Big Love Abroad Page 17

  "Oh. I see. I see." He backed up another step, turned and walked four more paces--I counted, for some reason--and then stopped and turned back. Stared down at the book in his hands. "Well. You still won the bet, so--here." He set the book on the sidewalk at his feet, and then looked up at me. "And really, I just came to give that to you, and to make sure there wouldn't be a problem with the class. Obviously neither of us knew I was your professor when we--when things happened. But now that we're aware, I just wanted to make sure you were okay, with--with what happened. It was confusing, you see. For me, I mean. It seemed like you were...into it, is what it seemed like to me. And then after, you seemed so upset, and I just--I wanted to make sure there was no problem."

  Ian was standing right behind me, listening to everything. I could feel his anger.

  "There's no problem."

  "It seemed like there was."

  I turned and looked back at Ian. He shrugged, and then gestured at Lucas.

  "Looks like you have a superfluity of explanatory outstanding debts," Ian said.

  "Ian--"

  He nodded at the door. "Clearly there's something that needs to be discussed. I'll wait."

  I looked from Ian to Lucas, and back. Jesus. What a mess.

  "You know what, never mind. It's fine. There's nothing to discuss. Never mind." Lucas turned away, glanced back one last time at his book.

  I let him get a few more steps away, almost out of sight, and then I swore and jogged after him, barefoot. "Lucas, wait. Just wait a second." He halted, turned back to me. "I'm sorry, Lucas."

  "I'm the one who should be apologizing. I pushed you into something you weren't ready for." He waved a finger at my still-open doorway, at Ian filling the frame. "And you've got someone waiting."

  "You didn't--what happened with us...Lucas, you didn't push me into it. I went with it voluntarily."

  "Then what happened?"

  I could only shrug. "I don't really know. I still don't know how to feel about it."

  "But it wasn't--it wasn't good, was it?" That was said as part question, part statement.

  "I don't know what it was, Lucas. I really don't. It's not about being blindfolded, or tied up, or...not solely about that. It's about everything. The whole experience. It was...I guess in a way you're right, I wasn't ready for it. But not like you're thinking. I think." I laughed self-consciously.

  "No, that's how I meant it. I'm assuming that's the bloke who had you crying in the rain, and you were crying, Nina. Deny it if you will, but you were crying. And now he's here and I'm guessing you're sorting things with him, which means I--what happened between us was--" he seemed at a loss to explain what it was.

  "See? What was it? It wasn't a rebound, or whatever. It happened, and it overwhelmed me, but I don't regret it and I'm not upset with you. At myself for getting myself into this situation more than anything."

  "There's no situation, Nina. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. You seemed really upset that night, and that was never my intention, obviously."

  "I know. And honestly, I think if circumstances had been different...I don't know. Maybe nothing would be different."

  "I won't lie...I do wish you weren't my student. Or that you didn't have..." his eyes flicked over my shoulder to glance at Ian, "...extenuating circumstances vying for your attention. I like you. God, that sounds absolutely juvenile, doesn't it? You're attractive and intelligent, and you appreciate the same things as I do, which is rather hard to find, I've discovered."

  I felt something in my heart squeeze. "Lucas, you're not making this any easier. You know, in some ways I wish we hadn't had sex. Not because of how I reacted, which is honestly mostly me. I mean, it was a lot to experience all at once, and really intense, but...if we'd gotten to know each other better first, maybe, or--I don't know. I feel like you and I are--"

  "Kindred spirits?"

  "At the risk of sounding like a Lucy Montgomery character, yes."

  "But not kindred enough, right?"

  "Lucas, come on--"

  He held up his hands. "Sorry, I'm being passive aggressive, aren't I?"

  "A little, yeah."

  "A failing of mine, I admit." He rubbed a hand across his jaw, scratched at his beard. "We're going nowhere fast with this conversation, so...I'm going to leave now. I'll see you in class, Miss Herrera."

  I let him walk away, watching him vanish into the shadows. When he was out of sight, I started back up the sidewalk toward my door, and came across the book, still lying where Lucas had set it, on the ground, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. I picked it up, held it in my hands, stared at it for long, long moment, wondering if I'd made a mistake in letting him go.

  I jogged into the shadows. "Lucas! Hold on!"

  There, at the edge of a pool of light cast by a lit window. "What is it, Nina?"

  I pressed the book into his hands. "Keep it. Please."

  He stared down at the book for a long minute. "If you insist."

  "I can't take it, Lucas. Not under these circumstances." I inhaled deeply, because I really wanted to be able to keep the book.

  "I understand." He held it up in gesture, turned and walked away. "I'll see you around, I suppose."

  He was gone again. I turned away, went back to my dorm but didn't go in yet. I stood outside, reflecting. There wouldn't be any going back, now. Something inside me understood very clearly that whatever potential may have existed between Lucas and me was gone now.

  And part of me mourned that.

  We truly were kindred spirits. We saw the world through the same filter, in many ways. He understood my obsession with Regency literature, for one thing, which not many others could or did. He was kind, gentle, intelligent, thoughtful, self-assured, but not all cocky or arrogant. He could make me orgasm a dozen times in twenty minutes--although the exact number and time frame involved was hazy, at best.

  So why had I let him walk away? What was wrong with me? He was here, in Oxford, where I hoped to spend the next several years of my life studying. Even being a student in his class wasn't a huge obstacle. We were close in age, he wasn't my degree advisor, his class wasn't necessary for my degree, neither of us was married...

  I felt him before I heard him. He stood behind me, waiting. "Nina?" The anger was tempered, for the moment.

  "I'm fine."

  "We've been over this."

  "Really."

  "Bullshit."

  "Ian--"

  "Even if you are--which I don't believe for a second--I'm not." A quiet tread of rubber on cement, then the scent of his cologne washed over me, and his heat billowed against my back. "What was that all about? And what's with the book and the bet?"

  "It's complicated," I said.

  "Fucking hell, Nina, that's the problem with you. Everything is fucking complicated. It doesn't have to be. And you know what, it's not really all that complicated, is it? You just don't want to explain, because then you'll have to actually say out loud what happened and what you're thinking and what you're feeling, say it all in actual words, and that scares the bloody hell out of you, doesn't it? I've come a long fucking way to have it out with you, and by god I'm going to. I know it's taken a bit of time, but life isn't as easy as it seems in the movies, is it? So I can't just walk away from a job I just started, one I moved halfway across the world to take, no less. I woke up after a night I thought had cemented something really powerful between us, that there really was...oh fucking hell, I don't know, something. Something real. Not just casual sex, not just fun. Yeah, I saw it, too, I felt it, too. I saw you feel it as clearly as you saw me. And then I woke up and you were gone. Not even a fucking note, like 'sorry, Ian, I can't do this, goodbye.' Just gone. Like, what the fuck, Nina? Who does that? All of your clothes, your toiletries, everything, just gone. Like you'd never even been there in the first place."

  "I'm sorry, Ian--"

  "Sorry doesn't fix shit all, does it, though?" He gestured at the shadows into which Lucas had vanished. "And then, when I
do manage to sort my new job enough to get away and come find you, I discover you've already managed to fuck over some other poor arsehole's heart. It's been what, a month, barely? And you've already moved on from me to someone else and that's over with too? Even for a true-blue heartbreaker, you move fast."

  "I'm not a heartbreaker!"

  "Oh yes you fucking are!"

  The sound of a window opening interrupted us. "Have your row indoors, would you?" an old grumpy male voice shouted, and then the window squealed and slammed closed.

  Ian spun away, dragging a palm down his face from forehead to chin, blowing out a harsh breath. Then, before I could react, his fingers were pinioned around my wrist and he was dragging me toward my door, closing it behind us, propelling me backward, hands now on my shoulders and walking me backward toward the couch. I could only move as he dictated, breath frozen in my lungs, my gaze locked up on his icy, angry blue eyes. His chest was heaving, his fingers digging cruelly into my shoulders.

  "Ian, you're squeezing too hard," I said, shrugging in his grip.

  He immediately let go, eyes narrowing, nostrils flaring, a vein throbbing in his forehead. But then his hands were ascending, sliding, cupping my cheeks with feather-light fragility. He shuffled forward two steps, and now his body was a mountain of hardness and muscle against mine. His thumbs brushed over my cheekbones, and then he curled his index finger under my chin and tipped my head back, and now all I could see was Ian.

  One hand beneath my chin, the other cupping the side of my face, he closed in, lips descending...

  It was a kiss meant to claim. To remind. His lips slanted across mine, his tongue parted my lips, my teeth, slashed over my tongue, his lips moved and scoured. And then he pulled away.

  "Did he hurt you?"

  "No."

  "What happened?"

  "Sure you want to ask that, Ian?"

  He turned away abruptly, and sat down on the couch. "Yes. Tell me."

  I circled the couch, sat a foot away from him on the edge of the cushion. "When I left, I came directly here, to Oxford. It was early in the morning, and I had no room assigned yet, no clue where anything was. I hadn't planned ahead, so I was...mixed up. I was upset. I should have taken a cab, but I wasn't sure how far it was and I didn't want to spend the money. I don't know. It was stupid. I should have just taken a cab. They were right there, but I didn't. I had all this luggage, and I was trying to drag it through the town, but I had no clue where the university was. And then it started raining."

  "And cue the professor."

  "Pretty much. He gave me a ride to the university, showed me the office where I could get my room assigned to me. And...that was it, really. Nothing happened right away. It's not like...it's not like I went right from you to him. I'm not like that. I didn't see him again for two weeks. Almost three. But then I ran into him at the library, and we had lunch."

  "Something tells me you're skipping a few bits."

  "Nothing important. I thought I'd left you behind, left you in London."

  "You had."

  "It wasn't that simple for me, though. I knew how I'd left was...wrong, but a part of me still felt, and still feels, that I couldn't have managed it any other way. It was all happening so fast--so much, so fast. It doesn't make it okay, that I just left like I did, and I know that. My point is, I was still messed up about it, about everything, about leaving how I did, about having left at all, because so much of me wanted to be back there with you. And Lucas...Lucas felt safe."

  "Which makes me dangerous?"

  "Yes! You're a threat to my sanity, Ian. You're a threat to my plans for the future. To everything I know about myself, about what I want. About who I really am, deep inside. I thought I knew, and in a few days you challenged all that."

  "What was I doing to threaten you?"

  "Just being you! I wanted to stay. I wanted to just be with you, never leave London, just stay and fuck you all day every day and let you do whatever you wanted to me and never leave. And emotionally, too, being near you was just...all-consuming. Nothing else mattered. And I guess part of me felt like if I didn't leave, I never would." I rubbed at my face. "And Lucas, like I said, it felt like he was safe. He didn't consume my every thought. I could just be around him and be me, be myself. We could talk about books and everything was just...calm. Easy. He got me, it felt like."

  "But?"

  I groaned. "But then I agreed to go on a date with him. I thought it was just dinner, I thought I'd have time to figure out what I wanted with him, but things happened fast, I guess. I don't even know. But then he took me back to his place, and things--things went a lot faster than I'd imagined. And not as...as safely as I'd thought it would be."

  "Nina. Did...he...hurt you?" Ian's voice was low and razor sharp.

  I met his eyes, let him see the truth, see that there was no prevarication in me. "No, not in any way. Everything that happened was entirely consensual."

  "You've got me worried, Nina? What happened?"

  I blinked and breathed and rolled my shoulders to ease the tension in them. "Are you really sure you want to hear it?"

  "I didn't come all the way here for nothing, Nina. My feelings for you aren't so...flimsy...that whatever you have to say now will undo them easily."

  "We had sex."

  "Obviously."

  "He...I let him...tie me. And...blindfold me."

  "And you'd only just met him? I mean, you said there'd been two weeks, but you still barely knew him."

  "I know."

  "And you said you thought he felt safe?"

  I squeezed my eyes shut. "I know. I did. It wasn't...he used neckties, and he was gentle. But then he...it was a while before we actually had sex, but he was doing other things to me."

  I glanced at Ian, whose expression was stone-cold and emotionless. "And?"

  "I don't know how to explain it. I don't know what...why I get mixed up about it. He made me feel good, but he drew it out, if you know what I mean? Kept me on the edge for a long time, and then kept me over the edge for even longer. It got to the point where it was almost painful. Then he--we--you know, and...I was still bound and blindfolded, and it made it so intense, and after everything else, how intensely I'd been--" I halted, feeling awkward about saying all this to Ian, feeling an internal conflict about being explicit.

  "Coming. He edged you, and then he made you come until it hurt, and then he fucked you until you couldn't take it anymore. That's what you're trying to say, right?"

  I nodded. "Yeah."

  "But you didn't ask him to stop, didn't ask him to untie you."

  "No."

  "So you let him do whatever he wanted, but then afterward..."

  "Afterward, I felt...drained. Exhausted. Emotionally...fried. Confused. Overwhelmed, above all. And...even a little guilty."

  "Guilty? Guilty about what?" He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  "You. You were...I wasn't thinking about you during it, exactly, but...deep down it still felt like...like I was betraying you." I shrugged, a small, pained gesture. "I knew I'd ruined things, but that didn't stop part of me from feeling like..." I shrugged again, having a hard time saying it out loud.

  "Feeling like what, Nina?" He was right there, twisted sideways on the couch to face me. Eyes soft and warm, yet mouth tensed and tight.

  I could only whisper, slight, soft words, uttered into his expectant silence. "Like it should have been you."

  "It could have been. It should have been." His voice was like granite being crushed into gravel, as if emotions were being ground up into dust at the base of his throat.

  I swallowed hard. Blinked. Sucked in a long, deep breath, held it. Held it until my lungs burned, as if trapping oxygen could keep the hot acidic tears behind my eyes. I managed to hold it all back, push it all down. Keep the breath locked in until my lungs screamed, keep the tears dammed in my tear ducts, keep the swelling knot of guilt and regret trapped in the hot, swollen vise of my throat.

  "Nina." His voice, fuc
k, that voice. How could something so rough be so tender?

  And why, after what I'd done to him?

  I shook my head. "Don't."

  "Don't what?" His thumb on my eyelashes, smearing away the burning dampness.

  "Act like it's okay."

  "I'm not." He swallowed, cleared his throat. "It's not okay. I'm angry. I'm hurt."

  "Then why are you still here?"

  "Because I'm hurt and angry."

  "That makes no sense."

  He tilted his head to the side. "Doesn't it, though? For someone who reads a lot of romances you sure don't understand love very well, do you? If it didn't matter, I'd have stayed in London. If it was fine, I'd not have come to Oxford looking for you, and I certainly wouldn't have been stood here waiting while you had it out with the professor."

  "Ian--"

  "I'm here because I'm hurt. Because I'm angry. Because, for some damned reason, in the short period of time we've known each other, you've come to matter enough to me that I can be hurt by you, that I can be made angry by you."

  "You've a thing for interrupting me, you know that?"

  "Are you trying to sound English?"

  I shook my head and blew out a breath. "No, it just happens sometimes. Shut up, it's fine."

  He frowned. "You can't joke your way out of this, Nina."

  "I'm not trying to," I said, tracing lines on the denim pulled taut around my thigh. Anything to avoid looking at him. "I just...I don't know what to say."

  "The truth? What you're thinking? What you're feeling? What you want? What you don't want? Any of those will work, as long as it's real."

  I'd almost managed to bluff my way past the emotional danger zone, but then he had to go and do that stupid alpha male thing where he tilted my chin up and forced me to look at him and brushed his thumb over my cheek, and saw into my heart.

  That last part, that was what did me in. He saw me.

  "Why'd you sleep with him, Nina?"

  "I don't know." The words were choked out.

  "Yes, you do. And the sooner you admit it to yourself, the sooner we can move past this."

  "Why do you care?"

  "Because there's this obnoxious four-letter word banging around inside me, and it's all focused on you, that's why."

  "Ian, don't. Just don't."

  "Why not, Nina?"

  "Because you can't!"

  "Why not?"

  "Because--" I had nothing, except my own confusion. "Because of Lucas." That sounded pathetic, even to me.