Page 49 of Untouchable
She relaxed with a long exhale. “I’ve just never wanted to do relationships. Is that so strange?”
“It’s rather unusual, yes.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“Partly.”
“I don’t know.” She rolled over onto her back and now seemed to be staring at the ceiling. “I don’t like to depend on other people, and in a relationship I would have to. I’m not inclined to trust, and you have to trust to make a relationship work. Sex I can control, so that’s what I do.”
A thick silence followed her words, a silence Caleb could feel in his chest. He somehow knew the words were true and that she hadn’t intended to say so much.
If he’d been a kind man or a sensitive one, he would have let the topic drop since her tension now made it clear she wasn’t comfortable with this conversation. But for the first time since that very first day, he felt close to getting her, reaching her, understanding her, and he wasn’t going to lose the advantage.
“Why don’t you trust people?”
“Because they let you down.”
Her voice was small, tight, clearly trying for casual, and it evoked the most unexpected response in him. He reached out to pull her against him again, holding her snugly. She buried her face against the side of his chest, clinging to him with a strange sort of tension.
He didn’t understand it at all, but she felt uncharacteristically needy. After a minute, he asked, “Everyone in your life has let you down?”
“Not everyone. But if they don’t, they get taken away anyway.”
His throat suddenly tightened so intensely, so powerfully, that he couldn’t breathe for a moment. Because he knew—he knew—heknewhow she felt.
It had happened to him too.
She might look beautiful and soft and untouched, and she might be secretive and sensual and damaged, but she wasn’t all that different from him.
He understood her. Knew her. The way he knew himself.
Maybe she sensed some of what he was feeling. Maybe she felt it herself. Because, after a minute, she raised her head and stared down at him in the dark. “What about you? Do you trust people?”
“No.” Just the one word, the one truth.
“I didn’t think so.”
It felt like she was drawing away from him, so he tightened his arm around her. She didn’t resist, settling against him again.
“What about your mafioso lover?” He’d been putting pieces together about her in his mind.
She jerked.
“What?”
“The guy who’s after you. If you just do casual sex, how did you get involved with him?”
After a brief hesitation, he felt her shrug. “I was just trying something out with him, and obviously it didn’t work. Plus what makes you think he was Italian mob?”
“You said he was connected.” He stiffened as he processed this new idea, the puzzle distracting him from his intense, softer feelings before. Maybe… He sucked in his breath as a different thought crossed his mind. “If you’re going to tell me you got involved with someone?—”
“Oh, just shut up. It’s none of your business who I got involved with. Let it go.”
He didn’t respond, knowing she was really annoyed now so the conversation would be fruitless, but he was worried in an entirely new way. Some wannabe gangster from Atlantic City would be one thing. A Russian or Albanian would be entirely different. The stakes would be much, much higher.
He was mulling over this new avenue of investigation when she shifted beside him, stroking his bare belly with her hand. “Sorry,” she murmured.
“Don’t be. It’s fine.”
