“Because you tell them so?” She shook her head, her expression serious though her mysterious eyes laughed at him. “I think that tactic only works with me. And not very well.”
“Because,” he said, his hands moving to her bottom again, then higher along the tempting indentation in her lovely back to tug her down to him, “a man is only a playboy whore when he appears to be having too much of a certain kind of uncontrolled fun in public. I can do all the same things in private and it doesn’t count. Didn’t you know?”
Her attention dropped to his mouth and he wanted it there. He was already hardening within her again and she shifted restlessly against him as if she encouraged it, making the fire inside him leap to new life that easily.
“It all counts,” she breathed. “Or none of it does.”
“Then I suppose that makes us all whores, doesn’t it?” he asked. He indulged himself and sank his hands deep into her hair, holding her head fast, as he tested the depth of her again and found her hotter around him. Wetter. Better, somehow, than before. That quickly, he was like steel. “But let’s be clear. How many lovers have you taken in the last ten years?”
“Less than your thousand,” she said, her voice a thin little thing, as her hips met his greedily. Deliciously. He grunted, and then pulled out to flip them around, coming down over her again and drawing her legs around his waist. He teased her heat with the tip of his hardness, and he didn’t know what it was that drove him then, but he didn’t let her pull him into her.
“How many?” he asked. He had no idea why he cared. He didn’t care. He’d imagined it a thousand times and it scraped at him and it changed nothing either way. But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Tell me.”
Her eyes moved to his, then away, and they looked blue in the shadows. “What does it matter? Whatever number I pick, you’ll think the worst of me.”
“I already think the worst of you,” he said, the way he might have crooned love words a lifetime ago, and he couldn’t have said what he wanted here. To hurt her? Or himself? To make this all worse? Or was this simply his way of reminding them both who they were? “Why don’t you try the truth?”
“None,” she said, and there was an odd expression on her face as she said it. He might have called it vulnerable, were she someone else. “I told you there were no new tricks.”
It took another beat for him to process that, and then something roared in him, a primal force that was like some kind of howl, and he thought he shook though he knew he held himself perfectly still.
“Is that a joke?” But he was whispering. He barely knew his own voice.
Her wide mouth twisted and her gaze was dark with something he didn’t want to understand. Something that couldn’t possibly be real.
“Yes,” she said, her voice broken and fierce at once. “Ha ha, what a joke. I meant ten. Twenty. How many lovers do you imagine I’ve taken, Giancarlo? What number proves I’m who you think I am?”
He heard her voice break slightly as she asked the question, and a kind of ripple went through her lush body. He felt it. This time when she urged him into her, he went, slick and hard and even better than before, making him mutter a curse and press his forehead to hers. And he didn’t have the slightest idea if this was his form of an apology, or hers.
“I don’t care one way or the other,” he lied, and he didn’t want to talk about this any longer. He didn’t want to revisit all those images he’d tortured himself with over the years. Because his sad little secret was that he’d never imagined her in prison, the way he’d told her he had. He’d imagined her wrapped around some other man exactly like this and he’d periodically searched the internet to see if he could find any evidence that she was out there somewhere, doing it with all that same joy and grace that had undone him.