“I did. And I’ll do it as many more times as I need to in order to get you comfortable with the idea that I can’t unsee you in that lingerie you were wearing earlier. If I’m being completely honest, which is the goal here, I don’t want to forget. You’re an amazingly beautiful woman,” he murmured, and his grip on her hand tightened. “I can’t help the fact that I want to kiss you again, but I totally understand that you don’t feel quite the same way about it. I’m telling you it’s okay. I’ll back off.”
Speechless—again—she worked her throat, somehow managing to swallow several times in a row, a minor miracle since her mouth had turned into a desert. What a patient, saintly man she’d married, speaking of deceptions. He’d sold himself as remote, a banger of a professional. A CEO who brooked no nonsense—look how quickly he’d dispatched Craig and solved her problem in one shot.
This sweetness she had no idea what to do with. Other than return a bit of the honesty that seemed to be what he was looking for.
“Warren, I—” Wow, this was not the conversation she’d prepped for, and when she wasn’t in her element, the words weren’t so forthcoming. The fact that he wasn’t pressing her about her suits was throwing her off. “Trust me when I say my hesitation is not you, it’s me.”
“That’s what they all say,” he said with a bit of a smile that coaxed one from her, as well. “It’s fine if you’re not attracted to me in return. This is supposed to be a green-card marriage and I will keep it that way despite my earlier statements.”
“Not attra—” She choked on that so hard that she coughed, sputtering around the rest of the syllables until her throat cleared. “That’s patently ridiculous. Please, sit in your chair.”
She couldn’t think with him crouched at her feet like Romeo come to court her. Romance wasn’t a part of her world, nor could it be, no matter how much she yearned to have that between her and Warren.
It wasn’t happening. And he needed to understand why.
When he’d taken his seat, she dragged air into her lungs and watched him as she launched into the short version of how she’d met Bryan. To his credit, he listened without interrupting or asking what in the blazes any of this had to do with him.
She’d get there. “Our relationship was fantastic, at first. He showered me with gifts and compliments. I was so in love. After two months of dating, he asked me to move in with him because he couldn’t stand the thought of being apart. It was too soon, but I walked into that willingly.”
That was the part she couldn’t forgive herself for. She’d had reservations but swept them aside for the romance of a man being so caught up in her that he couldn’t live without her.
The changes had been small, at first. He’d murmured that he loved her so much that a thing like passwords shouldn’t come between them and given her his. Of course she’d reciprocated, and then at odd times her phone wasn’t where she’d left it. Once she’d gone into her laptop’s browser history to find the website where she’d seen a pair of shoes she’d liked and noted several visits to her favorite links that had occurred the day before, when she’d been out to lunch with her mother.
Bryan had been checking up on her, she explained to Warren, and when she confronted him about it, he got angry. Demanded to know what she was accusing him of and then got upset that she didn’t trust him. That was the beginning of the downward spiral that had gotten uglier, but she’d gone along because he always turned it back on her.
“Everything that happened was my fault in some way,” she said quietly. “Even when he hit me.”
And that was when her voice broke. She’d gotten through most of it pretty well, reciting the facts by rote as if they’d happened to someone else, and in some ways, they had. She wasn’t that naive anymore, nor did she trust so easily. She was taking steps to become a permanent resident of the United States. If she could, she’d give up every bit of her Australian blood and embrace the safety she’d found here.
“He hit you?” Warren’s voice had gone tight. “On purpose?”
She nodded and told him the unvarnished truth. “It was in a fit of rage because he’d found out that I went to a party for work that I hadn’t told him about. I shouldn’t have gone, but Craig strongly encouraged me to make nice with the senior partners if I wanted to get better assignments.”
“You should have called the police is what you should have done.” Warren’s hands had clenched into his lap but he uncurled them and gripped the armrests of his wicker chair. “Please tell me he’s in jail.”