Grounded (Up in the Air, #3)(71)

I cupped his cheek and watched with covetous eyes as he pounded out his own release long moments later.

Our eyes stayed locked as he hovered over me, staying buried deep while he watched me. It was one of our silent standoffs, and I broke first.

“Are you going to tell me what has you so worried that I’ll leave you? So worried that you kept me tied to the bed while we slept?”

His jaw clenched and his eyes flinched but he nodded. “A…video of me was released this morning. It’s all over the internet. There’s no way to control it. I’ve known of the video for about a week, and I’ve been trying my best to keep it from leaking, but I failed. Whoever was behind this didn’t care about making money.”

I swallowed, a sick little ball of dread forming in my gut. “A sex tape,” I guessed.

He broke eye contact, staring down at our joined bodies. “Yes. I’m sorry. Just when I’ve been trying to clean up my image, to clean up my life, this would happen. I’m disgusted with myself, if it makes you feel any better.”

It didn’t. “When was this video made?” I asked him.

He pulled himself out of me and I gasped at the raw sensation. His hair trailed into his beautiful face as he looked back up at me. “About three years ago, I think, or possibly closer to four. It was taken without my knowledge, I’m embarrassed to admit. It was a setup. One of the few times I wasn’t at one of my own properties. I’m so sorry. My past just won’t seem to go away. Please tell me this isn’t your breaking point.”

I studied him, wondering how his mind worked. “Of course I’m not happy about it, but I would hardly leave you over it, James.”

I couldn’t speak for a long minute because he crushed the breath out of me. I gasped at the raw sensation it caused in my tender nipples.

He pulled back when he heard the gasp, muttering an apology. He moved back over me, more carefully this time. “Thank you,” he murmured into my ear.

“I know about your past,” I continued, when he let me. “You’ve been forthcoming with me about your promiscuity. But you should have told me a week ago, when you first heard about this. You’ve been moody and strange and I don’t like to be kept in the dark. You should know better. If we’re going to make this thing work, you can’t keep things like this from me. One of the things that makes me trust you is your honesty. I need that honesty, James. Do you understand?”

He nodded, his face buried in my hair. “I was just so terrified that you would run again.”

I tugged hard on a lock of his hair. “What will keep me from running is you being upfront with me.”

“Yes, okay. I understand.”

I took a deep breath, hating this next part, but not enough not to ask. “Who is it?”

He tensed against me. “Jolene.”

I nodded. Somehow I had known, though that didn’t make me happy about it. “So she made the video, and leaked it. Obviously.”

He shook his head. “I can’t rule that out completely. And yes, she obviously set the thing up. But I just can’t see her leaking it, not with the kind of money I was offering to keep it under wraps. And this will ruin whatever she has with Scott. She’s too mercenary to do this just for spite, and with nothing to gain.”

I took his word for that, since he obviously knew her better than I did.

He brushed my hair back from my face, and the light picked up those scars on his wrists. I caught his hand, bringing it to my lips. I kissed the inside of his wrist softly.

“Are you ever going to tell me what these are from?”

His eyes picked up a certain vulnerable glint that I was coming to recognize. It was going to be bad, though I had always assumed that the scars on his wrists were deep wounds.

“Spencer used sharp handcuffs. They cut me. It was one of the first things I noticed. These cuts on my wrists started appearing first. I hid them, because that’s a conspicuous and embarrassing place to have a cut, especially being fourteen, and feeling self-conscious of every little thing to begin with.”

“I can’t say if he used that kind of cuff to make me hold still, or if he just wanted to make me bleed. If he was trying to keep me from struggling, it didn’t work. If I could have cut my own hands off to get away from him, I swear I would have. I certainly tried.”

He let me trace those tiny scars, then kiss every inch of them, very carefully. Tears ran silently down my cheeks. I couldn’t hear what he was saying and not be affected by it.

He traced my tears with a soft finger. “It was about that time that I got real promiscuous. I didn’t go a day without hooking up indiscriminately. I wasn’t analyzing it back then, but I suppose I was trying to regain some control, since I’d lost so much of it. And it didn’t help that I was one giant hormone at the time. It all just sort of escalated, and by the time I was an adult, it didn’t get better. I preferred the most casual of hookups, so I almost always went out of my way to find women who were hot, but who I knew I wouldn’t feel bad leaving, which I guess would explain Jules and Jolene, though I didn’t stick exclusively to raging bitches.”

I had to hold back a comment about that one. He was talking now, and I wanted him to get it all out. The last thing I wanted to do was stop the flow of information.

“It was never straight vanilla for me, but the really kinky stuff developed over time. I knew that I liked things a little more off-color than the norm, and I was always pushing it a step further. At about the age when a normal kid was getting excited to drive his first car, I was running a worldwide hotel chain, obsessively learning to tie knots, and f*cking every female in sight. I got better when I started going to therapy. I became more focused, more controlled, but that took time. Getting into the BDSM scene when I was eighteen helped a lot, too. There were rules there, and people that were willing to sort of mentor me about how to do it right, and I got the proper training.”