Sinful Desire (Sinful Nights, #2)(40)

She couldn’t even compare Ryan to those guys. He was in a class by himself. Everything about him—that soft brown hair, those dark blue eyes, his hard body, the way he took her—he was fantasy material.

But real.

Add in the easy way they were able to talk, toss in the intensity of the connection, and mix in the sweet little gestures, and she was dangerously close to feeling something more.

Ryan reached across the table and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ve never met a woman like you, one who’s so strong and direct in everything else, but able in bed to turn over the reins. It’s addictive,” he said, his eyes fixed on her the whole time, the look in them earnest and truthful. Her heart swooped in a daredevil loop the loop.

Correction: she was already feeling something more.

Which meant she wanted him to know more about her. She brought the straw in her milkshake to her lips and swallowed some of the delicious chocolate ice cream concoction. “Confession—I’ve never had the chance to be like this.”

He arched an eyebrow in question.

She put the shake glass down, keenly aware of the sounds of the diner—the cooks frying up bacon for patrons ordering breakfast for their late-night dinners, the twang of a country tune playing softly overhead, a waitress taking an order a few booths away. “This isn’t some big secret. I know you looked me up before the gala, so you might have learned this, but I was married for five years.” At this point it would be odd not to tell him this fact of her romantic life.

The surprise in his eyes told her he hadn’t known this. “No, I wasn’t aware. How long have you been divorced?”

“Since I was twenty-nine, so a little more than two years now. Which means I was twenty-four when I married Holden,” she said, sharing the details matter-of-factly, because there was nothing to hide. Now, on a third date, after hot sex on her car, seemed the right moment to mention her past marital status.

“That’s young. Did you go to college together?”

She shook her head. “We were best friends in high school, and we stayed close. He went to Berkeley and I was at Stanford, so we weren’t far away. I didn’t date much in college, except this one guy, Zach, who was a computer geek, too. Truth be told, Zach was kind of a competitive ass who thought his tech startup would blow mine out of the water, and he told me as much every day.”

“Did it? Blow yours out of the water?”

“As if.” She was pleased, and not a bit guilty, to share this next tidbit. “He never even got funded. He actually applied for an engineering job at my company two years after graduation.”

“Did you hire him?”

“No. But it had nothing to do with our past relationship. It had to do with him rushing through things, including his work. He was always cutting corners.” His work ethic was similar to his sex ethic. “Anyway, we only went out for a few months during college, and even though it wasn’t a tough decision to end things, he was quite insulting at the time. Holden was there for me when I broke up with him.”

“So Holden was the guy you turned to when things went amiss with others?”

“In that case, yes. There weren’t many others, honestly. But Holden was there for me. I was there for him. And soon enough after college, marrying each other just seemed to make sense.”

He furrowed his brow, as if marriage didn’t truly compute for him. Perhaps it didn’t. “Make sense?”

He reached for a french fry as she nodded. “We were great friends. And we actually still are. He’s probably my best friend.”

He dropped the fry. “I don’t get it. How can you be best friends with your ex-husband? If you’re that close, why aren’t you with him?”

She inhaled deeply. Okay, telling Ryan she’d been married wasn’t hard in the least. But explaining why they’d split up was a wee bit tougher. She lowered her voice. “We weren’t compatible in the bedroom.”

“You mean he’s gay?” Ryan asked, so damn straightforward in his assumption that Sophie laughed.

She shifted her hand back and forth like a seesaw. “Sort of.”

“Sort of? How the hell are you sort of gay?” he asked with a laugh.

“Um, it’s called bisexual, Ryan.”

He blinked, and shook his head, as if he were processing this information about sexuality for the first time. Maybe he was. Maybe bisexuality didn’t occur to him because Ryan Sloan was as straight as they came. If there were a mold for hot, dominant, heterosexual male, he’d fit it perfectly. Hell, he’d probably made the mold. “Okay, I hear you,” Ryan said. “So he likes boys and girls.”

She nodded. “Yes. And he was interested in sharing me with boys.”

He drew a deep breath and straightened his spine. “Did you?”

She studied his face, unsure if the uncertain look in his eyes suggested that a past ménage was a deal-breaker. She didn’t want to be judged for her past, even though she didn’t have one. She needed to know Ryan wasn’t that kind of person. “Would it bother you if I had?”

“No,” he said immediately, then waited for her answer.

She shook her head. “I didn’t have a threesome. I don’t want to be shared.”

He pushed away from his side of the booth, stood up, and moved in next to her. Draping an arm around her possessively, he pulled her close, then brushed his finger along her jawline. “If you were mine, I’d never share you,” he said, his deep, sexy voice sending goose bumps over her flesh.