CHAPTER 6
Cash
As I waited for Cheyenne to come downstairs for breakfast, I wondered if I should bring up what she’d told me the night before.
I love you.
I didn’t miss the irony in my situation. For months, I’d been doing my best to ignore what I felt for her out of respect for Billy. Yet here I was, in his house, well his old house, cooking breakfast for his baby sister in sweats and a T-shirt that I’d grabbed from the gym bag in my truck thinking about her telling me she loved me. If he could see this, I was pretty sure he’d cut my balls off.
And I couldn’t blame him.
She was perfect, and I was…not perfect. Even if you took my depression and PTSD out of the equation.
It wasn’t that I treated women badly. I would never disrespect anyone, much less someone I was intimate with. But my post-coital demeanor had been described as distant, and cold by several women I’d been with. When they’d used those descriptors, it had hit close to home. That was exactly the way my dad could be.
Sex for me has never been an emotional thing. It’s just a physical act that, while enjoyable, has never made me feel particularly bonded to the person I’m engaging in it with.
Cheyenne is different.
Even at the subconscious level I knew that being with her would be so much more than just physical.
I’m a virgin.
I want you to be my first.
I don’t want to lose my virginity to anyone but you.
The question was, had that just been some sort of drunken fantasy she was playing out, or was it the real deal?
She didn’t really talk about her upbringing that much. But from what she did say, it was clear to me that her grandparents had been very overprotective. She said that every moment of her life was scheduled for her from waking up at six in the morning until her bedtime which was ten at night. It was that way up until she went to college.
I’d enlisted even before I graduated and had never gone to college, but growing up in Firefly, which was a spring break hotspot, I knew that college was a time that young adults went wild. Apparently, that hadn’t been the case for Cheyenne.
From what she’d said, she’d been so concerned about disappointing her grandparents that she hadn’t even had her first drink until her twenty-first birthday. And even then, it had only been one drink.
In the military, you have to go through boot camp. People think it’s designed to break you down, but the truth is that it is designed to condition you. The purpose is to make soldiers that are disciplined and trained to respond without thinking.
It was scientifically proven that it took approximately eight to twelve weeks to train someone to respond like that. Cheyenne had been conditioned for thirteen years. It was no wonder that she hadn’t reveled in her independence when she went to college. She’d basically been bred to live a perfect life.
So, there was a chance that what she’d told me was the truth.
If that was the case, the thought of someone else being her first made me feel sicker to my stomach than I assumed she felt from her hangover. But it couldn’t be me.
No matter how much I wished it could.
“Smells good.”
I turned my head, glancing over my shoulder and saw Cheyenne standing in the doorway. She’d changed into a tank top and sweats and obviously taken a shower. Her skin was dewy, and her damp hair hung down, framing her sweetheart-shaped face.
Turn around, there’s nothing to see here.I tried to convince myself, but my eyes had a mind of their own.
In less than a second, I clocked that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her puckered nipples were visible beneath the thin white cotton of the ribbed tank top. I also noted that her sweats hung low on her hips, showcasing her hourglass figure that had been the star of many of my fantasies.
When my eyes traveled back up to her face, I saw that she was doing some ogling of her own. Her eyes were trained on my backside. She wasn’t the first female to show her appreciation for that particular asset. I had women, on the nightly, grab it, slap it, and even bounce coins off of it. I took the attention in stride and it was actually more annoying than anything else.
But the way that Cheyenne was looking caused something to stir in me. Namely my dick in my sweats.
Attraction had always been a funny thing to me. It wasn’t quantifiable. Sure, people had “types.” But that didn’t mean that was who they’d go home with at the end of the night.