Free Seduced: The Unexpected Virgin by Emily McKay Page A

throat. He watched the delicate muscles in her neck shift beneath her skin as she swallowed. There was something innately erotic about watching her drink. Something about just being with her that soothed him.
    Yes, she got in his face about Hannah’s Hope, but he never felt like she was desperate for a chunk of him, the way he sometimes felt with people. That only added to her appeal. Only reinforced the gut-wrenching desire he felt for her.
    Since she didn’t say anything, he kept talking. “I’ve found women are a lot like tequila. When you’re a musician, there’s a lot of them around. Like cheap tequila, sometimes you indulgewithout lingering over them. Something you do just because it’s there and it’s available.” He rolled the tumbler between his palms. “I loved my wife and I never once cheated on her, I was never even tempted. Why would I drink a shot of cheap tequila just because someone handed it to me when I had something worth savoring back at home.”
    He looked at her then, his expression darkening. He took another drink of the Patron and then asked as if it was only just now occurring to him, “Does that analogy offend you?”
    She thought about it for a second, tilting her head to the side as she considered. While she could see how it might offend some people, it didn’t bother her. “My father used to say that women are like Eskimos. You’ve heard the myth about Eskimos having forty words for snow? He said women were like that. We have hundreds of words for emotions. But men don’t. They describe women like possessions because they have no other way to convey how desperately they need them.”
    Funny, she hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Growing up, her parents lectured her endlessly about staying out of trouble. They were so afraid of her messing up her life and her future by doing drugs or having sex and getting pregnant. Her mother’s lectures had been frequent, redundant and sometimes infuriating. But her father’s words had stuck with her.
    Don’t sleep with a boy just because he says he loves you, he’d told her. That’s just a word boys will use to get you into bed. Wait for the boy who wants you enough that he’s willing to wait. Wait for the boy who can’t tell you how much he loves you. The boy who makes you believe it.
    And she’d never met a guy like that. And so here she was, a virgin at twenty-seven. Honestly, she’d begun to doubt love like that really existed. Yes, her parents were daily proof that it did, but she knew their relationship was rare. Maybe even a throwback to a simpler time and place. Maybe her generation had lost the ability to love so completely. Maybe decades of rising divorce rates and instant gratification had bred it out of them.
    But listening to Ward compare Cara to sipping tequila, for the first time she believed love like that was really possible.
    This man standing before her had faced every temptation imaginable. He had to have had countless opportunities to be unfaithful, but he’d loved his wife too much. Even now, three years later, he loved her too much to live in the house they’d shared together. He couldn’t even discard her sunglasses.
    How could that kind of devotion offend her, no matter what terms he couched it in?
    She may not be able to understand the full depths of his grief. But she could respect it. And she certainly wasn’t going to judge him for it. She hardly knew him well enough to have an opinion on what was a healthy way for him to grieve for his wife.
    Circling back to his earlier request, she said, “If you don’t want Chase to know you’re living in the carriage house, he’s certainly not going to hear it from me.”
    He nodded slowly and smiled. “Thanks.”
    But the smile looked sad. And a little rueful. Like he knew it was time to move on, but still wasn’t sure if he wanted to.
    She buried a wistful sigh. Her reasons for coming now seemed so self-serving in the face of his obvious grief.