What an amazing night. She ached in places she hadn’t known she could ache. A good ache. Like when you’d run a marathon and won. Like when you’d been made love to over and over by a man who couldn’t get enough of you.
She had.
Sweet and tender, hot and fast, Blake had claimed every inch of her body.
She’d done some claiming, too.
She smiled at the memories. Blake’s groans of pleasure at her touch, his worshipping of her body and his teasing her awake with kisses when she’d thought she was too tired for more. She’d been wrong.
Not bad for a beginner.
With the way Blake had held on to her afterwards, she’d say not bad at all. They’d been good together. She didn’t have to have experience to know they’d shared something special.
Was it because she loved everything about him? His eyes, his smile, his spicy scent, his pin-up abs that she’d licked every indention of, his intelligence, his…? Oh, she loved him. Enough said.
Rolling onto her side, she opened her eyes, ready to wake him and tell him every emotion in her heart. Instead she looked into black eyes.
Black eyes that were filled with regret. And guilt. And more regret.
Her elation fizzled like a deflating balloon that lay lifeless on the ground.
“Don’t even say it,” she warned, putting up her hand to shield herself from his recriminations. She didn’t want to hear about how he regretted what they’d shared, didn’t want him to make the most beautiful night of her life something cheap, shabby, wrong.
“Say what?”
As if he didn’t know.
“What I see in your eyes.”
“And that would be…?”
“That you think last night was a mistake.” Maybe it had been a mistake, but, wow, on the scale of one to ten last night had been an eleven. An amazing hallelujah eleven.
He lay back on his pillow, stared at the ceiling, and ran his oh-so-talented fingers through his hair. “You were a virgin, weren’t you?”
She couldn’t tell him. Not with the angst already lacing his voice. Didn’t he understand that she’d awakened wanting to love him forever, not face recriminations?
“I’m not a virgin, Blake, but until last night with you Trey was—” She stopped, knowing by the way Blake’s head snapped toward her that she’d said the wrong thing.
“Trey?” Sitting straight up, he spat the name at her. “You slept with Nix? Is that what you meant to say? That he was the only man you’d slept with until last night?”
“No.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She’d meant to say that there hadn’t been anyone she’d ever cared enough to have sex with except Trey, and Trey had been a silly schoolgirl crush.
“Don’t lie to me, Darby.”
She might have told him the truth—that, had he wanted her innocence, she’d have given her virginity to Trey on the night of her junior prom. But Trey had left her willing body to go to Mandy. She might have told him that every time she’d gotten sexually close to a man she’d backed away because she’d heard Mandy’s voice telling her she’d die a virgin, and she’d wondered at her reasons for being with whatever man she’d been with since she hadn’t loved any of them. The moment she had that thought she’d always stopped, and usually ended the relationship soon thereafter.
Last night she hadn’t had any such thoughts. All she’d known, thought, everything had centered around the man lying next to her.
She’d been consumed one hundred percent by Blake.
But she bristled at his tone, bristled at the way his nostrils flared and the pulse hammered at his throat.
What right did he have to judge her if she had stupidly slept with Trey all those years ago? It wasn’t as if Blake hadn’t slept his way through enough beauties to fill a little black book—a big black book, for that matter.
“Just because we had sex it does not give you the right to suffocate me.”
“Suffocate you?”