Page 20 of A Captive Situation

He said naked.

His eyes heated. “You know what I mean?”

I wrinkled my nose at him, more to hide the effect his words were having on me. “Not about that, but yeah. I guess. I used to have sex regularly.”

I tasted acid in my mouth. Sex with Beck had never been mind blowing, but it’d been sex. I was able to get off with him, or some of the time. My vibrator was all the way back in my hotel room too.

“How long’s it been?”

“Since I had sex?”

He had that hawklike expression on him again. “Since the breakup.”

“Oh.” Heknew. Damn. “Three weeks.” I began picking at my mug, scratching my nail at the handle. “The day he ended things, he fucked me before he told me he wouldn’t be marrying me. He’d been cheating on me, and they are going to have a kid instead.” I whispered that last part, but my nails suddenly started trying to rip into my mug.

“Did you want to have a kid with him?”

My eyes jerked to his again, and I held there. Feeling like the way he was looking at me was giving me a lifeline. Another one. “I don’t know. I ... he and I had been together since college. We’resupposedto have kids. That’s what society says, right? Status quo. I never questioned it, but it wasn’t on my super-urgent list.”

The corner of his mouth curved up. “Not like the tourist list you have?”

I grinned, feeling like he was giving me another oxygen bubble. More air so I could breathe. “I should’ve taken his golf clubs to his car. He has a certain group of them that are his favorite. I should’ve taken those. I bought ’em.”

That made them mine.

My golf clubs.

My car.

My house . . .

A fresh wave of anger was starting to rise up in me.

“You dodged a bullet.”

“What?”

“I don’t know the guy, but you’re better off. I’ve seen the worst of the worst. If he’s going to do that to you, you don’t want to be tied to him for the rest of your life. Whoever got him, he’s now her punishment. My guess is that’s why you weren’t pushing the kid thing with him. A part of you knew having kids with him wouldn’t be a good idea. Then again, what do I know?”

I sighed. He was saying smart things. “We had a decent sex life.”

He swung his gaze my way, a flash of heat there. “Don’t give that guy credit for anything. You never married before?”

I shook my head.

“You’re what? Midthirties?”

I frowned. Where was he going with this? “Thirty-six.”

“Unless you waited to go to college, you were probably twenty? That’s sixteen years together, give or take a year or two. Probability of him marrying you after all those years was low, statistically a zero percent chance. You should’ve seen the writing on the wall. He was never going to marry you.”

Indignation swept through me. I took back all the nice things about him.

“I supported him when he went to graduate school.”

His gaze softened. So did his voice when he said, “He let you go. That’s a gift he gave you.”

My stomach was back to churning into a pit, deep down inside of me.

---