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His eyes dropped to her lips and her body hummed with awareness. “You do, do you?”

“Mmmm.”

His hand shifted to her hip and she closed her eyes on a rush of need. “Tell me, agape, do you think anyone has ever had sex in this room?”

Her eyes flared wide and her lips formed a perfect circle of surprise. “I—no—probably not.”

His grin was pure, alpha brilliance. “Good. I like being the first at things.”

And in one deft movement, he removed her sweater and tossed it across the room, his mouth crashing to hers with desperate, passionate longing…

CHAPTER 6

THE QUESTION HAD BEEN hovering at the recesses of his brain for two days, and two blissful, sensual nights, but he’d avoided asking it because it felt somehow wrong. As if by digging deeper into the confession she’d made over dinner he’d be breaking down a barrier they’d agreed to hold in place.

He’d always been a curious person. As a child, he’d driven his nannies crazy because he kept breaking things around the house. Not because he was inherently destructive, but because he wanted to understand how they worked. And if pulling apart a fridge was the only way to understand the cooling mechanism, so be it.

Chloe was infinitely more attractive than a fridge, and about a thousand times more mysterious as well, so this question had been busily washing through him for more than forty-eight hours and finally came out of his lips, spoken like a command.

“Tell me about him.”

Lying naked in his bed, body sheened in a hint of perspiration after hours of making love, she shifted, frowning, eyes heavy from exhaustion. He reached over and brushed an imaginary strand of hair from her cheek, just to touch her, to feel the softness of her skin.

“Why?”

He was glad she didn’t pretend to misunderstand. There was only one ‘him’ hovering like an elephant in the room.

“Morbid curiosity?”

She sighed, eyes lifting to his, torture in their depths, so his whole body seemed to catch fire at the same moment. “Did he hurt you? Did he fucking hit you or something?”

“No. No, he was never violent.” She gnawed on her lower lip in a way that almost succeeded in distracting him. But this was too big. Too important.

“Tell me,” he implored.

She breathed out heavily. “It’s hard to talk about.”

He didn’t even consider giving her an ‘out’. He wanted to hear this. All of it. And so he waited while she ordered her thoughts, rifled through her heartbreak.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said, shaking her head a little. He moved closer to her, bracing his body to hers, still not telling her he didn’t need to know. Because he did.

“Jaxon was…my first,” she said, eyes lifting to his. “We were high school sweethearts. We did the long distance thing while I was at uni. We were together a really long time. I loved him. I trusted him.” Bitterness flooded the words. He stroked her hip, trying to focus her mind on the present. “He proposed, I said ‘yes’. We had a goddamn engagement party,” she whispered. “With all our family and friends. It was one of the happiest nights of my life. Until it wasn’t.”

Dimitrios’s heart stammered. “What happened?” The words were drawn from him, cold and ruthless. He was bracing for whatever she was going to say, knowing it would be worse than he imagined.

“He was making out with someone else in a broom closet. Not just making out. Having sex.” She covered her face with her hands so her words emerged muffled. “They must have been against the door, because it came off its hinges, smack bang into the middle of the restaurant. Both of them almost completely naked, a tangle of limbs and sweat and pink cheeked and oh my God, Dimitrios. I can’t even tell you…”

He swore then. “At your engagement party?”

“But it wasn’t even…the worst of it was the fact it was a guy. Jaxon’s gay. Not bi. Gay. He was trying so hard to love me, because he didn’t think his family would accept him—which makes me the angriest of all, because his family is amazing and not remotely homophobic. But to think…I was planning our future and he was sleeping around behind my back.”

Dimitrios was temporarily lost for words.

“I don’t care that he’s gay! I care that he lied to me.” She dropped her hands away. “I care that he started to question his sexuality—or maybe he always knew he was gay?—and didn’t have the decency to talk to me about it. To end things with me while he sorted it out. He let me live in a house of cards fantasy world while he fucked around behind my back. And then he had the hide to blame me, saying I should have known. I should have realized he didn’t actually love me.”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“I’ve known him since I was fourteen years old. I trusted him with my life.” Her voice shook. “So you see why I’m not in any rush to get involved with someone else? I will never, ever trust anyone else with my heart. I will never risk it.”