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And as the second eldest in a family of five girls, I assured him that was something I wanted too—the house with a white picket fence, two or three kids, falling asleep next to my husband every night and waking up with him in the mornings. Forever.
That was the dream, and for all the flaws I’d perceived in Cal in those early days, it was surprising to find a man whose values and desires for the future were so in line with my own.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “But…”
“Here we go.”
I reclined slightly on my stool and shot him a glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve been far too understanding up to this point,” he said. “You met my ex today, Mar. The woman I wanted tomarry.I know you well enough to know that can’t be sitting well with you. Maybe that’s why you puked your guts up when we got home.”
“That’snotwhy I got sick,” I said defensively, though I couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility. I hadn’t truly started to feel nauseous until that bomb had dropped and exploded in my lap.
“Suuuuuuure,” Cal said, drawing out the single syllable with a wink. “Now let’s hear this ‘but.’”
“I wish you would’ve told me before,” I said. “I was fucking blindsided in there.”
“To be fair, it’s not like I knew who we were going to meet until I walked into Granny’s and saw her face, until you said her name. I don’t know about all the skeletons in your closet, after all.”
“You damn sure do!” I protested. “In case you’ve forgotten, you’ve taken every opportunity to throw my…European promiscuity in my face.”
In truth, I hadn’t been as loose as I’d let him believe, but any time he’d taken that particular dig at me, it had been easier to agree, to let him continue to think the worst of me. I’d truly believed there’d be no changing his mind.
Another instance in which I was glad to be wrong, but now that we were here, having this conversation, I supposed Icouldset him straight.
“It’s not like you’ve ever kept that part of your life a secret, Princess.”
Over the years, that nickname had been uttered in so many connotations—exasperation, anger, disgust, and more recently reverence, fondness, desire.
Now, we were back to sarcasm, where he tossed the term out to hurt me.
“It wasn’t like I made you think,” I said.
Cal raised a brow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean…yeah, I had fun in Europe. But I wasn’t out fucking a different guy every night.”
“Oh yeah? What about that son of an English earl?”
I grimaced. “Okay, that rumor was true. But that’s one guy out offive, Cal. I had five partners while I was over there. In five years. I was too damn busy working to give much attention to relationships. You’d think by now you’d know that about me.”
Something like shock and surprise flitted across his face, but he didn’t back down—didn’t apologize. “And you’d think by now that you’d know better than to be jealous of a woman I haven’t seen or spoken to in nearly three years!”
“Well, how the fuck was I supposed to know that?” I said, standing from my stool so quickly it toppled over onto its side. The crash sent Skye skittering from the room, her nails clicking on the floors as she disappeared deeper into the house.
“You’re supposed to trust me, Mar. That’s how this works. Just like I trusted you when I found out about Owen, and we weren’t even together then.”
“Owen was a fuck buddy and nothing more,” I said through gritted teeth. “The two are not the same.”
“As far as I’m concerned, they are,” he said, stalking toward me. Before I could protest, he’d hooked his hands behind my thighs and lifted me up onto the counter, sliding his hips between my legs. “What I’m saying here, Princess”—the nickname was softened now, sweet, more a term of endearment than the thinly veiled insult from a minute ago—“is that there’s no reason to be jealous.”
I pursed my lips, unimpressed. “Tell that to your fixation with the fact that I used to fuck your buddy Owen. The buddy I only started fucking because you rejected me!”
I clapped a hand over my mouth. Oh God, what had I done? I’d managed to keep that little secret to myself all these years, and now here it was. Out in the open, my heart bleeding on the floor.
An inhumane noise tore free from his throat as he brought his hand to my neck, thumb under my chin forcing my gaze to collide with his.
This man, the sheer possessiveness in his eyes?
