from her fingertips there.
She leaned back. “Say something.”
He didn’t know what to say, but honesty won the fight. “I’m not sure I know how to do that anymore. Be that.”
Her lips curved into a half-smile. “Then maybe we can both teach each other a thing or two.”
A breath coasted out of him. He wanted her more than he could bear. His entire body thrummed with that need. But if she thought she could fix him somehow, put together what was broken, she was only going to be disappointed. His pieces weren’t just in a pile on the floor. Many had been lost completely. Even if reassembled, the holes would forever be there. “I’m not going to change, Marin.”
Her smile softened. “Not asking you to. Just asking that you be you, not the guy everyone thinks you are, not the guy you were for McCray.”
He stared at her, marveling at this woman. Marin was young and inexperienced. And she blushed and got flustered when it came to sex. But hell if she wasn’t tougher than any woman he’d ever met. She wasn’t afraid to ask for what she wanted—no, she didn’t ask, she required. There was a price to be with her and she wasn’t going to negotiate.
It was dangerous.
And so fucking sexy—like made-him-hard-just-thinking-about-it sexy—that he found a single word slipping from his lips. “Okay.”
Her brows went up. “Yeah?”
He leaned forward and slid his hand along the back of her neck. “Yeah. This is uncharted territory for me, but I want you, Rush. And I’m willing to try it your way.”
“Says the man who likes control.”
His lip curled. “I never said I was giving that up.”
She smoothed her hands over her skirt, the slightest tremble visible, proving that she wasn’t quite as steady as she sounded. “I’m okay with that. I know I’m inexperienced, but that doesn’t mean I don’t remember the recordings. I know your dirty secrets, West.”
He wanted to touch her so badly. He could just move his hands up and he’d be at her thighs. He could part her legs and see if this conversation was affecting her as much as it was affecting him, get on his knees and taste her, but he settled for moving his hands to the outside of her knees, rubbing the soft skin there. “You think so, huh?”
“Yeah. I do.” She put her hands over his, linking their fingers, and staring down at the connection. “Because I’ll let you in on my secret. They’re some of mine, too.”
“What?”
She wouldn’t look up, as if eye contact would be too much. “I kept those recordings. I kept them and I listened to them so much in the year following that I could probably recite them by heart. It was my escape. I wanted to wish them into existence. Sometimes I still do.”
His breath zipped out of him, fire lighting his blood. “You want the stuff on the recordings?”
Desire rumbled up through him like a threatening storm, wide and dark and fast-moving. This was so much more than he’d originally imagined with her. He’d thought he could go through Marin’s list with her, teach her things, enjoy the basics with her. He liked all kinds of flavors of sex. Simple and sexy with Marin would’ve been fantastic. But what she was asking for was like offering him his personal heroin with a side of hell yeah. She wanted to play the games. She wanted to step into those shadowed places where the rules and niceties went lax.
