“Hi.”
As she moved closer, a dark cloud in the sky shifted precisely so that a sudden ray of light coming in through the kitchen windows behind him obscured his expression. “I hope you don’t mind my going through your closet,” she said in a playful voice. “We were in such a hurry to get my clothes off last night that they’re pretty much goners.”
Expecting him to tease her back, when he didn’t say anything, and she still couldn’t quite see his face clearly, those old nerves she always used to have around him started popping back to life.
But that was crazy. There was no way he could have touched her, kissed her, spoken to her the way he had if he didn’t feel the same way she did.
Only, when she finally stepped in front of him, he didn’t reach for her, didn’t drag her against him the way she loved so much. And he still hadn’t said a word. Instead, he was looking down at her with an expression of such clear regret that, for a moment, she almost started to worry that she’d made a mistake.
No. She couldn’t have.
Last night, Ian had shown her a hundred times over just how much he cared about her, hadn’t he? First with have-to-have-you sex and then with the care he’d taken in her pleasure until she hadn’t known where one orgasm ended and the next began.
She wanted to say something that would ease the strangely tense air between them, but before she could, he spoke first. “Tatiana, last night—”
“—was incredible.” She lifted her hand to his smooth, freshly shaved jaw. “It was the most beautiful, perfect night of my life.”
“You’re right, it was incredible.” His eyes gleamed with the same fierce emotion he hadn’t been able to hold back when they were making love. “You are incredible.” That was when she realized that he looked positively tormented with every word he spoke...and guiltier by the second. “But you were also a virgin, Tatiana.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Untouched.”
She didn’t know how everything could possibly be going from beautiful to weird so quickly, just that she needed to make it stop. Needed to make him see that things didn’t have to be weird or strained between them. And that she didn’t want him to spend one more second feeling guilty about being her first.
“I thought we already talked about this last night, about the fact that I wanted to do everything we did together. But maybe,” she said when she could see that she still wasn’t getting through to him, “it would help if you knew why I was still a virgin when I could have slept with dozens of guys by now?”
“Tatiana.” Her name was more a growl than anything else, but she wasn’t nearly done making her point—had barely begun, in fact.
“All the guys who wanted to take me to bed were nice men. Good-looking men. Heck, most of them were rich, famous men. But I always knew I would wait to have sex until it wasn’t just sex, but something so much bigger than that. So that’s exactly what I did, Ian. I waited until I fell in love. With you.”
* * *
Just as his body had immediately stilled over hers when he’d realized she was a virgin, now Ian’s heart stopped dead in his chest.
It was one thing to think Tatiana had whispered I love you while falling asleep against his chest. He could have written that off as heightened emotion from all the orgasms, or even pure exhaustion right before she dropped into sleep.
But hearing her say it to him in the clear light of day, her eyes bright and sure...
No, he couldn’t let himself believe her, and he needed to stop the warmth, the longing that had shot through him when she’d said it.
“You don’t love me.”
“I do.”
He didn’t want to hurt her any more than he already had...and yet that didn’t change his boundaries or his limits. If she were someone else, maybe they could have had a fling, just enjoyed each other casually the way he had with other women since his divorce. But Tatiana wasn’t like anyone else. Partly because she was going to become part of his extended family by marriage soon, but mostly because she deserved so much more than a simple no-strings affair with a man who could never give her anything else.
“We’ve only spent a few days together,” he reminded her, “and one night.”
“So what? People fall in love at first sight all the time.”
“Nobody can possibly fall in love that fast,” he insisted, despite how jumbled up his insides had felt from the moment he’d met her in Napa Valley. “You’re just trying to convince yourself that you love me because—”
“Don’t you dare try to say you know how I feel or why I feel it.” Her eyes flashed emerald fire as she moved closer. “I know what I feel, just like I know that you could never have touched me the way you did last night if you didn’t care about me, too. Maybe it’s not love yet for you like it is for me, but there’s something there inside of you for me. Something big. Something real.”
All morning long, he’d gone over and over what had happened between them, trying to figure out what could have driven him to go against everything he’d known was right. In the end, he’d decided it had to have been pure hormones and primal attraction, rather than an emotion Tatiana wanted to call love. And what man on the planet wouldn’t have been infatuated with her beauty, with the sounds she made when she came, with the thrill of being with someone so full of life and boundless dreams?
The last thing he wanted was to hurt her, but at the same time, he needed her to understand without even the barest doubt that he simply wasn’t capable of loving a woman more than he loved his company, his work, the power and the rush of business.
It was one of the hardest things he’d ever have to force himself to do, hurting her now so that he wouldn’t hurt her even worse in the future, as he made himself tell her, “Of course I touched you like that. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t resist you, not after you kissed me. No one could have, Tatiana.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been with way prettier women than me. I’ve seen pictures of the women you’ve been with, not to mention your ex-wife.”
“Those women all bought their faces, their bodies, with high-priced surgeons. But every curve on your body, every expression on your face is you.”
“Okay then, why don’t you tell me—how was sex with those women compared with me?”