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“I am not!” she said, setting her laptop aside. Then she bit her lip and picked it back up, put the computer back on her lap and turned her focus back to the screen, her cheeks pink.
He’d never in all his life dealt with something like this.
She set her computer down again and looked back at him. “Why did you sleep on the couch last night?”
“Why would I not sleep on the couch?”
“Because we…shouldn’t you sleep together after sleeping together? I assumed that was where that highly glossed term came from.”
“I’ve never slept with a woman I had sex with.”
“You’ve never had a lover before, either, remember? It was supposed to be different.”
A strange pang struck his chest, worked its way through his body. “In that I was in control, and not the other way around. I’m not going to pick a China pattern out with you.”
“I didn’t ask you to. I just thought maybe you could say a few words to me. Or…get in bed with me. Why are you making me feel needy for asking for what, I’m sure, is bare minimum sex etiquette?”
“Did you not listen to anything I told you?” he asked, the burning in his chest getting worse. As it had been just after he’d finished with her last night. A virgin. She’d been a virgin. It had excited him. Made him feel some sort of masculine pride he’d been completely unfamiliar with until that moment.
And it had made him feel every inch the predator. Had made him feel no different than the women who had used him. At least they had given him something in return.
He would, though, regardless of what she said she wanted. He would make sure she was compensated for her time in his bed. For giving him her innocence.
“I listened,” she said, her lips pulled tightly together.
“But you apparently didn’t understand. If you wanted tenderness and feeling you should have picked a man who was capable of giving it to you. I can’t. I don’t want to. I want to make you come, and that’s the beginning and end of it. If you can’t handle that, then I’m not the man for you to stretch your sexual muscles with.”
Slashes of dark color appeared on her cheeks. Anger, he could see, not embarrassment. She was shaking with it. Good. Maybe if he made her angry enough it would erase the hurt she felt, because he didn’t know another way to do it. Didn’t know how to offer comfort.
“I knew that with you all I was getting was good instruction. I knew you weren’t going to want anything else from me. I just wanted a little quality training before I took another lover, but I damn well expected you to treat me with a little respect.”
Such irony that she should speak of respect when she admitted she was using him for training. That she was using him the way the other women had.
As if he wasn’t using her. Using all that sweet innocence as a salve for his bloody soul. But it was really just putting butter on a burn. All it did was hold the heat in so it burned faster and deeper.
“I am not the man for you, Julia, not even for temporary purposes. And I’m not training you.” He spat the words out. “I’ll do business with you, but this is over.”
“Fine by me. I wouldn’t let you touch me again. Not after the way you treated me last night.”
“Then we’ve arrived back at the same place we’ve always been,” he said.
“And that is?”
“Barely tolerating each other but prepared to work together if it will benefit us. No harm, no loss. Except your virginity, that is.”
He didn’t know what had possessed him to strike out at her. He only knew that the same feelings he’d been wrestling with since last night were threatening to rise up and strangle him again. That venting them this way seemed to stop them.
“Oh, classy, thanks, bring that up.”
“You should have.”
“Why? Why should I have to tell you? You said yourself we were just having a fling. You wanted to experience having the control, I wanted to learn from the best. We were both in it for ourselves, but that’s life, isn’t it? Everyone’s in it for what they get out of the deal. I know those women used you, but you used them, too. You used them for money.”
