Page 406 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

But,he was so perfect. When he took his clothes off for sex with me, he was like every beautiful dream I’d ever had, turned into flesh and muscle and offering himself to me. I’d accepted the offer — eagerly, wholeheartedly, excitedly, joyously. I’d accepted his body. I’d accepted his cock and his balls and his ass. When we went down on each other, and when he fucked me — oh God,especiallyall the times he fucked me and came inside me, pouring out his cum into me — I was transformed.

After learning who Elijah really was, though, I was transformed again, this time into a mass of tears.Was I wrong to judge him for who he used to be and reject the idea that he’d changed? Was it really a mistake not to believe him, to turn away any and all trust in him?Perhaps I should have tried to find it in myself to trust him just a little more.

All I could think of,though, was how my image of him was completely shattered by that…creaturefrom his past. I couldn’t even bring myself to think ofKaneas aperson.He was acreature,athingthat crawled out from under the rug of Elijah’s life and tried to get me, to attack me, to… I couldn’t even bear to think the word, but I knew what he wanted.

If Kane representedthe kind of life that Elijah really came from, if his past really was full of creatures like that, tanked-up on Lord knows what illicit chemicals, wanting to put their paws all over a girl and dothat,and expecting her to want it and like it… If Elijah Bennett came from a world full of people like that, I couldn’t see him having any place in my world.

Elijah had my virginity. I’d given it over to him freely and happily. And now, I had to live with the fact of who he was, even if he swore he wasn’t that person any more. I didn’t care. I’d handed over my virginity to an illusion before reality came pounding at his door.

And,that was what made me cry all night.

I tooka shower Saturday night as if it would wash the whole experience from my life the way it washed the physical part of it from my body. I went to bed feeling clean only physically and cried myself to sleep.

I tookanother shower when I got up, as if to wash away the memory from my mind. Of course, it didn’t work. I got out of the shower feeling fresh and clean only in body. In my mind and my heart, I was all cried-out, but I was depressed. Sadness clung to me in a way that dirt could not. I needed reassurance and comfort, a reassurance and a comfort that I couldn’t get from washing up or from anything that Cincinnati had to offer me.

No,what I needed was at the end of a long drive to the northeast.

At first Ithought it would make me feel better to listen to Daddy’s weekly sermon. But his face on the screen and his words on the speakers of my computer would not be enough. I didn’t need just my father’s face and voice. What I needed washim.After making myself eat some toast and sausage for breakfast, I packed a bag and headed out to my car, bound for Youngstown.

I wason the road all day. Traffic was light, but I still took my time getting home, pulling over when I needed to. Once I went into a rest stop, not because I was hungry or thirsty or needed the restroom, but because thoughts of everything that was growing farther and farther in the distance behind me were mounting up on me and I was overcome with needing to cry again. I sat behind the wheel and cried, then got out and went into the rest stop to splash some water on my face before getting further down the road.

But,at the end of that road lay the town where I’d kept my virginity, and in that town lay the street with the house where I grew up feeling safe and secure. And in that house was my father, surprised but happy to see me.

He was sittingin the living room in his favorite chair, watching an old Western movie on the TV, when I walked through the door, bag in hand. He was so wrapped up in whatever Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper was doing on the screen that he almost didn’t notice me at first.

The thoughtof Daddy watching Westerns gave me a familiar, warm feeling. Those old horse operas were his favorite movies, reflecting simpler ideas, a simpler time, and what people still remembered as a simpler way of life, whether it really was or not; a life where right and wrong were easy to point out and questions seemed easy to answer. It was probably never really that way, at all. But, it made a good myth.

What I needed wassimple comfort, like what Daddy found in those movies — and what I found in his smile when he looked up and over from the chair and saw me standing in the hall.

Daddy’s hugfelt so wonderful, so safe and filled with assurance, that it made me want to fold him up, stuff him in my bag, and take him back to Cincinnati with me.

“Sweetheart,”he said with my head on his shoulder and my arms wrapped tight around him, “you didn’t say anything about coming home today. I didn’t make anything for dinner; I was just going to pull some leftovers out of the fridge. You know what? We should call Leanna and the three of us should go out and eat together. How does that sound?”

When I pulledout of the hug and he saw the beginnings of new tears on my face, his fatherly enthusiasm turned to concern.

“Uh-oh,”he said, tapping me under the chin the way he did when I was little and something upset me. “What is it? What happened?”

My voice crackedat him a little bit. “I’m not ready to talk about it yet, Daddy.” I was hit with the full weight and import of what was upsetting me. My father had always loved and supported me unconditionally, but the thing that had brought me all the way back home now — how in the world could Ipossiblytell himthat?

The words formedin my head and I couldn’t even begin to speak them.

Daddy,I had sex for the first time with my boss and he turned out to have this awful past full of awful people, and it scared me so much that I had to get away from him, and I don’t know what I’m going to do…

I realizedI was in no way prepared to putthosewords out for my father to hear, at least not now when I’d barely gotten my foot back in the door.

So I only answered himwith, “It’s been a long drive, Daddy. I’m not ready to talk about it…yet.”

With his usual understanding,my father said, “Fair enough. Whenever you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to listen.”

“I love you, Daddy.”Iwasready as always to tell himthat.

While I tookmy bag upstairs to my room — the room where I once used to lie in bed wondering what it would be like to let a boy do to me the secret things that I’d let my boss do, the things that I’d driven so far all day to get a distance away from — Daddy called Leanna to tell her of my surprise visit and have her come over. “We’re all going out to eat,” Daddy told her, and I heard him mention The Magic Tree, where we would all go for steaks when we still had Mom, and other old familiar feelings stirred up in me.

But,they were nothing like the feelings that someone else had given me, feelings as strong as the pain and confusion that came in their wake.

When Leanna came over,she would see, as Daddy did, that something was wrong with me, and she would be concerned just like he was. I would be just as unable to tell her what had so unexpectedly brought me home.

CHAPTER23

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