“That’s so cold.”
“I’m being honest, Tanja. As honest as I should have been back then. Maybe if I had, you wouldn’t have married me. Did you really believe we’d have the picket fence, two kids and a dog? End up in side-by-side rocking chairs on the porch?”
“First of all, we should be so lucky as to grow old at all.” She bunched the edge of the blanket beneath her chin, thinking of her father losing her mother when they’d been so devoted to one another. “I didn’t think marriage would be easy, but I thought we’d figure things out as we went along. Mom and Dad got married really fast and had challenges, but they found ways to get through them. They went into it intending to make their life together and made it seem doable, if not simple. That’s what commitment is, right? Committing to figuring out how to stay together while working through stuff?”
“Why did they marry so quickly?” His head turned on the pillow. “Was she pregnant with Zach?”
“The opposite.” She couldn’t help the gossipy chuckle that came into her throat. “They both had really strict parents and were saving themselves for marriage, but couldn’t wait so they had a short engagement. Isn’t that cute?”
Leon didn’t say anything.
“Do not say I should have done the same thing.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“What then?”
Nothing.
“Some things never change.” She was hurt by his silence. She really should have seen how doomed they were from the way he had always shut her out like this. She had tried to give him space, thinking he would let down his guard eventually, but they hadn’t had time and apparently he still didn’t want to open up.
He suddenly came up on his elbow, looming over her. His imposing silhouette pressed her deep into the mattress. There was only a slanting glow from the other room, making it impossible to read his expression.
“I haven’t been with anyone since you.” He threw the words down like a gauntlet.
“Liar.” It was too flabbergasting.
“Believe what you want.” He sounded insulted. “It’s the truth.”
She wouldn’t normally be so rude, but the man had been a sexual animal.
“Did something happen?” she asked with sudden concern. “Are you okay?”
“My mojo is fine, Tanja.” Definitely insulted. “It was a choice.”
“Really.” She couldn’t help that she was so skeptical. “Why would you do that? Or not do it.”
The silhouette of his profile looked to whatever moonlight was sparkling on the distant ripples of the sea.
“I had already done enough things that made me like my father. He had committed so many atrocities... Infidelity felt like the last tawdry straw. If I could hang on to a shred of moral character, if I kept myself from doing that one thing, then for sure I was a step above the human garbage that he was.”
His view of himself was so bleak it made her unutterably sad. “So celibacy was like...a form of self-flagellation?”
“Oh, yeah, I’ve done a lot of that,” he assured her with a ripple of self-deprecating amusement in his tone.
She burst out laughing and shoved at his shoulder, not moving him an inch. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
“I wouldn’t know. No one admits to doing it.” His teeth flashed.
This, she thought with a warm glow. This was the man who had so dazzled her that she had been unable to say anything but yes to his proposal. She’d been willing to do anything he suggested. The things they’d done on his sailboat? Whew.
She grew very aware of the rumpled blankets between them and the intimacy of the low light and the warmth off his body. His scent and solid strength. His weight tipping her toward him on the mattress.
Maybe that was simply his magnetism pulling at her.
He was looking at her. When he spoke, his tone was somber.
“It’s fine that you’ve had lovers while we were still married.” He smoothed a wrinkle from the blanket between them. “I didn’t expect you to be faithful. That was my own baggage I was working through.”
“I...” Was she really going to admit this? “What makes you think I’ve had lovers?”
A silence crashed over them, so loud it might have been a five-alarm fire bell.
“Why wouldn’t you? You don’t need punishing,” he said evenly.
She folded her fingers over the edge of the blanket, loath to admit what a spell he’d cast, one so strong she was still under it.
“Tanja.” He sounded so grave he made her heart shiver in her chest. When his finger looped to pick up a tendril of her hair, a tingling sensation swept down her nape into her breast. “Please don’t tell me I hurt you so badly that you couldn’t trust men. If you denied yourself the pleasure of sex because...” He swallowed. “It really would be too much for even my fairly impervious conscience to bear.”
“It wasn’t that.” She licked her lips, hyperaware of his finger twirling that length of hair. “I mean, I was pretty disenchanted with men and the institution of marriage, but I had to work while I was in school. I didn’t have time to do more than go for coffee. Anything more than that would have meant I’d have to free myself of you first and...”
This part was hard to admit because Leon had set a certain bar. No one had made her feel the way she was feeling right now, and he was only touching her hair. Since when were there electrical currents in strands of hair that ran straight to erogenous zones, lighting her up like a Christmas display?
“I never met anyone who—” tempted me the way you did “—seemed worth going to the trouble of filing the papers. You didn’t break me, Leon.”
“Good,” he said after a pulse beat. “I don’t want that kind of power.”
“Too much responsibility?” she guessed in a voice that was strained by the reactions and emotions she was trying to stifle.
“Yes.” He spoke frankly, but gently. His fist was resting on her shoulder and his fingertip extended to play with her ear. “You weren’t even tempted to have a casual hookup, though? You’re so passionate.”
“Not really. Not if I can go five years without sex,” she joked weakly.
“You’re very passionate. That hasn’t changed.” His tickling touch dipped into the hollow beneath her ear, making her scalp tighten. “This may come as a surprise to you, but most people do whatever I tell them to do. You’ve always pushed back on me. It’s frustrating, but I have to respect you for it.”