“This is different.” His growl sent delicious shivers through her body.
She settled back against her headboard, allowing a small smile. It wasn’t like he could see it. “How do you figure?”
“Because all those other men who have said it to you before weren’t worthy.”
Big words. “Oh, and I suppose you are?”
“Yeah. More than that, I’m the only one who’s going to truly have you.”
Carrigan laughed because it was the only appropriate response to the sheer cockiness of his words. He was going to be the only one to have her? The man was even more delusional than she could have guessed. “I don’t know if you noticed it that night, but I was hardly a blushing virgin when we met.” She found herself holding her breath, waiting for the inevitable demands to tell him how many men had been there before him. Or maybe he’d assume there had been only one, and the sheer magnitude of his masculine presence had been enough to stir her almost-virgin heart. In her experience, men fell into only one of those two categories. They constructed their own beliefs about an experience—about her—and when faced with evidence that they were wrong, they looked at her like she was either a whore or a virgin in disguise. There was no middle ground.
“They don’t matter.” He said it totally dismissively, as if it was actually true.
She blinked. “What?”
“They’re the past. We all have a past, lovely. It doesn’t matter who they were or how many or if you loved or hated every single one of them.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or just hang up. Damn him to hell and back for blocking off all the things she’d done with a few short words. If he was trying to mindfuck her, he was doing a hell of a job with it. “I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.”
“Why should you be?” His voice dropped an octave. “Those choices led you to me, after all.”
The nerve. “I number you among the mistakes.”
“No, you don’t.” He sounded amused again. Ass.
“God, you’re completely insufferable.” It didn’t seem to matter what she said, because he always had a comeback ready. Worse, he sounded like he actually meant them. Carrigan shook her head. What she should do was hang up the phone and block this number. To do anything else was just encouraging him, and that was the last thing she should want.
Right?
“I want to know something.”
“What’s that?” She really had to work on her mouth getting away from her. Maybe she wouldn’t be in this situation if she had better control. If her father found out…She glanced at her bedroom door and took a minute to pad across her room to make sure it was locked. The cell phone had been a gift from Teague several years ago, something that she could have without fear of the family monitoring every call and text.
Though she seriously doubted he’d approve of the way she was currently using it.
“Why did you come back to the club tonight?”
She froze in the middle of climbing back onto her massive bed. To answer that was to strip bare a small part of her. It wasn’t anywhere near her center, but it was still closer than she wanted to let James. Then hang up, idiot. But she didn’t. Instead, she answered. Honestly. “Curiosity.”
“You know what they say about curiosity and that damn cat.”
Yeah, she did, and that hadn’t stopped her. Her days were numbered as it was—if she didn’t use what was left of her freedom to take chances, she was wasting precious time. “Are you planning on hurting me, James? Maybe finishing what your father started?”
“Fuck, no. The world would be a darker place without you in it.” Before she could fully process that comment, he moved on. “You’re not being strictly honest, though. It was more than curiosity that drove you to sit down across that table from me.”
He was right. It had been a number of things that she didn’t want to give voice to. This conversation was already strange enough—it was almost intimate to sit here on her bed in the darkness and exchange words with him. Which meant she had to do what she’d been shoring herself up to since the moment she realized he was on the other end of this call. “Good night, James.”
“A little too close to the truth, huh?” He sounded like he was smiling. “I can take a hint—on occasion. Good night, lovely.”
And then he was gone, leaving her wondering if maybe it really had all been a dream. She went so far as to check her phone to see if she’d actually received a call, and there it was. James’s number. Before she could think too closely about what she was doing, Carrigan saved the number under J and set her phone aside.