Oh, Theos, how he wished it was the first time. How he wished those other moments, those other women, those cold, selfish encounters, had not been. But he could not erase his past from reality. Only from his mind.
“I don’t think we have as much to worry about as you might imagine.”
“You don’t?” she asked.
“No. I have always believed in making plans. When I decided to marry, I knew I would need to have the skills a husband is required to have to satisfy his wife. More than a teenage boy would need with a woman who was not even a lover. So I have done some reading. I am also gifted with singular focus. When I am in bed with you I will apply both my knowledge and my focus to you entirely, at the exclusion of everyone and everything else. A man who has had a lover every day for the past eighteen years, but only has a tenth of my focus and perfectionism could not come close to satisfying you as I will.”
Her eyes darkened, irises shrinking to a gold line around a pool of black. Her breath shallow, the pulse at the base of her delicate throat pounding. Yes, she was a woman aroused. A woman who wanted this. Wanted him.
A virgin.
Strangely he found that revelation to be disturbing. A vague and unsettling parallel. Considering that he felt his very touch was a violation of her innocence. Emotional innocence was all he’d been betting on. It seemed especially disturbing, underlining the point, that she was innocent in this way, as well.
He was not. No matter how many years stood between him and those other women, him and that time in his father’s house, he carried the evidence on his soul. Dirt that would never come clean.
And he had tried. He’d expected some sort of feeling of absolution. Sins washed white as snow when he’d helped to destroy the wicked empire his father had built. When he’d helped to free countless women and men from the trade. And yet, even when that was finished, he’d looked inside of himself and he’d still seen the monster.
There was nothing clean in him. Some stains stayed forever. And he had to be mindful of that. Of the fact that no matter how much had changed around him, not enough had changed in him.
But he wouldn’t back out now. He couldn’t. Not when she was looking at him like he was the best present she’d ever got.
Another testament to her innocence. Her naïveté. She didn’t know what she was asking for. Didn’t know the man that she was about to make love with. He should tell her. Who he was, where he was from. About all the life he’d lived before he’d walked through the wrought iron gates of the Holt Manor and became Ajax Kouros, leaving his real name, his life, his connections with Greece’s most notorious drug and human trafficker far behind him.
He should tell her how he hadn’t been a captive of that man, no, he was that man’s son. He shared his genetics. He’d lived in the mansion, worn suits, driven cars, bought with money dripping with the blood of innocents.
No, he hadn’t known better. But it didn’t matter in the end. It was still what had created him.
And that night, he’d come face-to-face with a choice: embrace the monster, or leash him, shoving him down and moving forward, half a man, but a decent human being. He’d chosen to be decent.
But it didn’t mean the monster wasn’t there. It didn’t mean it didn’t prowl inside of him, waiting for a chance to escape and devour everything in its path. The monster who remembered what it was like to live only for yourself, to taste excess. He would kill it if he could. Instead, he’d spent years trying to choke it out, making it weak. Leaving it forgotten. Starving its appetites.
But tonight, it was just beneath his skin. Claws digging in, threatening to tear its way through his flesh. And he didn’t want to put it back in the cage. Tonight he wanted to let the beast free. Wanted to sate that appetite.
No. He would not. It would be unthinkable.
“Do you think you can handle me?” he asked, putting his hands on her cheeks, looking at her eyes.
A smile curved her lips. “I was going to ask you the same question.”
He hesitated, unsure of where she would want him to start. What he should do. Still, a part of him wanted to protect her. Give her something sweet and unchallenging. A few moments in bed to consummate the marriage, dispense with her virginity and his celibacy and move on.
But then there was the beast. And Ajax feared if he made the wrong move he wouldn’t be able to hold that part of himself back any longer.
Leah took the choice from him.
She kissed him, hard, deep, devouring, her tongue sliding against his, teeth scraping his bottom lip. Her fingers were forked through his hair, her body pressed hard against his.