“You find me repellent.”
“What—and I truly mean this—the fuck?”
“Oh, give me a break, Gideon.” I shook my head, scoffing. “I know I’m not some sort of catch, okay? Especially with this.” I gestured in the general area of my vagina. “But I know when a guy is interested. They don’t jerk back whenever they touch me. They don’t go out of their way to avoid me. They don’t run the fuck away when I’m naked and spread-eagled on the bed beneath them. You are obviously not interested in me. Not that way.”
He blinked at me, staring into my face like he was worried I was having a stroke. Then he exhaled and sat back, like he’d come to a decision. His voice was a low rumble in the car,vibrating in my bones. “Before I tell you all the things I’ve been wanting to do to you since the moment I laid my eyes on you, I need you to answer a couple of questions.”
Oh.Oh. Oh, my God. I had misread this situationseverely. My throat was suddenly dry. “What questions?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your desire for sex?”
The question from the application. The one where I’d lied. My face flamed, and I tore my gaze away from his to stare out through the windshield. “Is this designed to humiliate me?”
“This is designed to figure out where the fuck we went wrong, Sadie. Answer the question.”
My heart had started beating harder at some point over the past few minutes, and now it thumped against my ribcage like it was trying to escape. “Ten,” I said in a raspy voice.
Gideon let out a short grunt. When he spoke next, it was all gravel. “So, just to be clear, on our wedding night, you didn’t tell me to stop because you touched my scars?”
I blinked, jerking my head to look at him. “What?”
“Your hand touched my shoulder, and suddenly you wanted to stop,” he grated. “I thought—I left because I thought you found me disgusting. And then I figured I’d forced you to go that far, and…”
I fought for my next breath, frowning at him. “No,” I said, the word exploding out of me. “No, I never felt that.”
“You wanted me to touch you, but you were worried about your body.”
“That’s right.”
He exhaled, leaning his head on the headrest as he closed his eyes. Seconds rolled by, slow as molasses.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked.
“I’m processing.”
“Oh. Do you want me to leave?”
He laughed. “No, babe. I don’t want you to leave.”
Something in the way he said it made me think he wasn’t just talking about getting out of the car.
Then his eyes opened. He turned to face me and said, “We need to lay it all out. All our cards on the table. Are we together? Like a married couple is supposed to be?” He swallowed thickly, then continued in a voice that was a little more strained: “Do you want something different? A partnership, without intimacy, like you said the morning after? What do youwant?”
I stared into his pale blue eyes. The eyes of a man who sat with burn victims because he didn’t want them to feel as alone as he’d felt. A man who dropped everything to help a cousin-in-law who’d run out of gas. A man who was wracked with guilt over feeling like he’d pressured me. A man who hadn’t hesitated to run after me, to hold me until I was honest with him, to listen without judgment.
He hadn’t turned away when I told him about the vaginismus. Hadn’t said anything about the fact that we couldn’t have penetrative sex. Hadn’t lamented the fact that I couldn’t meet his needs. No—his first thought hadn’t been about his own needs at all. He’d thought aboutme. He’d been worried he’d hurt me.
There was only one possible answer to his question.
“You,” I whispered. “I want you.”
GIDEON
She trembled beside me, looking tender and afraid, and I wanted to flay the skin off of my own flesh for hurting her. Find her ex and annihilate him. Tear the world apart and put it back together in the shape she most desired.
Anything—I’d do anything for her.
TWENTY
