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She stepped back from him, forcing his hands to drop from her neck. “Why are we having this discussion? We agreed this was just sex.”
Why did it feel like she was running?
“But we are also friends. Whatever makes you think you cannot have a life with me, or amongst my family, is naturally of concern to me.”
“You speak so formally sometimes.”
“I admit it. That is in fact a prince thing, as you like to call it.” His eyes teased her.
“I figured.” She bit her lip, thinking.
Talk, or don’t talk?
“Tell me.”
“What?” She gave him her best guileless look.
The look was wasted on him. He just stared at her, clearly unwilling to allow prevarication about this.
She sighed, part of her wanting to share her past and part of her knowing that no matter how many years had passed, it never stopped hurting to do so.
“I’m not the oldest child in my family.” That’s where it started. With her brother, Matt.
He took her hand and led her to the large horseshoe-shaped sofa. “I thought you were.” Dima sat down and despite all that room, pulled her into his lap.
“No. Matt was two years older than me.” She let her head rest against his chest. This was easier to talk about without making eye contact. “He was the best big brother. He never made me feel like I was in the way.”
Dima’s arms tightened around her. “What happened to him?”
“He got sick when I was ten. At first, we didn’t know what it was, you know?” Pain welled, like it always did. “But it turns out that my mom carried a gene for a degenerative disease.”
Dima went very still. “Your mother is not sick.”
“Neither am I.”
He let out a breath she hadn’t realized he was holding. “However, youdohave this gene?”
“Yes.” Inactive, but there in her genetic makeup, just waiting to be passed on to the next generation, which she would never allow. “Matt died when I was sixteen after years of pain and slowly, inexorably losing more and more of himself to the disease.”
“I am very sorry.”
Jenna nodded, acknowledging the sincerity of his sentiment. “We were all tested for it.” She lifted her head so their gazes met. “I was the only other child carrying the gene.”
“Could you still get sick?”
“No. It would have come on during adolescence. It didn’t, but my parents were watching for it. We were all scared, though, until I aged past the window when it would have manifested.” Looking back, she realized how that had shaped her and her siblings.
Her parents too. Though she honestly didn’t remember what they’d been like before Matt had gotten sick. Her memory had melded it all together.
But her brother Luke had gone from being a determined boy to a driven man who’d built nothing short of an empire by the time he was thirty. Lisa, their baby sister, had rejected college and gotten married young, having four children in six years. She and her husband were happy living their organic, off-the-grid lifestyle.
“Explain why this terrible tragedy means you and I cannot have a future.”
“I had a tubal ligation the day after my twenty-first birthday.”
“So that you could not pass on this gene that had wreaked such terrible pain on your family,” he guessed.
Though he sure sounded like he had no doubt about being right.
