moved around looking for the tea and butter, trying to escape how acutely humiliating this was.
“My life was a mess for quite a while, though. Grigor found out I’d been seeing the boy and that I’d gone to the police about Mum. He kicked me out and I moved to London. That was a culture shock. The weather, the city. Aunt Hildy had all these rules. It wasn’t until I finished my A levels and was working that I started dating again. There was a guy from work. He was very smooth. I realize now he was a player, but I was quite taken in.”
The toast popped and she buttered it, taking her time, spreading right to the edges.
“He laughed when I told him why I was nervous.” She scraped the knife in careful licks across the surface of the toast. “He was so determined to be The One. We fooled around a little, but he was always putting this pressure on me to go all the way. I wanted to have sex. It’s supposed to be great, right?”
Pressure arrived behind her eyes again. She couldn’t look at him, but she listened, waiting for his confirmation that yes, all the sex he’d had with his multitude of lovers had been fantastic.
Silence.
“Finally I said we could try, but it really hurt. He said it was supposed to and didn’t want to stop. I lost my temper and threw him out. We haven’t spoken since.”
“Do you still work with him?”
“No. Old job. Long gone.” The toast was buttered before her on two plates, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn and see his reaction.
She was all cried out, but familiar, hopeless angst cloaked her. She just wanted to be like most people and have sex and like it.
“Are you laughing?” Her voice was thready and filled with the embarrassed anguish she couldn’t disguise.
“Not at all.” His voice sounded like he was talking from very far away. “I’m thinking that not in a thousand years would I have guessed that. Nothing you do fits with the way other people behave. It didn’t make sense that you would give me pleasure and not want anything for yourself. You respond to me. I couldn’t imagine why you didn’t want sex.”
“I do want sex,” she said, flailing a frustrated hand. “I just don’t want it to hurt.” She finally turned and set his plate of toast on the island, avoiding his gaze.
The kettle boiled, giving her breathing space as she moved to make the tea. When she sat down, she went around the far end of the island and took the farthest stool from where he stood ignoring the toast and tea she’d made for him.
She couldn’t make herself take a bite. Her body was hot and cold, her emotions swinging from hope to despair to worry.
“You’re afraid I wouldn’t stop if we tried.” His voice was solemn as he promised, “I would, you know. At any point.”
A tentative hope moved through her, but she shook her head. “I don’t want to be a project.” Her spoon clinked lightly as she stirred the sugar into her tea. “I can’t face another humiliating attempt. And yes, I’ve been to a doctor. There’s nothing wrong. I’m just...unusually...” She sighed hopelessly. “Can we stop talking about this?”
He only pushed his hands into his pockets. “I wasn’t trying to talk you into anything. Not tonight. Unless you want to,” he said in a wry mutter, combing distracted fingers through his hair. “I wouldn’t say no. You’re not a project, Viveka. I want you rather badly.”
“Do you?” She scoffed in a strained voice, reminding him, “You said you would decide if and when. That I was the only one who wanted sex. I can’t help the way I react to you, you know. I might have tried with you tonight if I’d thought it would go well, but...”
Tears came into her eyes. It was silly. She was seriously dehydrated from her crying jags earlier. There shouldn’t be a drop of moisture left in her.
“I wanted you to like it,” she said, heart raw. “I wanted to know I could, you know, satisfy a man, but no. I didn’t even get that right. You were still hard and—”
He muttered something under his breath and said, “Are you really that oblivious? You did satisfy me. You leveled me. Blew my mind. Reset the bar. I don’t have words for how good that was.” He sounded aggrieved as he waved toward the lounge. “My desire for you is so strong I was aroused all over again just thinking about doing the same to you. That’s why I was hard again.”
If he didn’t look so uncomfortable admitting that, she might have disbelieved him.
“When we were on the yacht, you said you thought it was exciting that I respond to you.” Her chest ached as she tried to figure him out. “If the attraction is just as strong for you, why don’t you want me to know? Why do you keep—I mean, before we went out tonight, you acted as if you could take it or leave it. It’s not the same for you, Mikolas. That’s why I don’t think it would work.”
“I never like to be at a disadvantage, Viveka. We had been talking about some difficult things. I needed space.”
“But if we’re equal in feeling this way...? Attracted, I mean, why don’t you want me to know that?”
“That’s not an advantage, is it?”
His words, that attitude of prevailing without mercy, scraped her down to the bones.
“You’ll have to tell me sometime what that’s like,” she said, dabbing at a crumb and pressing it between her tight lips. “Having the advantage, I mean. Not something I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Not something I should want to go to bed with, frankly. So why do I?”
He did laugh then, but it was ironic, completely lacking any humor.
“For what it’s worth, I feel the same.” He walked out, leaving his toast and tea untouched.
* * *
Mikolas was trying hard to ignore the way Viveka Brice had turned his life into an amusement park. One minute it was a fun house of distorted mirrors, the next a roller coaster that ratcheted his tension only to throw him down a steep valley and around a corner he hadn’t seen.
Home, he kept thinking. It was basic animal instinct. Once he was grounded in his own cave, with the safety of the familiar around him, all the ways that she’d shaken up his world would settle. He would be firmly in control again.
Of course he had to keep his balance in the dizzying teacup of her trim figure appearing in a pair of hip-hugging jeans and a completely asexual T-shirt paired with the doe-eyed wariness that had crushed his chest last night.
He couldn’t say he was relieved to hear the details of her sexual misadventures. The idea of her lying naked with other men grated, but at least she hadn’t been scarred by the horrifying brutality he’d begun to imagine.
On the other hand, when she had finally opened up, the nakedness in her expression had been difficult to witness. She was tough and brave and earnest and too damned sensitive. Her insecurity had reached into him in a way that antagonism couldn’t. The bizarre protectiveness she already inspired in him had flared up, prompting him to assuage her fears, reassure her. He had wound up revealing himself in a way that left him mistrustful and feeling like he’d
