* * *
‘What is it I should tell you?’ Oti asked a few minutes later. After he’d taken a sponge and squeezed it over her exquisite body.
He was still trying to get his head around the discovery that she’d been a virgin. Still trying to work out how a woman so intelligent and beautiful could possibly have still been untouched.
‘Shall we start with the obvious?’ he muttered gently, unable to help himself from lifting a wet curl from her neck and dropping a kiss where it had lain.
His body was already—impossibly—beginning to tighten again with need. As though he hadn’t just had her—his wife—less than ten minutes earlier.
‘You want to know why I was still a virgin,’ she said flatly.
‘For a start.’ He dropped another kiss, and her body relaxed just a fraction.
They didn’t speak for a moment, the sound of gently splashing water filling the room instead. But then Oti drew in a breath, as though steadying herself, and she began.
‘I told you that I picked myself up when I was nineteen, right after my mum died.’
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. He just kept slowly sponging her down.
‘But I didn’t tell you why I went off the rails in the first place.’
‘Take your time,’ he murmured when she paused again, this time clearly waiting for some kind of response.
She gave an almost imperceptible dip of her head.
‘When I was fifteen I was attacked.’
‘Attacked how? Sexually?’ Lukas bit out, stilling for a moment, unprepared for the anger that stabbed through him at her unexpected admission. She stiffened again, and he instinctively resumed his ministrations.
‘Sort of.’ She sucked in a deep breath. ‘It was on some holiday, on a beach one night. My family...and the Rockman family.’
Lukas didn’t know how he controlled himself. How he didn’t spit out the next question.
‘One of the Earl’s sons?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted almost soundlessly.
Whatever he’d felt before about the way the Earl—his biological father, for want of any other term—had treated his mother, it was nothing compared to the sheer violence he felt at the knowledge that one of his sons had attacked Oti.
‘He raped you?’ Lukas rasped out.
‘He tried to.’ She hunched her shoulders and Lukas had to clench the sides of the bath not to drag her around. Just to give her space.
‘I was lucky... Edward came looking for me and he found us in time...before anything serious happened.’
‘You were...okay?’ Lukas demanded, immediately regretting his choice of words.
Of course she hadn’t been okay.
‘Edward went mad. I think he would have killed him if I hadn’t pulled him away. But when he told our parents, and they told us not to upset the Rockmans by making a big deal of it, he really went crazy.’
‘Your parents said what?’
Lukas didn’t know how he stayed calm. It was only because he knew that him blowing up would be the last thing that Oti needed.
‘That’s when our family really started to come apart. I went crazy, turning into that girl we all know so well from the press. I drank, tried drugs and generally wasted my life. But the one thing I couldn’t stand to do was be around boys, or men. And I haven’t had a serious relationship since.
‘Meanwhile, Edward couldn’t stand to be around any of us. I think he blamed himself for not being there sooner to stop it getting even as far as it did.’