Emily closed her eyes, bit into her lower lip and felt tortured. Why had Lucas come over to her? Why wasn’t he eating his darn pudding?
“Do you remember the first time we kissed?” He bent close and his words seduced her ear, her body, her mind.
Seriously, did he think she’d forgotten their first kiss?
“I do,” he continued, so near she could feel the warmth of his breath. “We were standing outside your apartment door and I leaned down to press my lips to yours. Your mouth was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted and I couldn’t get enough. You set me on fire.”
Her brain was on fire. So was the rest of her. Hellfire because he was torturing her with past memories. She’d loved him so much, wanted him so much.
But that was long ago.
“What does it matter if I remember?” she asked incredulously, shaking her head. “All of this is crazy. I don’t understand why you wanted to eat at my house, because we both know it wasn’t so you could try my cooking.”
“Your cooking was great,” he assured her, still close to her, too close. “I want the friendship we shared, Emily, before everything went wrong between us. I want to kiss you again. I want to do a lot more than just kiss you. I want all the good there was between us without the golden rings of death to choke out that goodness.”
What was he saying? That he wanted them to be friends with benefits? Was he asking her to be his friend while calling their marriage “golden rings of death”? He really was crazy.
“You want to be my friend?” she quipped, her brain still reeling at what he was saying. At the fact that he’d just said he wanted to kiss her again. That he wanted to do more than just kiss her. Darn him. She didn’t want to think about Lucas kissing her, doing more than just kissing her.
He was so close, he could kiss her.
The thought had her wanting to back away from him. The thought had her wanting to turn to him and satisfy her curiosity. Had Lucas really kissed the way she recalled him kissing her or did her mind play tricks on her?
“Have you lost all your other friends?”
His lips curved upward in a wry grin. “You know better than that, Emily. I’m a good friend. A very good friend.”
Perhaps he had been to his other friends. Not to her. To her, he’d been a mostly absent friend. Although, he probably meant sexual friends.
“Sex?” She rolled her eyes and moved away from him, sitting down at the table and picking up her pudding. “That’s what all this is about? Why you outbid Richard? Why you are interfering in my life when I can’t stand you? Because you want sex?”
“I told you, I didn’t intentionally go to the auction to bid on you. And if the idiot who let me win your bid wasn’t willing to fight harder for you, then good riddance. He didn’t deserve you, either.” He followed her lead and sat back down at the table, too. But rather than pick up his pudding, he leaned toward her. “I don’t believe you can’t stand me. I think you want me. Sex was very good between us.”
Her lips twisted with bitterness. “Did you think so? I got the impression you bored of sex with me very quickly.”
“Never.”
“Then you have very different memories from mine.”
That seemed to throw him. He stared at her a moment, then took a spoonful of his pudding and closed his mouth around it. “This is good.”
“Of course.”
Her sarcasm wasn’t lost on him and he arched a brow in question.
“You changed the subject,” she accused.
“You want to talk about my memories of sex between us?”
No. Yes. Maybe. Depended on what he would say.
“Let me tell you. I remember a woman I couldn’t get enough of whom I married and still couldn’t get enough of. A woman whom I was so obsessed with that I wanted to be with her rather than doing all the things I needed to be doing, like studying and preparing for my next day’s patients, or doing the things my parents needed of me. A woman I’d rather spend time with than sleep or eat or anything else.”
The blood drained from her face and she felt cold all over. “I never asked you to put me before anything. I knew you had to study.”
“Saying that and living it are two different things. You expected me to be the husband you thought I should be. You cried all the time, Emily. No matter what I did, I felt I never could do enough, could never make your sadness that you’d married me go away. Knowing how unhappy you were made me miserable, too.”
“You regretted marrying me from the moment we said I do.”