‘You’re on a ledge?’
‘Oh, yeah. A big one.’
‘And you wish you weren’t?’
‘On the contrary, I’m kind of excited.’
‘Are you?’
She nodded. He watched, fascinated, as her hair shifted, then dropped his gaze to her breasts. They were truly stunning. His pants strained.
‘Yeah. I think so.’
Sensual heat was throbbing through him but there was amusement too. She was unlike any woman he’d ever known, so artless, but charming, and incredibly likeable. Alarm bells sounded in the back of his brain, and he heeded them. He didn’t do ‘likeable’. It was the nice girls who would get hurt the worst by men like him. He wasn’t going to risk it. Not with Sienna, and not because Luca had warned him off, but because he’d seen what had happened to his mother, how she’d been the quintessential nice girl, too trusting, too innocent, and she’d been completely destroyed by his father.
‘Why don’t you tell me why you came here?’
She lifted one hand from the glass, tucking that stray clump of hair behind her ear. The action was enough to release a hit of her fragrance—hair conditioner, perfume, hormones—reminding him, powerfully, of the night they’d shared. He was conscious of his body tightening, his arousal starting to strain against the flimsy material of his sports shorts.
‘Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?’
He’d forgotten about that. ‘I was getting ready to go for a run.’
‘Oh.’ She nodded, but there was a distracted expression on her face. ‘Firstly, I’ve been thinking. And I guess I owe you an explanation after all.’
He stared at her blankly.
‘You didn’t know I was a virgin.’ She darted her tongue out, licking her lower lip. Was she trying to give him a stroke? ‘And I didn’t know who you were that night, besides being a friend of Luca’s—’
Luca. Cristo. Your best friend.
‘But I do now. I looked you up online. I get what you were saying to me. That whole “notch on the bedpost” thing is no joke with you.’
Why did he wish, more than anything, that he could deny it? Why did he want to tell her that, in fact, he hadn’t slept with anyone since her—his longest bout of celibacy since he’d first discovered the wonders of sex.
‘Sex seems to be a bit like a sport with you.’
He couldn’t help it. He laughed, but at her look of pique he silenced himself, nodding encouragingly. ‘Go on.’
‘Sex is meaningless for you. That’s why you reacted so badly when you realised I was a virgin, because you thought losing my virginity to you would equate to the sex meaning more to me than you wanted it to. Right?’
He didn’t deny it. After all, that had been part of it, but what he couldn’t confess to her was that Luca had forbidden him from pursuing Sienna, a detail that had weighed on his mind equally.
‘But it didn’t,’ she rushed to reassure him. ‘I liked having sex with you, but that’s all it was for me as well. The dreams I’ve been having about you are not about your mind, believe me.’
Another laugh, short and sharp. He resisted asking what the dreams entailed—but only just.
‘The thing is, I want to have sex again. With you.’
It was the last thing he’d been expecting, and the response was immediate. His body jerked to attention, his mouth went dry, his heart began to thump hard against his ribs, and he had to count to ten just to stop himself from pulling her to the floor here and now.
‘Actually, I think I kind of need to have sex with you, so that I can stop thinking about it and get on with my life,’ she said with a hint of resentment.
It was a living nightmare. A cruel and unusual punishment. That this woman would step into his office and offer herself to him on a platter, when he had sworn to his friend that nothing would happen between them. He couldn’t do this. But hell, how he wanted to.
‘It’s not possible.’
Her eyes dropped to the floor, shielding her emotions from him.