Tears filled her eyes and she lowered her gaze to my chest. “Why won’t you? I want you to make love to me like that, Wroth. I need you to make love to me like that.”

“Because I want your husband to take your virginity,” I muttered. “He’s the only one who should ever take that from you. Do you understand?”

Blue eyes widened and she gasped. “What?”

I cupped her face, fighting back my smile at her outraged expression. “He will be a very lucky man, Marissa.”

“So you won’t make love to me?” she demanded, suddenly sounding angry. “Because I’m a virgin? For real?” She pulled away from me and I realized that she wasn’t just angry but pissed the fuck off. She moved farther away from me, wrapping the sheet around her gorgeous body as she climbed down from the roost. “You are such a fucking asshole.”

I quickly reached for my boxers at the end of the bed and pulled them on as I followed her out of the sleeping area and down the hall to the living room. Thankfully no one else was up, or if they were then they were off the bus since we had arrived at our next stop hours ago. The living room was empty and she tied the sheet tighter around her chest before turning to face me. “Marissa—”

“I can’t believe you. I really can’t.” She pushed her hair out of her face with a hand that trembled. “You said you loved me, and then tell me you won’t have sex with me. Because you want me to be a damn virgin for my husband? Yet, you will let complete strangers blow you? And I know you had sex with her. Why else wouldn’t you have come back to the hotel that night?”

How had we gone from making love, to arguing about her getting married, to this? I thought she had forgiven me for that night. Thought that it was behind us, even though I’d wanted to explain it to her. Yet she had refused every time I’d brought it up.

Well, no fucking more.

“I didn’t have sex with her!” I couldn’t help but roar when I saw the tears that had filled her eyes. Her tears should come with a damn warning label. At the sight of Marissa Bryant’s tears your insides will wilt and die.

For weeks now she had refused to let me explain about that fucking night with the groupie. But I couldn’t let her keep thinking that I had cheated on her. “And she sure as hell didn’t give me a blow job. You only saw, what? Five seconds? If you had waited five more you would have seen me push that stupid slut off me.”

“Yeah right,” Marissa said with a snort of disbelief. “She was on her knees, Wroth. And your pants were unbuttoned.”

“Unbuttoned maybe, but not down.” I raked my hands through my hair, silently begging one of Emmie’s fucking gods to help me here. My fucking life depending on this girl believing me right now. “I was checking on my Fenders, making sure that Pock had put them where they were supposed to be, and she caught me by surprise. One minute she was in front of me rambling some drunken gibberish, and the next she was on her knees with her hands on the zipper of my jeans. She was drunk and I didn’t know how to get her off me without hurting her. But when she nearly got my dick out, I pushed her off. I didn’t care if she got hurt or not. I just didn’t want her to touch me. She ended up on her ass, crying because she was drunk and mad since I’d turned her down earlier that night.” When Marissa still looked like she didn’t believe me I started to get mad too. “It’s true. I didn’t cheat on you.”

“Then where were you all night?” she demanded, more tears spilling from her eyes in a faster stream. The sight of those tears gutted me, but I wasn’t going to let them distract me from this conversation. This was too important not to get it out in the open. My future with her hinged on it. “Why didn’t you come back to the hotel room that night?”

“I took her home.” I told her and she turned away from me, shaking her head and laughing humorlessly in skepticism. “Pock and I took her home. She’d twisted her ankle when she fell and she was so drunk she didn’t make much sense. So I got Pock to help me take her home. When we got to her house, there was a big party going on that her roommates were throwing and Pock wanted to stay. I left him there and went back to the hotel, but by then Dev and Z had already gotten into a fight. I spent the rest of the night with Zander in a coffee shop letting him bitch about Devlin and Natalie.”

Marissa still had her back to me, but I saw the way her shoulders dropped a little and prayed that she was starting to believe me. I’d wanted to own up to what had happened that night for more than a year now, should have done it the night when she had thrown me out of her life. I’d thought, however, that she would cool down and realize that I would never have cheated on her. Never. She meant too much to me to throw away what we had with some meaningless fuck with a stranger.

Yeah, I’ll admit that I’d felt guilty for what had happened that night because for one insane second, when that drunken girl had had her hands on my zipper, I’d thought about letting her suck my dick. It would have proven to myself that I really didn’t deserve Marissa. That I wasn’t a good enough man for her. That one, stupid moment of insanity had made me think I deserved for her to hate me for a long, long time. But now that I had forgiven myself and had her forgiveness for my past, I knew that not only was she made for me but I was the only man who would ever cherish her the way she deserved.

No one would ever love Marissa Bryant as much as I did.

Marissa

The blood rushing through my ears made it impossible to hear anything over the beating of my heart. I clutched the sheet tighter to my chest, the tears on my face drying as Wroth’s words repeated over and over again in my head.

For days now I’d been thinking about what Dallas had said, that she hadn’t thought that Wroth had really cheated. She knew that he loved me too much to even think about it. I’d been living in denial, trying to convince myself that it had happened, when I knew deep down that what she said was the truth. Maybe he hadn’t said the words back then, but I had known that Wroth loved me. He was a man who wasn’t gentle by nature, yet he’d always been so with me.

All my life he had cherished me in one way or another. Whether it was joining the marines so that his parents wouldn’t lose their farm and so that I could still live with them, or helping my brother pay for my medical treatments and standing by that damned window every day that I’d been in isolation, or holding onto his control and not taking something he thought himself undeserving of. He always made sure that no matter what, I was taken care of.