TWOWEEKSLATER, Rory faced her latest date outside a café on the Left Bank, where they’d had a long dinner and drink during which she’d felt...nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Trouble was, she could no longer remember if she’d ever felt anything on these dates of hers. Was this a new thing, now that she knew what shecouldfeel? Or had it always been like this and she just hadn’t known any better?
“Are you sure you don’t want to come back to mine?” he asked in the charmingly accented English she’d been enjoying all evening, flashing his dimples at her from beneath his floppy hair. “I’ve a bottle of wine I’d love to share with you, Rory.”
The dimples were why she’d gone on a date with him in the first place. And the way he said her name, rolling the firstRso it almost sounded likeLori,had seemed almost unbearably cute when she’d offered it to him like a ripe peach outside the Musée D’Orsay. He was from northern Italy, was in graduate school of some kind or another in Paris—he had told her all about it at great length, but she’d been surreptitiously checking her phone—and a couple of weeks ago, Rory would have loved nothing more than to let him take her home to whatever flat he lived in.
Wine or no wine.
She would have rolled around with him all night long and taken great pleasure in the provocative things she could say to him while they did that. Bold, careless, contradictory. He would tell her how amazing the sex was, she would smile mysteriously and talk aboutthe sensualandthe eroticwhile never coming close to any climax herself, and he would follow her around for months thereafter. Begging for another go, which she would deny him.
Rory had always liked to think of herself as madcap and mercurial, and that was why she liked to play with boys but rarely get serious. But now she wondered if all along, her body had been hoping she’d wise up and stop wasting her time withpuppies.
She had been on three other such dates since Conrad.
All of them cute, just like this one. Boyish. Eager to please and impress.
She hadn’t bothered to have sex with a single one of them.
Because every time she drank a little more wine and told herself she might as well, because she was young and free and in Paris, she had Conrad in her head.
That navy blue gaze, pinning her to his wall. And her clit would light on fire all over again, and she would have to clench down hard to keep herself from coming just fromthinkingabout him—
And every time that happened, the prospect of getting fully naked with some boy who would do nothing for her at all...paled.
“I won’t change my mind,” she said, smiling to take the sting off it.“Au revoir.”
And then she walked away quickly, throwing herself into the late night crowd milling about on the cobbled stones of Rue Bonaparte, so there could be no further wrangling.
Conrad had wrecked everything. He’d wreckedher. She should never have let him touch her.
She glared at the old abbey across from the café, rising into the Paris night, because it made her think of him. But then, so did everything else. Even walking up a famous street toward the Seine, which had nothing to do with him. Ever since she’d staggered out of Conrad’s converted church with her cleaning supplies and her shirt on backward, she’d been...flustered. Days later. Two weeks later she still wasn’t right.
Rory hadn’t felt like posting, for once. She hadn’t felt like much of anything, for that matter. She spent more time than she wanted to admit feeling listless and a whole lot less interested in the brand she’d been building. Because what even wasa brandwhen she was nothing but one person trying to pretend social media likes were the same as...well, as anything? When all she could think about was one person and whether or not he, personally, liked her.
Or ever could.
Even if he had threatened to call the police on her.
She went out on dates, because they’d already been scheduled, but it was always the same. They were nothing but a waste of her time.
Puppies,she could hear Conrad say, as if he lived in her head and had complete control of her clit.
She felt that same jolt that she should have been used to by now, out there on the historic street in the thick, warm, summer dark.
All she thought about was sex. And that locked room of his. And the amusement in those navy blue eyes of his. The magic in his fingers. And she thought he might actually have wrecked her. For good.
Because she didn’t understand how she was supposed to survive now that sheknew.
Now that she was entirely too aware that there was a world filled with pointless men who didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with her body. And that she happened to possess the name and address of the one man who knew all too well.
And had proved it.
Tonight, the weather was mild. There were people strolling down the boulevards, talking happily, probably all on their way to have mind-numbing, life-altering orgasms with each other. Meanwhile Rory could do nothing but brood her way along the Seine, everything inside her clamoring for one more taste of Conrad Vanderburg.
Who, by now, she also knew a whole lot more about.