Page 66 of Taking The Virgin

“Jules has a boyfriend!”

“Shut up,” Jakesays.

Now, with them so personally involved, I do come to my senses. “Kids, please go in the house.”

Jemma shakes her head. “Not on yourlife.”

But the young man of the house, Jason, forcefully begins to herd them away while muttering something about adults needing their privacy. Jemma rolls her eyes as Jason gives the flowers back tome.

Owen keeps watching me, and I clutch the bouquet in front of me like it’s myshield.

After the kids get to the house, the screen door shuts behind them, but I know they’re still behind it, listening.

When I look back at Owen, there’s tenderness in his gaze. It’s the same emotion I’ve caught in him a few times when we were together, but it was always gone before I could identifyit.

He’s not hiding itnow.

“I still don’t know what spurred this visit,” I whisper, “and I’m positive that you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’d better believe I do.” Now a fiercer emotion fills his dark eyes, but it’s not anger. I thinkit’s…

Love?

As my head spins he goeson.

“You don’t know how many times I’ve started to walk out my door, ready to come to you. But there were still so many of those demons nattering at me, telling me that I wouldn’t ever be able to get as close as I wanted to be to you, that I didn’t deserve it, and you wouldonly…”

“What? Contaminateyou?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking, Juliet. For a long time, I believed that there was no one on earth who would ever understand my situation. Then you showed up, only for me to drive you away. Or should I say that I drove away fromyou?”

At the mention of the day he left me, I grip the flowers tighter.

His smile is back, but it’s melancholy. “Then, one day, when I turned on the sound system in the music room, a song came blaring on. Music that you evidently would listen to and dance around to when I wasn’t home. At least that’s what Nat told me.” He fists a hand and puts it over his heart. His voice goes jagged. “That’s when I really felt how hollow my life was without you around. It was as if a piece of me was missing, and I had to have you back where you belong.”

“I belong here, with thekids—”

“And they’re no doubt as wild and chaotic as you can be. But I want that, Juliet. I want allofit.”

The sweet scent of the flowers is beginning to lull me. So is the warmth of Owen’s gaze as he lavishes it over my face, taking me in as if he really did missme.

I’m beginning to believe, second by second, that hedid.

My god, hedid.

He lowers his voice so just the two of us can hear. “When you came into my life, for the first time I was able to forget about all of my tension and hang-ups and need for order. With you, I wanted to be dirty. Goddammit, so dirty. You brought out a side of me that was always pent up. You could say you unleashed something I’d been struggling to keep inside.”

I think of the beast he always became when it was only the two of us in a room, and my skin flushes.

He reaches out his hand to me, then drops it as if he still doesn’t know what’s going through my mind. “That first night, when I didn’t use a condom… I just didn’t do things like that. Ever. You saw how I acted—the dread, the claustrophobia. It was all so messy, literally and figuratively. So raw. My need for you took me off guard because you didn’t fit in to my well-planned routine like you were supposedto.”

He’s breaking me down. But was there ever much to break? I’ve always been his, even after he hurt me so badly.

He must see this in my teary gaze, because he finally reaches out to brush his fingertips over my cheek. He wipes away those tears.

“The morning after we were first together and you left, I couldn’t let you go even then, Juliet. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. I couldn’t stop wanting to be with you, and that’s why I showed up on the jet. That’s why I wanted an extended arrangement.”

“And are you down here to offer me another extension? Is that what thisis?”

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