Page 53 of Resist

“I thought we did.”

Coulton frowned. “He had a different opinion?”

“My relationship with him was sort of uncharted waters for me. Tiger and I were teenagers, so you know what that’s like—making out in friends’ basements and hanging around fast-food places. Jagger was my first adult relationship, but we were both poor as shit, so our dates were limited to Mick’s Tavern or chilling in his bedroom. He’d shared an apartment with four other guys when we first started dating. We only lived together the last year, which was when it all fell apart spectacularly.”

“It was different with Montgomery?”

“Monty had a good job, a great apartment, and a lot of money. For months, we met up a few times a week, either for coffee or dinner. Then we’d always end up back at his place. He was sweet to me—saying nice things, buying me little gifts, giving me flowers. I wasn’t used to any of that. I thought… I thought those things meant he had feelings for me.”

“He didn’t?”

She shook her head. “After six months, it occurred to me that I’d never met any of his friends or work colleagues, and I’d never even spent the entire night at his place because he always had to be up early for work. One night, we were lying in bed, and I told him I wanted to take things to the next level. I’d seen a note on his calendar about his mother’s birthday party, and I asked if I could go with him and meet his family.”

Coulton could already tell he was going to hate where this was going.

“Monty refused.” She paused. “No. It was worse than that. Helaughed.”

“Laughed?”

“He said I wasn’t exactly the kind of girl a man took home to meet his parents.”

Coulton wasn’t even sure how to reply to that, because what the fuck?

Ainsley was putting on a good front as she told him the story, but he still caught a glimmer of pain in those sad eyes of her.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he finally asked.

She gave him that damn shrug, trying to act casual about something that had very clearly hurt her.

“When I asked him what kind of girl I was, he pulled off the mask, lost the silver tongue, and said, ‘The kind you fuck.’”

“What’s Montgomery’s last name?” Coulton growled through clenched teeth.

Ainsley smiled, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I thought we were in a relationship, that we had something real, but it turned out, I was nothing more than a booty call. After that, I lost my shit and slapped him.”

“Good for you.”

She shook her head. “He didn’t like that. At all. Or the fact I told him we were done. He had this snakelike-lawyer demeanor. The dude was seriously determined when it came to winning, always bragging about the cases he’d won, losing his shit whenever he didn’t get a guilty verdict. Apparently, that same competitiveness drifted into his personal life, because he refused to accept the idea of me dumping him.

“So…that was when he went for the jugular. He said he’d been planning to break things off with me because his girlfriend, Emma, was returning from Europe. She’d been overseas, studying abroad for a year. I was just warming his bed while he waited for the girl to return who youdidtake home to meet your parents. Said the fact I was poor made me an easy, cheap lay. The kind who didn’t require more than a hot meal to get me to…” She swallowed heavily. “Spread my legs.”

Coulton tugged Ainsley tight against him, cupping the back of her head as she pressed her face to his chest. He didn’t know why he felt the need to hold her like this, because she wasn’t crying.

Even though she could use a good cry.

“He was an asshole,” he murmured against the top of her head.

“Maybe so, but that fact doesn’t negate that I was an idiot. I had my head turned by his pretty words and face. I should have known a guy like him…”

She straightened up as she looked at him, but she didn’t say anything more.

She didn’t need to, because she’d told him all he needed to know.

Primarily, that he had his work cut out for him.

CHAPTERSEVEN

Ainsley wokeup the next morning and smiled.

---