Staring at Cassie on the bed, Patrick felt genuinely sick.

She was holding the blanket like a taut shield over her body and her eyes were hot enough to make him think she could set him on fire and dance on the ashes. But that wasn’t the thing making him panic. He could take her up on her offer to leave—he’d walked out women’s doors for far less—but he wasn’t going, not now. This thing between them wasn’t ending like this. And not letting that happen meant telling her the story he’d never spoken aloud to anyone.

He made a slow path back and forth in front of her bed. Where else to start but the beginning?

“My mother was an alcoholic,” he said. “She’s been sober for years, but she was drunk for most of my teens, and my twenties. Not that I could blame her—” even though he did, “—if I were married to a philandering jackass, I’d drink myself into oblivion too.”

Cassie was quiet for a moment. “Your father cheated?”

Her question came out a bit detached, as if she were examining a witness on the stand. He didn’t mind. If anything, it made talking easier. “Repeatedly.”

“And your mother knew?”

“She did, but she numbed herself to it by drinking. They had a shitty relationship.”

“Did they fight a lot?”

“No. They barely spoke to each other, even less to me, and when they did, it was cold. Empty. I spent most of my childhood desperate to get out of there.”

He’d hid it well, though, behind the smiles he’d learned to paste on. They covered his feelings of shame, the emptiness he faced at home. He never invited anyone over, save for Jack, too embarrassed for anyone to see what life was like behind the wrought-iron gates.

“That sucks,” Cassie said, still distant. “But what does this have to do with—”

“You?” Patrick stopped pacing and caught her tight nod. God he did not want to talk about this. But she’d laid out the options—tell her the truth, or walk out the door. “I’m getting there.”

She eyed him carefully, mistrustful. Patrick leaned back against her bedroom wall.

“I went to Princeton—Dad’s alma mater—with the explicit instruction I follow in his footsteps and get a degree in Economics. So I took literature classes instead, just to piss him off.”

“He ran a publishing house. How would that be an issue for him?”

“Because he wanted me to be like him, a perfect little copy.”

She looked at him, her arms tight across her chest, her body language closed off. “I know what you’re thinking,” he continued. “Rich-kid problems, right? I had money so I shouldn’t have complained. But I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be something more.”

Cassie held still over another beat of silence, then asked, “What did you want to be?”

“Last week, you asked me what my passion was. If you’d asked me that question twenty-five years ago, my answer would’ve been different.”

“It wasn’t sex? You didn’t fuck your way through college?”

“I was a virgin in college.”

“Seriously?” Patrick flicked a glance at her, but she just shrugged. “Sorry, I find the idea of you being a late bloomer hard to believe.”

“Surprise,” he said. “I didn’t understand how a normal relationship worked, not after watching my parents. And I wanted my first time to be with someone I cared about. I wanted it to mean something.”

He didn’t look at her on the last bit. Admitting his naïve dream of finding love before he had sex was embarrassing enough without having to see Cassie’s expression of incredulity about it.

“So, you spent college a monk,” she said.

Patrick’s short huff of a laugh was hollow, without mirth. “Not completely. I fooled around, but nothing serious. My real love affair was with words.”

“I thought you don’t read much.”

“Not now. But back then, I spent more of my time reading than not.”

He recalled the quiet of it, the peace. The smell of old books in the library. He’d be immersed for hours, lost in a collection of sentences. The prose he’d read, the way the authors painted pictures with words, made him feel alive for the first time in his life. It was a world he’d wanted to bury himself in—to read and never stop.

“Your passion was with literature?”

“Spanish literature,” he corrected her. Now he made eye contact. Purposely—to make sure she was listening. “One course and I was hooked. After that I took every class I could—soaked it up, packed on the credits, even went from beginner’s to advanced Spanish in a semester. By my senior year, I was fluent.”

One plus of having a great memory. Languages were super easy to learn.

Cassie raised an eyebrow. “Fluent?”

He raised one right back. “Don’t believe me?” She didn’t seem to, so he narrowed his eyes and leaned over the bed. “Pobre pequeña princesa, deja que papá la bese.”

Poor little princess. Let Daddy kiss it.

It was a purposeful turnaround of her snarky comeback before, and oh, did it do the trick. She shifted under the blanket, a pinched V between her brows. She was angry at being bested, and if he wasn’t mistaken, she’d gotten a bit turned on. But now wasn’t the time for that.

“My father was pissed but told me at my graduation I could ‘still be an asset to the company anyway.’” Patrick remembered the anxiety, the frantic need to do anything but lead by that bastard’s side. “I was supposed to come home, shadow him and move into a management position. I skipped town instead.”

“A multimillion-dollar business was your birthright, and you ran away from it?”

“Like I said, I didn’t want to be like him.”

And yet, he’d become that way anyway. Wealthy. Angry. Sleeping around.

God, he was disgusted with himself.

“I came home for Jack and Eve’s wedding, left a note for my parents, emptied the one bank account I had access to and was on the next flight to Spain.”

He could see the rugged coast of it now—the mountains and medieval architecture. He could smell the food, hear the music. The rushing current of the waterfall outside the bedroom he’d spent far too many nights in.

“What did you do there?” she asked, anchoring him in the present.

“I backpacked around, taking on odd jobs and staying in hostels until I landed in Asturias.”

“Spain was where you learned to dance, wasn’t it?”

His glance back at her was sharp. “Spain was where I learned a lot of things.”

She shifted again, this time uncomfortable. Cassie was nothing if not good at understanding the subtext: Spain was where he’d gotten so good in bed.

“So what happened? Did you gamble away your inheritance at a casino in Madrid or something?”

“Not quite. I got a job in a bookstore and stayed with the man who owned it. He took me in, and treated me like family.” Patrick’s jaw tightened, his eyes meeting the floor. “And then I met Sofía.”

One, two, three beats of quiet. “Who was she?”

There was a flat note of jealousy in her voice, peeking through despite her attempt at being casual. If he hadn’t felt so damn nauseous he would’ve enjoyed it.

“She was a cashier at a high-end clothing shop in town.” With wild, thick hair, and a body he’d dreamed about for weeks. “It was love at first sight for me. But I didn’t have the guts to talk to her.”

“You? Shy?”

“I told you I was a late bloomer. I was terrified to approach her. She didn’t speak much English, and wasn’t in town on the weekends—at the time I didn’t know why—so I wrote her a letter. A long, lovesick schoolboy’s poem.”

His face burned at the memory of the words he’d written in Spanish, asking for her name, her time, her heart. How trusting, how foolish he’d been, pouring his soul out on paper like that.

“No one’s written me a love note before,” Cassie said.

“Well that’s insane. Somebody should’ve.”

“I would’ve had to have been in love for that to happen.”

Patrick’s gaze snapped toward hers. “Never?”

Cassie shook her head. He didn’t know how that was possible, but after what she’d shared about her past relationships, it wasn’t such a surprise. He wanted to go to her, to touch her, but she hadn’t moved her arms from her middle, and he wasn’t ready to sit yet either.

“Well, love isn’t the fairy tale people say it is.”

Patrick could hear the bookshop’s bell tinkling happily, the elated leaping of his heart when Sofía finally walked through the door, yellow peasant blouse and beaming smile and his note in her hand. The past rattled in his skin, too many emotions to fit inside. He started to pace again.

“Our first in-person conversation lasted for hours. We went to a café, and talked until they closed and she asked me to go home with her. I was so excited, I could hardly breathe.”

“Was she your first?”

Patrick nodded. “And having sex made me fall even harder.”

He couldn’t go there, couldn’t play back those feelings. He moved instead, cut a narrow path between the foot of her bed and the TV across from it. Ten steps from the windows on one side to the door on the other, glass frames on one wall, exposed brick above her headboard. It was cozy. Comfortable.

Another reason he hadn’t wanted to leave.

“How long were you with her?”

“Six months.” The second half of the happiest year he’d ever known. He had a job he liked, a family to spend time with, albeit borrowed. And love, or so he’d thought. “It wasn’t all sex, although that was a big part of it. We spent countless nights together, talked about everything—books, politics, art. She opened up a world of intimacy to me, and I loved her with every stupid, hopeful bone in my body. But none of it was real.”

“What do you mean?”

His pulse pounded. “I wanted to stay in Spain, to spend all my time reading and discussing books, work in the shop and marry her. It was my childish version of a happily ever after, and I spent every cent I had on a ring.” Patrick could feel his heartbeat in his throat. “Turned out, she already had one.”

“What?”

He turned around to catch Cassie’s startled expression. “Yeah, turned out she was engaged, and had been the entire time to a businessman her father had set her up with. That’s why she was never around on the weekends. She went back to the countryside to be with him.”

“She told you when you proposed?”

That would’ve at least been decent. “No, she waited until after we’d made love, and I’d fallen asleep beside the woman I thought was going to be my wife. I woke up the next morning alone, the ring on top of a note explaining that she wasn’t in love with her fiancé, and had wanted one last fling before she tied the knot. She never expected to care for me, but she wasn’t going to run off with me, either.”

He could recall every detail of that morning. The quiet of her being gone. The anguish. How devastated he’d been to read her words, the future he’d imagined with her evaporating like warm breath on a cold day.

“She ended the note with the words ‘Lo siento, y adios para siempre, amante mío.’”

“I’m sorry, and—”

“—goodbye forever, lover of mine.”

The shame was thick on Patrick’s tongue at the translation.

“A Spanish woman was your first love and your first heartbreak,” Cassie said. “No wonder you freaked out on me.”

Patrick winced. Hearing her speak Spanish had sent him catapulting into the past. “I’m sorry about that. It was a knee-jerk reaction. Emphasis on the jerk.”

“It’s okay, I guess.” She shrugged. “At least I understand now.”

Okay I guess didn’t mean she was okay. She still had her back up, and that guard didn’t come down easily. Which was why he was surprised as all hell when she pushed back the covers, inviting him back beside her.

A small gesture, but one he hadn’t known he’d been waiting for. Gingerly, he sat on the bed and stretched his legs out. She curled up beside him.

“What happened then?”

He’d stopped being the boy he was. Started being the man he became, whoever that was. “I packed my things the next day. I couldn’t be there anymore. Everything about Spain, about books, reminded me of her. Of how foolish I was.”

It still did.

“You weren’t foolish. You were in love.”

“And foolish. I was so focused on this life I thought I had that I couldn’t see how badly I was being played.”

Cassie held him more tightly, and her arms felt like a brace, holding down that need to move. Gustavo had been sad to see him go, but had given him that tattered old copy of El Viejo y el Mar as a goodbye gift, saying one day he’d find more meaning in it.

It had been untouched on his bookshelf ever since.

“So I sold the ring, bought a plane ticket and went home, only to find out my father had died, and the CEO position at Dunham and Strauss was waiting for me. And he’d put a stipulation in his will saying if I didn’t work for the business, he’d deny me my inheritance and cut my mother off from her monetary support as well.”

“Nice guy.”

“Yeah, he was a real winner.” Her humor lifted his mood, as did her cheek, warm against his shoulder. “I didn’t care about the money. I would’ve walked away from it all. But my mother would’ve ended up on the street. I wasn’t going to abandon her.”

Even if she’d never offered him the same courtesy.

“You couldn’t challenge the will?”

“Trust me, I tried. There was a no-contest clause.”

“So if you fought it and lost in court, your inheritance would’ve been forfeited.”

“Bingo. Not a risk I was going to take. Jack pored over the will until he found the loophole—I only had to be in a position of authority to satisfy the conditions, not run the ship. So Director of Sales, I became.”

And resigned himself to being trapped in his life, his fancy home and his steady cash flow.

“You never wanted to be in charge?” Cassie asked.

“I’m not in charge now. I just have a larger share of the stock. And the joy of doing something I hate.”

“I didn’t know you hated it.”

“It’s not what I imagined doing with my life. That’s for sure.”

“You wanted to continue your love affair with literature,” she said. “Sex isn’t your only passion.”

But it was his escape. “Maybe, but since Sofía, I don’t get involved. No emotions, no one gets hurt.”

Especially not him. Because not a day had passed when he hadn’t thought about her, and he’d spent his life since avoiding connections, leaving women first because he couldn’t stand the idea of waking up alone like he had that morning long ago, and making damn sure he knew how to protect himself from something like that ever happening again.

“What’s your fantasy?” she asked quietly.

Patrick searched his mind and drew a blank. “I don’t know that I have one.”

“None?”

“I prefer fulfilling other people’s fantasies. It…gets me out of my head. Anyway, it’s too late for me to pursue my passions. I’ve sold my soul to Dunham and Strauss. I wouldn’t know how to start over now.”

He wouldn’t know how to change either, how to break from the life he’d started living, spending money because he figured he was stuck in this situation, so he might as well get what he could out of it. Expensive clothes. Lavish apartment. His home was as closed off as he was, luxurious and lonely.

Except when Cassie was there.

He hadn’t realized it until now, but that was another reason he hadn’t wanted to walk out her door. He didn’t overthink when he was with her, didn’t worry about the future or fixate on the past. He didn’t need to become someone else either. He was just…himself.

Cassie touched him, slim fingers against his chest. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

“I’ve never told anyone about Sofía.”

“Not even Jack?”

“Nope.”

“Why tell me, and not your best friend?”

“I didn’t want to talk about it.” He rubbed her knuckle like it was a worry stone, then turned her hand over and ran his thumb along her palm. “I told you because you needed to know my reaction tonight wasn’t about you. And because I trust you, which is weird as all hell, since I’ve spent the better part of this year seeing how angry I could get you.”

She smiled and melted into him. Patrick liked it, knowing he’d made her feel better. And telling her everything had made him feel better. He hadn’t realized how much that story had been eating at him until he’d finally told someone.

Not someone. Her.

It was like exposing a wound that refused to heal, somehow helped by contact with the air. The anger had festered in the darkness, growing more bitter as it flowed through his veins. He’d been so ashamed, unwilling to explain to anyone how badly he’d been duped, why his future was meaningless and his past was a mess. But it had felt right to tell Cassie. The sense of calm now that he’d done so was palpable.

He nodded in the direction of her living room. “My mother is also the reason I don’t drink much. Hence the one glass of wine.”

“That makes sense.” She nuzzled his chest, a tiny, sweet motion. “Thank you for telling me all that.”

“You’re welcome.”

She got up on her knees, the sheet giving way to curves and soft skin as she kissed him. She took control, tongue sweeping into his mouth, and as she got more demanding, suddenly it all made sense—her feisty temperament and zero tolerance for bullshit. How she radiated femininity and sex appeal, even when she was being impossible. Her ability to chew someone up and spit them out while still being seductive, provocative and fiercely loyal to her friends.

Cassie was Latina. Maybe only half, but still.

He didn’t understand why she kept it under wraps. He was caught between wanting to get her talking, and to find the best ways of shutting her up.

He’d seen her with her clothes off, but Patrick had a feeling he hadn’t truly seen her naked. Now he was getting to see the real her—the woman behind the defense she so often kept in place. A whole new Cassie was in front of him, and he wanted to know everything about her.

He eased off the kiss and tapped her bottom lip.

“And now that I’ve told you all my secrets, it’s time you did the same.”