“No!” She lowered her hand from her pretty face. But still refused to look him in the eye as she confessed, “I’m avirgin. A twenty-two-year-old virgin.”
Lydia
Ever wonderedwhat it would feel like to detonate a bomb? With your mouth?
Well, I’m here to tell ya. Not great. My heart pounded too fast and far too hard.
It felt like all of my internal organs were imploding inside my body as Artyom Rustanov gaped at me for several century-length seconds. Letting me know I’d shocked the hottest person I’d ever seen into complete silence.
“You have been with no other?” he finally asked.
Probably hoping he’d heard me wrong.
“Not on purpose,” I assured him. “I was just... busy, I guess, during high school. I was in all these clubs. And I had to keep my grades up, which is kind of hard when…”
I stopped myself there. No way did I want to tell the finest hockey player on the planet about the neurological glitch in my head that made it hard to read basic sentences. It was bad enough that I had no idea what was in that contract I’d signedbecause I’d been too prideful to ask for the hours it would take me to read the blocks and blocks of legalese out loud while running a finger underneath each line of text.
“When you don’t have a lot of time,” I finished on a weak note.
He shook his head. “I cannot believe this.”
Grade-A shame burned me up worse than the university-wide flu I’d caught last winter.
Okay, this was a mistake. Not the part where I decided not to dose him with whatever was in that packet Paul gave me. But the part where I agreed to come back to Artyom Rustanov’s hotel room, knowing full well that I did not have the experience points to psychologically handle going to bed with this hockey god.
I hadn’t come up here to finish Paul’s plan. No, I’d come because, for once, I wanted something for myself. A night with a guy so far out of my league it was laughable. Someone who made my skin tingle just by looking at me. For the first time in my dull, dutiful life, I wanted to be selfish. To take something bright and shiny, just because I could. Except now, my impulsive decision was settling like a pile of stones in my gut.
Saying yes to his grown-up proposal had been a mistake. A terrible, horrible mistake.
“I’m just going to go.” I set the sparkling water down and headed for the door. “I’m so sorry I bothered you instead of letting you go home with someone else.”
“Lydia…” he said behind me.
I didn’t turn around to answer him. It would have been impossible to speak anyway, considering my skin was meltingoff my head like that last villain scene in my father’s favorite movie,Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“Lydia!” Yom called out again.
Then, suddenly, he was in front of me. Like a vampire.
Wait a minute… “Are you a vampire?” I asked.
“What?” His brows furrowed.
“I mean, that would explain a lot. The easy seduction, the moving so fast, and the whole accent. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first American to mistake a Romanian accent for…”
Before I could finish, Artyom pursed his lips and said, “I am not vampire, Lydia.”
But then his exasperated look disappeared, and he stepped closer, erasing the space between us.
“I will admit there are many things on you I would like to suck. However, your blood is safe from me.”
My mouth dropped open. “Wait, you still want to…? Even though I’m a…?”
God, I was such a dweeb. I couldn’t even say the words out loud.
But I didn’t have to say them.
“Da, I still want to,” Artyom answered, his voice husky. “And because you are not experienced, we must take everything very slow, okay?”
