negate all the progress she’d made. Casting a sidelong glance his way, to that devilish smile and waiting stare, the temptation proved too much to resist. Her eyes squeezed shut and she fessed up in a rush of breath. “I’m thinking you’re the first notch in my bedpost.”
There! That wasn’t so bad. It was freeing, in fact. And—
Her eyes blinked open as Nate froze beside her, every muscle in his body gone taut and his breathing at an abrupt halt.
Her chin pulled back. Not quite the “partner-in-crime” kind of response she’d hoped for.
He couldn’t be insulted. But now that she thought about it, she wouldn’t feel great about being described as a notch either.
“You weren’t a virgin.” The words rasped out more plea than question or statement.
Momentarily stunned, Payton could practically feel his cold dread at the thought she’d saved something so special for him. That the night he’d given her on condition it be casual be so spectacularly significant. That she’d deceived him.
“No!” Her hands flew to the sides of her face as she shook her head in vehement denial. “I wasn’t a virgin, I promise! I meant ‘notch’ like uncommitted. Sex for sex’s sake.” The beginning of her reckless adventure. He didn’t need to know how special being with him truly was to her. After today it would never be an issue again. She wouldn’t let it be. “Don’t panic, please.”
Nate’s relief was a palpable thing, like a rush of air back into the room, the return of pressure with a whoosh.
“I wasn’t panicking,” he scoffed, pushing to one elbow on his side. “Pretty little princesses don’t make me panic. Especially not when they are…” he lifted the sheet for dramatic effect, offering a quick leer at her prone body before meeting her eyes again “…naked.”
Relief washed through her at the ease with which he recovered, but a lingering tension remained and his expression turned serious. Concerned.
“Are you okay about this, Payton?” Catching a wild curl with his finger, he pushed it over her ear. Let his mouth pull into a crooked twist when it sprang free and bounced back in front of her eyes. “With last night being the only night?”
She took a steadying breath. “I am if we go forward as friends.”
In those first minutes after the kiss became real in the hallway, she might have indulged in a fantasy where there could be more. A little longing or hope. But she’d quickly understood it wasn’t a romance in the making. And though a part of her cared for Nate on a level she couldn’t acknowledge to him, there was another part of her excited by the raw rush of her very own too-good-to-feel-guilty-about night of passion. A night only he could give her. Because she trusted him.
“Friends,” he said as if testing the word out.
“Yeah. I’ve missed you in my life. I don’t want to give you up again.”
Tiny lines etched at the corners of his eyes as he held her stare. “Do you feel like you can go forward from here without this—” he waved a slow hand between them “—getting in the way?”
She knew she could. She’d done it for years before Nate walked out of her life. “I can if you can. Even if you can’t tell if you’ve got a virgin in your bed.”
Brows arching high as he let out a sharp laugh, Nate rocked back, pulling Payton over with him. “Be a while before I live that down, will it?”
She squinted at him from her perch atop his chest. “Probably.”
“Then I better steer this little chat back toward the ego feeding.” Settling against the pillow to get comfortable, he prompted, “So tell me how it is I score bedpost-notch status.”
Payton readjusted around him and let her gaze run the length of his pure masculine perfection, complete with one heavily muscled leg thrown over the sheet, and wondered how he could even ask.
“It’s just it was so…intense without being…serious. It wasn’t candlelight and promises of love everlasting.”
“You don’t like those things?” he asked, running a finger down the curve of her shoulder.
Guiltily she glanced away, then forced her gaze back. “No, I do. I’m sure I would—” If she ever actually felt that forever kind of glow, she would probably love it. If Nate had wanted to give her those things…
Only he didn’t and she knew it. The only thing everlasting in their future was the schoolgirl crush she expected would never quite go away. And a friendship if she was lucky. “What I mean is this was so…hot and it’s never been like that for me before. Impulsive. Exciting.” She felt the blush creeping into her cheeks—held Nate’s gaze anyway, needing him to understand. “No strings. No expectations.”
“Hell, if I’d known that I wouldn’t have worked so hard.”
She let out her own laugh then, swatting harmlessly at his chest. “You know what kind of expectations I’m talking about. The long-term kind.” It would be impossible to go to bed with Nate without some kind of expectation. His name was practically scrawled on the ladies’ lounge wall next to the words “for a good time”. “It’s never been so much…fun. So…free. My other experience wasn’t like this.”
This time it was Nate’s turn to pull back. “Your ‘other experience’? As in singular? I mean, I knew your experience was limited, but that idiot was your first?”
“Nate! Can’t you at least pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about? And he isn’t an idiot.” Clint wasn’t perfect. Far from it. What she’d had with him was polite. It was pleasant. But it hadn’t been deep and it hadn’t been passionate. It hadn’t been real. How could it have been when one of the people in the relationship hadn’t actually existed? Not that Clint ever noticed or cared. But even so, it hardly seemed fair to discuss his lack of creativity and vigor with a man so completely out of his league.
“I can’t believe you gave it up to Clint.”
Payton bristled. Some long-ago disappointment—frustrated and immature—reared its head, lashing out. “Well, you didn’t take it,” she snapped. “I had to give it to someone.”
Nate coughed, his brows crashing down. “Thankfully you never offered.”
Yes, probably a good thing since he’d vanished from her life a few days after she’d decided she wanted him to be the one. She’d finally been ready to screw up the courage and tell him how she felt. Only it was too late. The friendship between them had become a casualty of the fallout with Brandt.
Nate’s finger caught under her chin, urging her focus back to his face. “I think it might have killed me to say no. But I would have had to. You were sixteen.”
“You were only eighteen.”
“Yeah, but there’s a big difference between those ages, Payton. Besides, I was leaving for school and I didn’t ever want to come back.”
Because of people like her brother and his friends. Nate knew plenty about being on the wrong side of the talk, just as she did. And right now, she didn’t
