Lauren walked in silence next to me during the slow, painful trek to my car. Almost 20 minutes later, we reached my BMW and I passed her the keys.

“A word of warning,” she said, taking them in hand, “I haven’t operated a manual since I first learned how to drive.”

“And that was when?”

“Sixteen years ago,” she answered, a challenging note in her voice.

Ah, we were back there again. Just when I thought she’d gotten past our ten-year age gap, here she was bringing it up again. I could guess why, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

“Cool,” I shrugged noncommittally, not wanting to play into her fears and the issues they could create between us. Lord knew we already had enough to work through following my earlier outburst.

One problem at a time, I told myself as I leaned my crutches against the side of the car, opened the door, and dropped into my seat. Reaching back out to grab ahold of the crutches, Lauren sighed and jogged back around to my side.

“Here, let me get those.” She grabbed for them before I could, and tossed them in the back seat before making her way back to the driver’s seat.

Once she was buckled into her seat, we sat together in awkward silence. I hated it, hated everything about this fucking day. I just wanted to hit replay and start the whole thing over. God, how I’d do so many things differently. Except I couldn’t, so I forced myself to man up and address the elephant in the room. Err, the car.

I swiveled in my seat as much as I could given the boot wrapped around my foot, and cleared my throat. “I’m sorry for not saying something sooner.”

“It’s okay,” she whispered, staring straight ahead and refusing to meet my eyes.

“It’s not something I go around advertising, you know?”

A small, cynical chuckle passed her lips. “No, just the opposite.”

Her dismissive attitude raised my hackles. “What does that mean? I never lied about it.”

She finally turned to face me. “No, but then again, I didn’t think I needed to ask if you were a virgin. Nothing about you—about the way you talk to me—led me to believe you would be.”

“What did you want me to say?” I asked, my exasperation mounting. She had no idea what it was like trying to keep this big a secret, to be living a lie.

“For starters, you shouldn’t have asked me—repeatedly, I might add—if I wanted your cock if you had no intention of ever giving it to me.” She sighed again and blinked long and slow. When she opened her eyes, the angry heat that’d been there before had been tamped down. now, her expression was filled with regret and resignation. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

“Don’t say that. This doesn’t change anything.”

“But it does, can’t you see that? I already felt weird about our age difference, but knowing you’re a virgin too makes me feel like a dirty old lady, like I’m stealing your virtue or something.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. If that’s the way Lauren felt, that was the way she felt. But I needed her to know how I felt too.

“Don’t you even want to know why?”

She studied me for a few long seconds, her eyes flicking over my face. “Honestly, yeah.”

I took a deep breath and let it out. The only other person I’d ever talked about this with was Eoin, and he’d been great about it. But Eoin wasn’t someone I wanted to be with; the weight of responsibility associated with my virginity would never rest on his shoulders. If things went the way I wanted them to, Lauren was the woman I was going to be with. We might not have a lot of time left together, but I had every intention of making it count. But first, I had to get her to understand where I was coming from and then I had to make sure the idea of being with me didn’t freak her out.

“It’s a long, complicated story but it comes down to not wanting to be like my dad; not wanting to be with the type of girls who wanted to be with a guy like him.”

“Look, I get family issues. Trust me, I’ve got my own. But you should have told me what I was walking into here, especially since you knew I wasn’t entirely comfortable with things between us.”

“Again, what did you want me to say?”

Lauren loosened her grip on the steering wheel and ran her hands back through her hair. “I don’t know.” She flicked her gaze back to me. “I’m just caught off guard is all.”

“I get that, I do. Which is why I want to talk about it with you. I want to make sure we’re okay.”

She twisted in her seat and rested her back against the door. “I’m trying to figure out what to say here without coming off like a bitch.”

Fuck. This wasn’t going to be good.

“I don’t care that you’re a virgin.” I opened my mouth to tell her she was lying to both of us if she thought that was true, but she shook her head and started over. “Okay, I care, but only because of our age difference. If I was a 22-year-old girl, I’d probably be swooning right now. But seriously, this makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t want to be your Mrs. Robinson.”

I didn’t tell her I didn’t know who that was because if I did, it’d only strengthen the point she was attempting to make. Taken in context, I figured she was some famous cougar who had a string of young boy toys in her past. I’d have to remember to look her up once I got home.

To hide my ignorance, I asked, “What do you want?”

She sighed again. “I kind of want you to be the manwhore I thought you were.”

“Sorry,” I chuckled. “That’s not me.”

Lauren stared at me and I could practically see the wheels turning in her pretty little head. “What do you want to know?”

Absentmindedly, she ran the pad of her thumb over her bottom lip, like she was remembering what it had felt like to kiss me, how electric it had been when our mouths had fused. She blinked, and shook her head. “I believe you when you say you had your reasons for not having had sex before, but clearly you’re not entirely innocent either. I mean …” she trailed off, her cheeks turning pink.

I leaned forward as best as I could and rested my hand on her inner thigh, my fingers petting her through the denim she wore. “You mean I eat pussy like a fucking champ and you’ve never come that hard in your life?”

Her pupils flared with desire and her chest rose and fell with deeper breaths. She nodded. “Yes, that.”

Good. At least she hadn’t denied how I’d made her feel, how good it had been between us. With just my fingers and my tongue, I’d taken her to places no other man before me had been able to. As long as I could keep her trembling with desire, I thought I still stood a chance.

“I’m a virgin, Lauren, not a monk. I like women. I like making them come. I loved making you come. I want to do it again, and again, and again.”

“I must be crazy,” she said, “because if you told any of my friends there was someone who looked like you who only wanted to pleasure them, they’d fall backwards, open their legs, and say ‘yes please.’ And yet, here I am, thinking about all the ways that’s wrong. How that’d be taking advantage of you in some way. How I can’t just take from you. I need to be able to give too.”

How I can’t just take from you.

Hearing those words, everything clicked into place. That right there is what I’d been afraid of all my life. All those women back in Los Angeles and here in Dublin who’d fucked my dad for their chance at fame or fortune. Even though he was a married man with a family, they gave themselves to him with the expectation that he’d give them something in return. And the girls who’d hoped to fuck me had been the same. They hadn’t want me—they wanted what I could do for them, what I could give them. But not Lauren.

“You’re fucking perfect,” I blurted, and then felt immediately embarrassed. It seemed where Lauren was concerned, I couldn’t keep my humiliating confessions at bay. With anyone else, I was cool as a cucumber, completely unaffected, but with her I was an excited little puppy.

“I am?” she asked, her eyebrows raised.

“I don’t fuck those girls because they don’t care about me. They just want what I can do for them, how I can improve their social standing. They’d be happy to lay back and let me take whatever I wanted from them—whenever—all with the expectation that I’d so something for them in return. That’s exactly why I haven’t been with anyone. Why I haven’t wanted to until now.”

“Until now?” she squeaked.

“I want you, Lauren. You don’t know how bad. You’re all I think about.” I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. Just talking about how bad I wanted to be with this woman was giving me the most painful erection. “Fuck,” I muttered, scrubbing my hand over my face. “I just found out my rugby career is over, and I can’t be bothered because there is nothing more important to me right now then making you understand I’m not fucking around here. I plan to do everything in my power to make you see how right this is, even though you think it’s wrong.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, the black of her pupils bleeding into the green of her irises.

“Take me back to your place and let me show you how fucking sure I am.”

Our gazes locked, the challenge hanging between us. This was it, the moment our fate was decided. Lauren licked her lips and then twisted in her seat. When she started the car, my heart stopped, the pendulum poised to swing one way or the other. She cast me one last glance and then smiled shyly. “It’s tiny, but my bed is big enough.”

I fell back in my seat with a sigh of relief.

Thank fucking Christ.