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Chapter 15
I felt myself melting into a puddle of yearning. What he was doing to my feet should be illegal. Clearing my throat, I sat up abruptly. “They’re better now. Thanks.” I put on my shoes like a knight donning armor. I needed to keep some kind of distance between Finley and me at the moment, and with him massaging my feet so erotically, that wasn’t going to happen.
He tucked his hands behind his neck and stretched. “I’ve got a good picture of your childhood. Now let’s hear about the men in your life.”
“You might not believe me,” I said ruefully, “but there haven’t been all that many. I went to an all-girls high school and an all-girls college.”
“Maybe so, but in college you were away from home, right?”
“Yes.” This next part was humiliating. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share it, but I could hardly expect Finley to bare his soul if I weren’t going to be honest with him. “My first time was with my English professor. Sophomore year.” I realized that my hands were clenched in my lap. To move them would only draw attention to how tense I was. I’m not sure what I expected Finley to say, but he surprised me.
He turned to me and smoothed the hair away from my face, rubbing his thumb over my bottom lip. “I get the picture, Duchess. No need to open old wounds. The guy was a bastard.”
I thought back to those exhilarating days. I’d been head over heels in lust with the man who spoke so eloquently of Shakespeare and poets and the power of words. In the end, I’d found out the hard way that he was no more than a middle-aged man trying to prove to himself he was still young. Unfortunately, I was not the only naïve girl he’d taken under his wing.
I shook my head, feeling the sting of regret. “Suffice it to say that I waited a long time until I was ready to trust a man again. The end of grad school to be exact. I thought I was finally on the way to getting engaged and living happily ever after. Turns out, though, bachelor number two was far more interested in spending my trust fund than he was in loving me. When I found out and broke up with him, he said I was immature and socially awkward, and that no man would ever see past the money.”
The silence fell and gathered weight. I’m not sure why I’d been so detailed in the telling. I could have glossed over it. Maybe it had been too long since I saw my therapist. I wanted to laugh at my own dark humor, but I restrained myself.
Finley reached out and took my right hand in his left. “At the risk of beating a dead horse, is that it?”
“I’ve dated in the interim, nothing serious.”
He massaged my palm with his talented thumb. The man clearly liked to work with his hands. Maybe that’s why his motorcycles gave him so much joy.
“Ah, Duchess,” he said. “What I wouldn’t give to have those two guys alone in a locked room for half an hour.”
“Would you beat the crap out of them?” I asked the question with relish.
He chuckled. “I’d sure as hell try. What morons.”
“Yeah. I figured that out eventually. The money thing was a bigger millstone than I had realized. People always want something. Good things sometimes. Still, it’s hard to feel like an ATM. That’s why my two friends who came to Scotland with me are so important. They knew me back before I was a debutante with money. I was just another toddler sharing a Little Tykes tricycle.”
“And you didn’t go to school together?”
“Only for a few years. My parents decided I needed to be sheltered from the ‘bad influences’ in public school, so they moved me. Willow ended up leaving, too, for different reasons. When we found each other again, it was as if those years in between never happened.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Yes, I am. Your turn,” I said, squeezing his hand.
When he hesitated, I grimaced, even though he couldn’t see my face. “I know you’ve had way more experience than me. Heck, some of the nuns at my high school probably had more experience than me. I don’t need a listing, Finley. You could hit the high spots. Particularly concerning a woman who was blond, gorgeous, and loaded. You’ve left that comment dangling.”
His laugh sounded forced. “I knew I never should have mentioned it.”
“Do I really remind you of her?” I sensed his ambivalence, though I didn’t understand it. Unless he was in love with the woman who got away.
Finley pounded a fist on his knee. “I’m sorry I said it. It’s not really true…at least not past a superficial resemblance. Vanessa was greedy and self-centered and high maintenance.”
“Ouch. If she was such an ogre, why did you fall in love with her?”
“It’s a long story,” he warned.
“I can stay up past my bedtime. Honestly.”
This time his laugh was the real thing. “Okay. You asked for it. You remember all that stuff about me buckling down in college?”
“Yes.”
