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“We met at the temple ruins,” he said, deciding to keep the conversation as honest as possible.
But it was clear Riot wanted love. He didn’t have the ability to give it to her. But it cost him nothing to weave a new story for them. And why not?
She hadn’t been planning on keeping the baby, but she would settle into their life here.
She would be happy. And as for the truth...once she was convinced of the rightness of all of this the truth wouldn’t matter.
“And you swept me off my feet?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
“No really,” she said. “Tell me.”
She was looking at him all open and sweet and he remembered her being much more guarded when they’d first met. She trusted him now. She wasn’t looking at him like he was a predator set on devouring her.
He idly wondered if this was a moment another man might feel something like guilt.
“Your...friends ended up leaving early. It was raining. We were the only two people left at the ruins, and you came back home with me.” It was impossible to keep his voice from growing huskier. Impossible to hide the rising desire inside of him because thinking of that night made him think of how it had been.
If he pushed through the memories of grief, if he ignored why he’d been there in the first place, he could remember the way her skin had felt beneath his hands. The way she’d looked up at him in wonder as she’d found her release...
“I did?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
She looked so guileless, and if he didn’t know for a fact she’d just woken up after being in a coma for a month he would have thought it was an act. Not that it couldn’t be an act but he doubted she’d be that quick to slip into one.
No, whatever Riot was...he’d never thought her an actress.
A sorceress, perhaps, for no other woman had ever managed to get under his skin in quite so accomplished a fashion.
“Our connection was immediate,” he said. “And physical.”
She blinked. “No. Now I know you’re lying. Sorry, there is no way I went back to your place and...no.”
“No way?”
“None,” she said, shaking her head.
“I hate to disappoint you, but you did. You had known me all of one hour when you took your clothes off for me.”
She laughed at him. Sleeping Beauty had the audacity to laugh at him. “It didn’t happen that way. I’m a virgin.”
Then she seemed to remember herself, putting her hand over her mouth, color suffusing her cheeks. “I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this except you say I know you, and now you’re telling me I slept with you moments after meeting you and I’m sorry I just...can’t make that make sense. Not when I know what I know about the rest of my life.”
“But you don’t know anything about the days leading up to your trip. Or what happened on it,” he pointed out.
A virgin?
Was it possible?
She wasn’t one now, that was for certain. But it had never once occurred to him that the sensual woman he’d taken into his arms that night had never been with another man.
“I guess I had a whole personality transplant. Believe me, I’m not adventurous. I...”
Something else changed in her face just then and it galled him that even now he couldn’t read this woman. Even now she was a mystery to him.
