Prince of Secrets

She was super sensitive to his nearness, too, her body aching to press against his, her lips going soft in preparation for his kiss.

The kiss didn’t come.

“Tell me,” puffed across her lips.

The sound of his voice whispered through her, increasing the sensual fire burning through her veins.

“It wasn’t anything.”

“Were you naked?”

“Once.”

“Good.” He kissed her, his lips barely there and gone before she could lose herself in the caress she wanted more than air or research funding. “When?”

“In college.”

He just waited.

“He told me he loved me.” She’d wanted to be loved so badly, she realized later.

“You didn’t let him into your body.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It didn’t feel right.” Old pain twisted through her heart.

She turned her head away, stepping back when a few seconds before she would have said she wasn’t capable of moving at all, much less away from him.

“He hurt you.” The growl in Demyan’s voice made Chanel’s eyes snap open, her gaze searching for him, for visual proof of what had been in his tone.

The anger in his eyes wasn’t directed at her, but it still made Chanel shiver. “He broke up with me.”

Her ex had called her a dried-up relic, a throwback woman who belonged in a medieval nunnery, not a modern university. Chanel had a lot of experience with disappointing her family, so her ex-boyfriend’s words should not have had the power to wound.

She should have been inured.

But they’d cut her deeply, traumatically so.

She’d never shared with another person the experience that had left her convinced her mother and stepfather were right, had never admitted her ultimate failure.

“I’m hopeless with men.” What was she doing here, wanting to give her body to a man destined to eviscerate her heart?

He wasn’t ever going to stay with her. He said they were going to make love, but they couldn’t. He didn’t love her, no matter what his words had implied. He couldn’t.

She wasn’t that woman.

Chanel wasn’t a bubbly blonde beauty like her sister, Laura. She wasn’t a cool sophisticate like her mother. Chanel was the awkward one who could make perfect marks in chemistry courses but utterly fail at the human kind.

She shook her head, her hands cold and shaking. “You should leave.”

Another primal sound of anger came out of him before he crossed the small distance between them and yanked her body into his with tender ruthlessness. “I’m not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not ever.”

“You can’t make promises like that.” His breaking them was going to destroy something inside her that her parents and ex had been unable to touch.

The belief that she was worth something.

“I can.”

“What? You’re going to marry me?” she demanded with pain-filled sarcasm.

“Yes.”

She couldn’t breathe, her vision going black around the edges. Words were torn from her, but they came out in barely a whisper. “You don’t mean that.”

He cupped the back of her head, forcing her gaze to meet his. “I do.”

“You can’t.”

“I am a man of my word.”

“Always?” she mocked, not believing.

No one kept all their promises. Especially not to her. Hadn’t her father told her he’d always be there for her? But then he’d died. Her mother had promised, in the aftermath of Jacob Tanner’s death, that she and Chanel would always be a team, that she wouldn’t leave her daughter, wouldn’t die like her husband.

Beatrice hadn’t died, but she’d abandoned Chanel emotionally within a year of her marriage to Perry, making it clear from that point on that the only team was the Saltzmans’. Chanel Tanner had no place on it.

“Try me,” Demyan demanded, no insecurity about the future in his words.

“You’ll destroy me.”

“No.”

“Men like you...” Her words ran out as her heart twisted at the thought of never seeing him again.

“Know our own minds.” There was that look in his eyes again.

As if he was a man who always got what he set out to, no matter what he had to do to get it. As if she might as well give in because he never would.

“I wanted to wait until I got married. I didn’t want to trap someone into a lifetime they would only resent.”

“There are such things as birth control.”

“My mom was on the Pill when she got pregnant with me. I was not part of her future plans. Neither was my father.”

“She didn’t have to marry him.”

“She loved him. At first.” Chanel didn’t know when that had changed.