Don't Speak (A Modern Fairytale, #5)(23)

“Plans, more like. There are lots of plans for me.”

“That’s how I feel too!” she said, looking happy and relieved. Then she winced, her eyes flicking to his groin and back. “But I felt your . . .”

“Sure you did. If we kissed again, you’d feel it again. It means I’m turned-on. It means—”

“You want sex.”

“Yeah. No. I mean . . .,” he said, squirming a little and wondering how in the hell they’d ended up here. “We just met, you know? That? Sex? It comes later.”

“But you said you already want it.”

Damn, this was like being back in one of his prelaw classes at Duke. She wasn’t going to let a single loophole go unexamined.

“Okay. That’s true. But first, I want to get to know you. And we definitely wouldn’t do it unless you wanted to.”

“But if we did, what about our futures? What about your plans and my dreams?”

“What about them?”

Her shoulders slumped. “If we had sex, we’d have to get married.”

What. The. Fuck?

How his eyeballs didn’t pop out of his head and land on the grass between them was a fucking miracle.

Okay. Okay. Breathe, Erik. Breathe.

Her values were coming into clearer focus—and from what he could gather, they were old-fashioned and incredibly conservative, almost like a throwback to the 1950s. He’d never known anyone remotely like her, like this fisherman’s daughter from a world that was somehow frozen in time.

He tried to remember what he knew about the more remote islands on the Outer Banks, but he’d spent his summers in posh Buxton, mostly oblivious to the year-round islanders. His knowledge of their ways was painfully thin. He knew from her accent that she’d been raised in a pretty isolated place. She wouldn’t let him come to her island to visit her, for fear he’d “make trouble.” She didn’t have a cell phone, and frankly, he wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t have the internet either, which meant that his world—the modern world, as he knew it—wasn’t exactly her comfort zone.

Her world was alien to him . . . which meant that his was alien to her too.

His mind flitted back to the catering manager last night, telling him to “let her go.” He was starting to understand why she’d said that, and why she’d warned Erik that he didn’t have “any business with an island girl.”

But one look at Laire told him he did.

It didn’t matter if one hundred people warned him away from her because this particular island girl held him rapt. Since meeting her, he couldn’t think of anything but her—finding a way to see her again, getting to know her. And now? After a kiss that tilted the axis of his world after a million that hadn’t? He wanted more. He needed more.

Erik was a student of law, not building, but he was ready to roll up his sleeves and start bridge-building between their worlds if that’s what it took to get to know her. And to do that, he’d need to treat her words and ideas with respect, even though they felt foreign and antiquated to him.

If we had sex, we’d have to get married.

“Um. No, Laire. To be honest with you, I don’t . . . I mean, I wouldn’t marry a woman just because I slept with her,” he said. “One has nothin’ to do with the other. In the world I come from, people can just . . . enjoy each other if they want to . . . without, you know, makin’ a lifetime commitment.” He scanned her face, hoping that his words wouldn’t scare her away. “Put it this way: I would sleep with someone I loved and wanted to marry. But I would also sleep with someone I didn’t love and might not want to marry . . . as long as she wanted it too.”

“You’ve done that?” she asked, her forehead creased, her voice a whisper. “Slept with someone?”

He hated it that he had to nod yes, but there was no point in lying to her. He was in the middle of the weirdest conversation he’d ever had with anyone, but in for a penny, in for a pound. He was determined to see it through.

“Oh,” she said, her cheeks flushing with a new wave of color. “Nice girls don’t do that where I come from. If you let a boy touch your body, you eventually settle down together. That’s the way it is. Everyone knows what you’re doing, but they don’t care as long as you got plans to make it right.”

Make it right. Which, apparently, meant marriage. Whoa.

He exhaled a shaky breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Okay, I got it. Nice girls don’t have sex before they’re married, or, um, engaged.”

“They shouldn’t,” she said. “And if they do, they deserve the reputation they get.”

“They deserve it?”

She nodded her head gravely. “Yes. They knew the consequences and made their choices anyway.”

“And what exactly are the consequences?”

She looked away from him, out at the Sound, mulling this over for a moment before turning her eyes back to his. “A girl like that might be more comfortable moving away from Corey, I guess.”

“Wow.” He nodded, a chill passing through him at the unapologetic absoluteness of her suggestion. “I see.”

“But you don’t agree.” She tilted her head to the side, scanning his face with curiosity. “You think a girl can give herself to someone and not marry him and still be . . . good?”