Just To Be With You (The Sullivans #12)(47)

She didn’t know how everything could possibly be going from beautiful to weird so quickly, just that she needed to make it stop. Needed to make him see that things didn’t have to be weird or strained between them. And that she didn’t want him to spend one more second feeling guilty about being her first.

“I thought we already talked about this last night, about the fact that I wanted to do everything we did together. But maybe,” she said when she could see that she still wasn’t getting through to him, “it would help if you knew why I was still a virgin when I could have slept with dozens of guys by now?”

“Tatiana.” Her name was more a growl than anything else, but she wasn’t nearly done making her point—had barely begun, in fact.

“All the guys who wanted to take me to bed were nice men. Good-looking men. Heck, most of them were rich, famous men. But I always knew I would wait to have sex until it wasn’t just sex, but something so much bigger than that. So that’s exactly what I did, Ian. I waited until I fell in love. With you.”

* * *

Just as his body had immediately stilled over hers when he’d realized she was a virgin, now Ian’s heart stopped dead in his chest.

It was one thing to think Tatiana had whispered I love you while falling asleep against his chest. He could have written that off as heightened emotion from all the orgasms, or even pure exhaustion right before she dropped into sleep.

But hearing her say it to him in the clear light of day, her eyes bright and sure...

No, he couldn’t let himself believe her, and he needed to stop the warmth, the longing that had shot through him when she’d said it.

“You don’t love me.”

“I do.”

He didn’t want to hurt her any more than he already had...and yet that didn’t change his boundaries or his limits. If she were someone else, maybe they could have had a fling, just enjoyed each other casually the way he had with other women since his divorce. But Tatiana wasn’t like anyone else. Partly because she was going to become part of his extended family by marriage soon, but mostly because she deserved so much more than a simple no-strings affair with a man who could never give her anything else.

“We’ve only spent a few days together,” he reminded her, “and one night.”

“So what? People fall in love at first sight all the time.”

“Nobody can possibly fall in love that fast,” he insisted, despite how jumbled up his insides had felt from the moment he’d met her in Napa Valley. “You’re just trying to convince yourself that you love me because—”

“Don’t you dare try to say you know how I feel or why I feel it.” Her eyes flashed emerald fire as she moved closer. “I know what I feel, just like I know that you could never have touched me the way you did last night if you didn’t care about me, too. Maybe it’s not love yet for you like it is for me, but there’s something there inside of you for me. Something big. Something real.”

All morning long, he’d gone over and over what had happened between them, trying to figure out what could have driven him to go against everything he’d known was right. In the end, he’d decided it had to have been pure hormones and primal attraction, rather than an emotion Tatiana wanted to call love. And what man on the planet wouldn’t have been infatuated with her beauty, with the sounds she made when she came, with the thrill of being with someone so full of life and boundless dreams?

The last thing he wanted was to hurt her, but at the same time, he needed her to understand without even the barest doubt that he simply wasn’t capable of loving a woman more than he loved his company, his work, the power and the rush of business.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever have to force himself to do, hurting her now so that he wouldn’t hurt her even worse in the future, as he made himself tell her, “Of course I touched you like that. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t resist you, not after you kissed me. No one could have, Tatiana.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been with way prettier women than me. I’ve seen pictures of the women you’ve been with, not to mention your ex-wife.”

“Those women all bought their faces, their bodies, with high-priced surgeons. But every curve on your body, every expression on your face is you.”

“Okay then, why don’t you tell me—how was sex with those women compared with me?”

Just when he thought she couldn’t shock him more, she went right ahead and did it without so much as blinking. First, she’d stunned the crap out of him by actually being as innocent as she’d seemed, and then she’d blown his mind by unleashing such sweet yet wild sensuality that he could barely keep up with her. Only to find that one little four-letter word falling from her lips could send him reeling harder and farther than any orgasm had.

And now, this. Actually asking him point-blank to compare his time in the sheets with other women to being with her just hours before.

When he didn’t answer her fast enough, she just kept pushing, “Was being with any of them as good as what you and I shared last night?”

“No.” Damn it. “Not even close.”

She smiled at him like she’d just made her point, and maybe it felt too much like she had, like she was getting too close, too deep again, because even though he’d already been cruel enough, he couldn’t stop himself from saying more. “You’re so tied to the fairy tales you’ve been acting out your whole life, and to the happily-ever-afters that screenwriters tie up into a neat and tidy bow, that you can’t see that nearly all of those perfect endings are just fiction. They’re nothing more than great stories meant to keep the audience coming back for more. So just because we burned up the sheets together doesn’t mean I love you. What it means is that I love your body. I love your face. I love touching you. And I love making you come. But that’s all it is, Tatiana. Just hot sex. Nothing more.”