She giggled, pressed one last kiss to his lips, and propped herself up on her elbows. She’d only moved an inch or two, but the air between them felt empty and cool.
“You still owe me some answers, remember?”
“No,” he teased. “My brain isn’t working anymore. I wasn’t kidding.”
“Come on,” she said, a playful glimmer in those deep brown eyes. “Let’s start with your first kiss.” Zander held her gaze, feeling grateful once again that he was able to answer the questions for himself now. He was getting to know her, and he wanted her to know him as well, even if she did have his name wrong for now.
“My first kiss was at a party in seventh grade. I kissed a girl named Julie, who said she liked me.”
“That’s cute,” Kat said.
“Yeah, but I also kissed this girl Brenda that night too. That one was a dare.”
“Two kisses with two different girls on the same night?” she said, coating her tone with shock.
Zander grinned. “Yep.”
“So you started earning your playboy status at a young age then.”
The comment gave Zander pause. Perhaps she knew a little more about the Benton brothers than she led on. A dart of discouragement snuck in; just how was she supposed to fall for the real Zander if she had preconceived ideas about who he really was?
“I’m nowhere near the kind of playboy they make me out to be. The tabloids like to create labels and then support those labels with imbalanced media to prove themselves right.” Sure, he was sounding jaded now, but even Duke would say the same thing if he cared enough about shedding the image. At this point, his twin brother was fine to let people hold onto their assumptions.
“What about serious relationships? Have you had many of them?”
Zander shook his head. “Just one.”
Kat raised a brow. “Me too. Tell me about yours and I’ll tell you about mine.”
Zander licked his lips, catching hints of Kat’s strawberry lip gloss, and sighed. “It’s not the most romantic topic,” he said with a laugh. “But normally, we’d already know all of this about each other.”
“Right.”
“I fell fast and hard for a girl named Monica.
We talked about getting married one day, owning a home with a yard and having kids down the road.” He let his mind drift back to the moment he’d strode on into the jewelry shop ready to buy the biggest rock he could find.
“I was just twenty-two, and not really aware of how things worked. None of my siblings had gotten married, of course. But without really talking about dates or a timeframe, I set out, bought a ring, and proposed to her in front of her whole family.
“It hadn’t come as a surprise to them. Heck, I’d asked her dad for her hand in marriage and planned it so they’d all be there.”
He chuckled in retrospect, freed from the pain the recollection used to bring. “Monica, on the other hand, she was not expecting that. She sat there staring at me for like…I swear it was thirty full seconds of silent shock.”
More laughter came, especially when he saw the look on Kat’s face. With her forehead scrunched up and her eyes wide, she looked horrified.
“So what did she say?”
“She said no.”
Now they both laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Kat apologized. “It’s just…you’re making it comical on purpose.”
“It is comical. I was an idiot.”
She slapped his arm playfully. “No, you weren’t, now stop smiling about it so I can stop too. I’m taking emotional cues from you, you know?”
“You are, huh?” He liked that. Liked this, all of it. Spending time with Kat, talking freely about his past. “I guess you could say that…that incident fed that guarded side of me. Those cautious tendencies. It made me want to be more aware. To never get caught off guard again, if that makes sense.”
