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I continued another several yards before stopping and turning on him.

“I am twenty-five years old, Lachlan. I’ve spent most of those years with other people deciding what I could see, where I could go, which doors I was allowed to open, what I was permitted to know, and who I was allowed to become. I’m not escaping all of that so another man can start deciding which parts of my freedom I’m ready to experience.”

His jaw tightened. “I’m not trying to control you.”

“I understand why you stopped.” My anger softened a fraction, but not enough to let him off the hook. “That doesn’t change what you did. You tried to protect my right to choose by making the choice for me—thus giving me no choice.”

The defensiveness disappeared from his face.

He glanced away, dragged a hand over his chin, then looked back at me.

“You’re right. I did.”

There was no excuse attached to it.

That helped.

I turned and started downhill again. Lachlan fell into step beside me.

“I want to be treated like a woman,” I said. “Not an obligation everyone has to manage. I’m finally allowed to make my own choices, and I intend to make them. Some of them may be brilliant. Some may be spectacularly stupid. I may even regret a few, but they’ll still be mine.”

“I understand—I fucked up.”

“And since you are apparently concerned about it, I’m not a virgin.”

His eyes cut toward me.

I kept walking.

“There was someone when I was younger. He lived at the compound. He spent time with me, listened to me, made me believe I mattered to him. I was young enough to think that meant I loved him. Perhaps I did. Or perhaps I loved having someone pay attention to me when almost every relationship in my life was controlled by Ciro.”

Lachlan remained silent beside me.

“He wanted sex. I told him no.” I stepped carefully over a root. “He decided my answer didn’t matter.”

He stopped walking.

I took one more step before turning back to find him standing rigidly with his hands clenched into fists.

“What happened to him?”

“Rafael found me afterward, really torn up. Then he found the man who did it, slit his throat from ear to ear, and left his body in the courtyard as a warning.”

“Good.”

The answer came without hesitation.

I studied him, remembering how fiercely he’d defended the woman Ciro had called merchandise. Her name was Lacey, if I remembered correctly.

Lachlan’s expression remained hard. “I’m sorry the bastard hurt you. I’m not sorry Rafael killed him. If a man did that to my daughter, I’d make damn sure death came after he understood exactly why it was happening.”

There was no pity in his voice, only anger for what had been done to me.

I was grateful for that.

His reaction made it easier to continue, because there was something else I needed him to understand.

“I don’t want you thinking that was the only experience I’d ever had with a man, though.”