Free Swept Away by Toni Blake Page B

outside the window. “What do you mean, you haven’t done it yet? You’re actually marrying a guy you haven’t even had sex with?”
    She rolled to face him and he saw her eyes, made out more of her shadowy shape, and loved the sleepy, tousled look of her with a sheet pulled to her waist. Her hair lay messy around her shoulders, which were left silkily bare in another little strappy top he hadn’t quite gotten a good look at before lights out. “For your info,” she said, “there was a time when people in our culture waited until marriage. I know it’s hardly the trend these days, but forgive me if I wanted to be a little... old-fashioned.”
    He flashed a wicked grin and stated the obvious. “Kitten. You’re about the least old-fashioned girl I know.”
    The sound of her sigh carried over to him. “Well, maybe not in some ways, but in others...”
    “Let’s stick to sex,” he insisted before she could go on. “You mentioned you’re not a virgin anymore.”
    She raised her head with a start, her eyes going indignantly wide. “I’m twenty-seven years old! What do you expect?”
    He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m not criticizing—”
    “Of course you’re not, because you dislike virgins so much.”
    Man, she remembered everything. It earned another laugh from him, but he had to get back on track and make his point, because it was important. “I’m just saying that what I know about you and sex kinda tells me that you...”
    She propped up on her elbows, looking thoroughly pissed now. “That I what?”
    Tread carefully here, dude. “That you, uh... well, don’t hold sex to be a... sacred act or anything.”
    She shot back up, directly into the pale beam cast through the window by the security light. Her eyes blazed and her chest heaved within a thin top of light green, the ridges of her breasts bowing from the low neckline. “How dare you!”
    So now he was getting the ‘How dare you.’ Feeling the instant need to calm her down, he made a swift move up onto the bed, grabbing her hands in his. “Honey, honey, honey—I’m not criticizing, really. I don’t treat it like a sacred act, either. It is what it is—what two people do when they’re attracted to each other. I’m just saying it sounds weird to me, if you’ve had sex with other guys, that you wouldn’t just go ahead and do it with the guy you’re marrying, too. Just to... take a test-drive, if nothing else—make sure everything goes okay.”
    With eyes narrowed venomously, she withdrew one hand from his to shove a wayward lock of hair behind her ear. She let him keep holding the other. “You seem to have an awfully vested interest in my impending marriage.”
    The words sank to his gut. He did seem to care an awful lot, now that she mentioned it. So he was honest with her. “I just don’t want to see you end up unhappy.”
    She glowered at him, looking incredulous. “My God, are you listening to yourself? You haven’t seen me for ten years, then you swim up onto my beach today and suddenly think you know enough about me to assume I’m making some sort of mistake?”
    She was right about that. Logically. Only she couldn’t see it from his angle. She couldn’t see the doubt in her expression when she’d talked about this guy earlier; she couldn’t hear the slightly flustered sound to her voice—then, and now. And she definitely couldn’t see the heat that had flashed in her eyes when flirting with him over dinner, the same heat he’d once seen a long time ago. For him, not some other guy. And from a different girl, he might buy some claim about waiting for marriage as a romantic gesture—but not from Kat. He’d never had sex with Kat, but one thing he knew about her instinctively—she loved sex. She was into sex, she wanted sex, she wasn’t afraid of sex. So he just couldn’t believe that if this guy was really the man of her dreams she wouldn’t have hopped into bed with him by now.
    Despite all that, though, he