He wasn’t talking about making love because there was no way such a thing could have been avoided. The sexual tension between them had been on overload since the day he’d arrived at her apartment and neither of them could have lasted another day.
What was not supposed to happen was feeling all these unexpected emotions. They had wrapped around his mind and wouldn’t let go. And what bothered him more than anything else was that he knew he was not confusing his emotions with what had definitely been off-the-charts sex. If he hadn’t known before that there was a difference in what he felt for Jillian, he definitely knew it now.
He had fallen in love with her.
When? How? Why? He wasn’t sure. All he knew, without a doubt, was that it had happened. The promise of great sex hadn’t made him take a week’s vacation and travel more than fifteen hundred miles across five states to spend time with her. Sex hadn’t made him become her personal test coach, suffering the pains of being close to her while maintaining boundaries and limits. And sex definitely had nothing to do with the way he felt right now and how it was nearly impossible for him to think straight.
When she purred softly in her sleep and then wiggled her backside snugly against his groin he closed his eyes and groaned. It had been great sex but it had been more than that. She had reached a part of him no woman had reached before.
He’d realized it before they’d made love. He’d known it the minute she told him she’d only made love once before. As far as he was concerned that one time didn’t count because the guy had definitely done a piss-poor job. The only orgasm she’d ever experienced had been with Aidan.
But in the days he’d spent studying with her he’d gotten to know a lot about her. She was a fighter, determined to reach whatever goals she established for herself. And she was thoughtful enough to care that Pam not bear the burden of the cost of sending Jillian to medical school. She was even willing to sell her family home.
And he liked being with her, which posed a problem since they lived more than a thousand miles apart. He’d heard long-distance affairs could sometimes be brutal. But he and Jillian could make it work if they wanted to do so. He knew how he felt about her but he had no idea how she felt about him. As far as he knew, she wasn’t operating on emotion but out of a sense of curiosity. She’d said as much.
However, the biggest problem of all, one he knew would pose the most challenge to the possibility of anything ever developing between them was her insistence on Pam and Dillon not knowing about them.
Aidan didn’t feel the same way and now that he loved her, he really didn’t want to keep it a secret. He knew Dillon well enough to know that if Aidan were to go to his cousin and come clean, tell Dillon Aidan had fallen in love with Jillian, Dillon would be okay with it. Although Aidan couldn’t say with certainty how Pam would feel, he’d always considered her a fair person. He believed she would eventually give her blessing...but only if she thought Jillian was truly in love with him and that he would make Jillian happy.
There were so many unknowns. The one thing he did know was that he and Jillian had to talk. He’d given her fair warning that what they’d shared would not be one and done. There was no way he would allow her to believe that her involvement with him meant nothing, that she was just another woman to him. She was more than that and he wanted her to know it.
She stirred, shifted in bed and then slowly opened her eyes to stare at him. She blinked a few times as if bringing him into focus—or as if she was trying to figure out if he was really here in her bed.
Aidan let her know she wasn’t seeing things. “Good morning.” He gently caressed her cheek before glancing over at the digital clock on her nightstand. “You woke up early. It’s barely six o’clock.”