I didn’t understand him. I didn’t understand him at all. I had to clear my throat and pick my fights: this wasn’t one of them. “If you say so. All right. How many people have you dated?”
“Next.”
“No, this is my time. You told me you owed me. Tell me. I’m not going to judge you.” I would, but he’d figure that out later, if he didn’t already realize I was full of shit.
He grunted.
I was pretty sure he knew damn well how full of shit I was.
Unfortunately for him, I wasn’t about to give up. Maybe hewouldleave tomorrow regardless of what he’d promised. Maybe we wouldn’t get a chance to talk like this again if he was in and out of the house, even though that wasn’t how the Trinity worked.
But if there was one thing I’d learned in my life,you never fucking knew shit.
And this was my shot. “Alex, in this moment, you’re in my circle of trust. I’m not going to make fun of you or call you anything. You’re a gorgeous, pretty much perfect man.Physically,calm down, cowboy, your attitude could still use an adjustment.But all jokes aside, how many women have you been with?”
He’d lifted his gaze to the ceiling when I started talking, and it was still there when I was done.
Fine. “Okay, okay, you don’t have to tell me.”
He made a growling noise in his throat before saying, pretty much spitting both syllables out like they tasted bad in his mouth, “Zero.”
“Zero?”
He side-eyed me. “I told you we only marry once.”
No.
No.
Was that possible?
“You”—I pointed at him, scrunching my face up—“haven’t been with anybody ever or anybody recently?” I asked slowly, not sure I was going to believe either.
He turned to look at me, not fucking amused at all. I’d swear he might have even been glaring at me too. “Never.”
I swept my gaze from his face down to the girth of his strong neck, to the shoulders stretching his T-shirt, across his pectorals and flat stomach, to those long legs and the black socks covering his feet.
This GQ motherfucker was trying to tell me he’d never been withanyone?
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
I focused on the muscles in his arms, in the general direction of a midsection that I knew was a masterpiece of an abdomen, and said in the dumbest, most distracted voice of all time, “I’m just….” I was fuckingspeechless.He’d said zero. “For a second, I was wondering how someone that looks the way you look could never have….” I waved my hand at him, still not comprehending how the hell that number was possible.
“Are you complimenting me again already?”
I scoffed. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Why is that hard for you to believe? Why haven’t you been with anyone?”
Of course he’d ask. “Why do you think?”
“Because your grandma probably told you that you needed to wait until you were married, and because you didn’t want to disappoint her, you decided to wait. Then once she was gone, you felt like a fraud lying to people and—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I cut him off. He’d come at me like a fucking hurricane with that. Was it all true? Yes. Did I want to hear him figuring me out like that? No.
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re annoying is what you are,” I muttered.
