He shook his head once. “You’re so bloody stubborn.”
She tilted her chin defiantly. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”
“Yes.” He admitted. “But there’s only room for one of us to be stubborn and win.”
“Youarewinning,” she said with a slight shiver. He felt it, and moved closer, warming her with his body. But she wasn’t cold. Not even a little bit. Her shiver had come from the bottom of her chest, from emptiness and despair. “I’m marrying you. You’re getting Charlotte. Isn’t that enough?”
He was silent.
“You don’t need to play with me just because I’m here. This isn’t a real marriage, I’m not really going to be your wife. And if you want to have ‘fun’, it should be with someone else.”
“Is that really what you want?”
“None of this is what I want,” she said quietly. “But I can’t sleep with you just because we find ourselves in this position. I don’t know what happened to you, to make sex so meaningless, but I’m glad I don’t share you view.”
“So you’re saying you’ve never had a one night stand?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“Because it will make your hypocrisy obvious?”
She expelled a frustrated sigh. “Fine. I’ve never had a one-night stand.”
He stared down at her, surprised and confused, and then, finally, stepped back. “I didn’t know. The night we met…you came home with me like you did it often.”
“I was on the rebound,” she reminded him, though that had really had very little bearing on her decision. In truth, she’d been spellbound by him, completely and utterly. And she’d known instantly that if she didn’t spend more time with him, she’d always, always regret it. “My fiancé had cheated on me. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone.”
His eyes narrowed. “I see. And since then…”
“No one night stands,” she said, without wanting to confess that she hadn’t been with anyone else at all.
“Boyfriends?”
“No one serious.”
But it triggered something inside of him, something that shifted his features into a mask of tight control. “Did they meet Charlotte?”
She couldn’t answer that. After all, there had been no boyfriend. No man. No lover. No one.
“None of that matters. I’m marrying you.”
“It matters to me.”
“You’re such a control freak. I’m marrying you but that doesn’t mean I have to answer every single question you have about my life before you. And it doesn’t mean I’m going to jump into your bed and beg you to make love to me. I’m not interested –,”
He made a scoffing sound.
“In letting desire dictate my life,” she finished with a proud tilt of her chin. “Wanting you isn’t enough of a reason to sleep with you.”
He crossed his arms. “And I’m not interested in an open marriage. If you seriously think I’d turn a blind eye while you see other men…”
“I’m not interested in any man right now.”
It was obviously an unsatisfying answer, but he moved on. “But you’re happy for me to screw around behind your back.”
Her skin paled and her heart stopped. After Eric, the prospect held a particular kind of pain. “Not behind my back,” she whispered. “That was the worst part of it, you know.” And suddenly she was back in the past, back at the point of time when Eric had admitted, finally, that he’d been cheating. “If he wanted to be with her, he should have just told me. Being lied to, being gaslit when I confronted him and he insisted he wasn’t seeing her,” she shuddered. “That was the real betrayal.” Any desire had been smothered from existence. She stepped away from Gray easily, clutching her empty juice glass just as the dawn sun spread a wave of muted orange into the base of the sky, making some of the buildings to the east look as though they were made of gold and silver.
“If you’re going to sleep with other women, please just have the courtesy to notify me, so I don’t have to read about it in some gossip blog or whatever.”