They both smiled at her small joke that did nothing to dissipate the emotional tension between them.
He put his big hands on her shoulders, his thumbs brushing along her collarbone, the hold possessive like before. And just like earlier, she found a new unexpected part of her that liked that. A lot.
“Demyan.” His name just sighed out of her.
She didn’t know what she meant by it. What she wanted from him.
He didn’t appear similarly lost, his gaze direct and commanding. “You say you’ve never had sex. I want to know what that means.”
It took two tries to get words past her suddenly constricted throat. “Why does it matter?”
“You can ask that?”
“Um, yes.” Hadn’t she just done?
“You are mine.”
“Three dates,” she reminded him.
“Love at first sight,” he countered.
“You… I…”
“We are going to make love. What I want to know is what you have done to this point.” His thumbs continued the sensual caress along her collarbone. “You are going to tell me.”
“Bossy much?”
“Only in bed.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him, was even less sure if it mattered. She wasn’t worried about standing up for herself. She’d never conformed when it counted, no matter how much easier it would have made her life—especially with her family.
Right now she found she wanted to answer his question, needed to. Still, she kept it general. “Heavy petting, I guess you’d say.”
“Be more specific.”
“No.” Heat crawled up her neck.
He shouldn’t care, should he? Virginity wasn’t an issue for modern men. Or modern women, her inner voice mocked her, and yet you are a virgin.
He bent so close their lips almost touched. “Oh, yes.”
Thoughts came and went, no words making it past her lips until she made a sound she’d never heard from her own vocal cords before. It was something like surrender, but more.
It was sexual.
The air between them grew heavy with the most primal kind of desire, pushing against her, demanding her acquiescence.
In a last-ditch desperate bid for space, she shut her eyes, but it did no good. She could feel his stare. Could feel his determination to get an answer.
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.
She’d been only eight when her dad died, but she’d believed her parents loved each other deeply and forever. It was her mother’s constant criticism and unfavorable comparisons later that made Chanel realize Beatrice had not approved of her husband any more than she did their daughter.
“They were not compatible.” Demyan said it like he really knew—not that he could.
“I thought they were, when I was little. I was wrong,” she admitted.
“We aren’t them. We are compatible.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know more than you think I do. We belong together.” There was a message in his words she couldn’t quite decipher, but his dark gaze wasn’t giving any hints.
“I told you I was a sure thing.” Though she wasn’t sure that was true. Part of her was still fighting the idea of total intimacy, especially at the cost of opening herself up like this. “You don’t have to say these things.”
“I am not a man who makes a habit of saying things I do not mean.”
“You never lie.” He’d as good as said so earlier.
Something passed across his handsome features. “I have not lied to you.”
His implication was unbelievable. “You really plan to marry me. After three dates?”
“Yes.” There was so much certainty, such deep conviction in that single word.
She could not doubt him, but it didn’t make sense. Her scientific brain could not identify the components of the formula of their interaction that had led to this reaction.
In her lab she knew mixing one substance with another and adding heat, or cold, or simply agitation resulted in identifiable and documented results.