I see the TV from halfway down the hall. A video is playing on the large screen. A gray image of people walking up my front steps.

My heart stops beating. What the fuck.

I step into the bedroom. Grace kneels naked on the bed with the remote. She’s pressing buttons but they must be the wrong ones. She seems helpless to stop the video, which plays silently on and on.

“What are you watching?” I ask.

She turns her head. The world – my world – feels suspended in mid-fucking-air as I wait to see her expression. I’ll know what she’s thinking the second I see her eyes.

She aims her beautiful sea-greens at me. All I see in her dilated pupils is hurt and jealousy.

Dropping the remote, she folds her arms over her breasts. “How many women have stayed in this room?”

Relief makes me weak in the knees. If she’d found it, I’d know. She wouldn’t be talking to me. She’d be gone.

What a fuck-up I am. I thought I’d brought the discs to my storage space months ago. Boxed them up and buried them under a ton of unneeded shit.

“How many women?” I repeat.

She shrugs. “I mean, girl after girl, night after night. From the videos I saw, some stayed for days. Where did you keep them all? In here? In this bed?”

Like a light bulb blowing, my relief turns to impatience. “Why were you watching a surveillance video, Grace?”

“I thought it was a movie.”

I go to the DVR player and press eject. I scan the label on the disc. “The same month James died,” I say. “Quite a coincidence.”

She huffs. “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Whatever’s true. For a change.”

Her eyes narrow and her arms tighten across her chest. “I’ll tell you what’s true. You told me you’d been alone for years.”

“I have been.”

“Dozens of women is being alone?” She raises her eyebrows.

I sit on the edge of the bed and loosen my tie. “A warm body is not a relationship, Grace. You’re still a virgin. You think every time two people fuck, it means something.”

Her mouth twists. “Please. Even a virgin isn’t that naïve.”

“Fucking was my escape, okay? I’m not proud of it, but it’s the truth.”

“You didn’t like any of the girls enough to keep them around?”

I sigh. “It wasn’t about like. It was about protecting myself. Most women who go home with a guy they just met want what I wanted. A nice, distracting, forgettable fuck.”

Confusion flits across her face. She can’t reconcile what I’m saying with the intense connection between us. “So before me…you’ve never…?”

“I’ve had a relationship before, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say. “I was engaged once.”

She frowns. “You – you had a fiancé?”

“Seven years ago. She was a student at Black Hollow.”

“The school?”

“Yes. That was the real name, but everyone called it Black Halo.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. The nickname went back a long way, before my time. The school started in the 40’s I think, in an old school building in the English countryside.”

“So…you met this student while you were teaching there?”

“Her name was Indira.”

Grace’s face goes dark with jealousy. “And it didn’t work out?” she asks, trying to put on a flip tone.

“No. Her father came first in her life. After a long time of trying to help her stand on her own, I gave up and she left the school. I couldn’t compete with him, any more than I could compete with my own father.”

I’m surprised at how much those words sting. Not to think them like I have a hundred times, but to say them out loud.

The softness in her eyes is like a safe haven. “It must have felt familiar, in a painful way.”

“Yes. Between Indira and you, it seems I have quite a pattern.”

She frowns. “Me?”

“She was loyal to her father. You’re loyal to James.”

I say it almost as a challenge. Tell me it’s not fucking true, Grace. Tell me you’re over him. Tell me anything.

But she doesn’t. She hears it, and lets it drop.

“Do you still think about her?” she asks.

“Almost never,” I say. “She sent me a birthday message, but that’s the only contact we’ve had. I don’t have feelings for her anymore.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Her face brightens. She slides across the bed, a little closer to me. I glance down at the sheets where she was just sitting, and blood rushes to my cock.

My horny virgin left a heart-shaped wet spot. It made her pretty cunt drip to watch videos of girls as they walked in my house to be fucked.

Following my eyes to the sheets, she flushes dark red. “That was because…um…”

“I know what it was because,” I say. “You like knowing I’m a master at fucking, don’t you?”

She nibbles the inside of her cheek.

“It excites you to think that other women want my cock.”

“I don’t know,” she says quietly.

“I do. I think it turns you on that I’ve done everything, and fucked everybody, but the only girl I want to fuck now is you.”

Her eyebrows go up in the middle. “The only?”

“The only. You know that.”

She shakes her head. “No, I don’t. Not after today.”

I run a hand through my hair. “Things have changed in the last two years. That’s not my life anymore.”

“Do you want it to be?”

“No.”

I hold out my arms. She blinks at me warily before crawling across the bed. I wrap her warm nakedness against my chest.

“I’m sorry I watched the videos,” she mumbles into my shoulder.

“I understand why you did.”

She shakes her little oval head. “I shouldn’t have. I won’t do it again.”

“It’s over. Now, don’t you have some party planning to do? You only have one week, and I’m a very demanding client.”

She looks up and smiles. “I don’t know. You seem pretty nice to me.”

For the rest of the night, that little wet spot stays with me.

I change into jeans and make dinner while Grace works on her Pinterest board at the table. I tell her that she needs clothes, and to order whatever she likes. She turns the laptop toward me and shows me dresses and tops. I give her my opinion on her choices while I make a salad.

“I’ll pay for everything with my party planning money,” she says.

“No, you won’t,” I say.

And all the time, my mind keeps returning to that heart-shaped stain. It was so sweet, and said so much.

It told me that her desires are her own. I don’t force her little pussy to crave cock. She likes thinking about fucking. She needs it. That’s another thing I’ve learned about her.

For hours, I deprive her. No touch, no kisses, nothing but casual conversation about her plans for the party.

By nine that night, it starts to get to her. She seems restless. She watches everything I do. She wants to say something, but doesn’t dare.

She’s already made one mistake today. She doesn’t want to make two.

After we clean up dinner, I head upstairs to the master bedroom. I don’t tell her I’m going, and I don’t invite her. Three minutes after I climb the stairs, she does exactly what I want her to do. She follows on her own.

I’m standing at the window with my arms crossed when I hear her soft footfalls behind me. “Put on your robe and heels,” I say.

Her excitement is palpable as she goes to the closet. Tonight is the night. She senses it. She’s been dreaming of it all of her life.

A strong, dominant man to claim her virginity. Except I’m not going to claim it. She’s going to give it to me.

She emerges from the closet looking like an angel in stilettoes and white satin. I barely glance at her. She stands across the room, radiating the need to fuck. Her lust is wrapped in a package of innocence so sweet and earnest, all I want is to protect her from the big, bad, voracious wolf.

But I can’t, because the big, bad wolf is me.

She clears her throat. Her stance is guarded, her fists clenched in little balls. She’s waiting for me to come for her, to sling her tiny body over my shoulder and take her unspoiled cunt by force.

I turn toward the window and look out. “It’s raining again,” I say. “I love the rain.”

The air is tense. She’s hanging on my every word and movement. I sense terror battling with lust in her scarred heart. If I’d just walk over and tear her tender body apart, she could say it was my animal greed.

It would be so easy to blame her wanton cravings on me. But I’m going to make it hard.

Her heels tap the floor as she walks toward me. I smile at the moon glowing in a dim red crescent between the clouds. My cock is rigid and ready against my leg.

“I like the rain, too,” she says, standing beside me at the window.

I look down at the top of her auburn head. I go through a list of my advantages, relishing each one. I’m taller, bigger, and stronger by a magnitude of a lot. She’s naked except for heels and a silk robe, I’m fully dressed. She’s never been fucked, I’ve fucked a thousand times or more. She’s in my house. My world. My life.

And she’s going to come to me. Our beginning wasn’t exactly consensual. Tonight there’ll be no fucking doubt that she wants it.

Glancing tentatively up at my face, she takes a baby step toward me. Her thoughts are almost written on the air. Why won’t I touch her? Why won’t I do what she expects?

Sweet fucking Jesus. If she only knew how much self-control I’m burning through right now.

The first thing I feel is her head leaning against my arm. My ab muscles tighten and my cock aches. I seem so nonchalant, but my heart is racing, pumping out blood in preparation for shattering her innocence.

She puts her hand on my forearm. “Is this okay?”

Okay? If she only knew how many shameless girls have thrown themselves at me while I yawned and thought of her. The one girl who wasn’t impressed by me. She has no idea. A shy hand on my arm is the sexiest thing I’ve ever experienced.

Rain travels on a gust of wind and batters the window. Grace turns toward me.

The soft mounds of her breasts press through my shirt. Their heat penetrates into my skin.

“Are you tired?” she asks. She’s trying to find an explanation.

“No.” My left hand twitches to reach over and squeeze her supple tits.

I feel her gaze against the underside of my jaw. Her heartbeat throbs like a trapped butterfly against my bicep.

Finally, I let my eyes meet hers. I give her no expression, nothing to encourage her one way or the other.

She’s on her own.

Gently, she pulls my shirt from the waistband of my pants. It’s all I can do not to throw her on the bed. Needy girl. She wants so badly to be fucked. And she will be. She’s not going to sleep tonight with that tight cunt intact.

Her cool fingers tremble underneath my shirt. Feeling their way, they inch across my abs and up over my chest. Her full lips part. Her eyes glitter like two green jewels.

“Do you mind?” she asks. “I just wanted to…touch you.”

“Explore all you want. I won’t stop you.”

What I really mean is, you’re about to take my cock in that chaste little hole until you scream. Until there’s blood on my sheets and cum dripping from your soul.

Her slender fingers bump over one of my nipples and then the other, pausing to squeeze gently. I feel it all the way to my full, throbbing balls. “What does that feel like?” she asks, blinking her huge eyes.

She squeezes again, and I suck in a breath. “I like it.”

A tiny smile plays across her lips. She’s in front of me now, both hands under my shirt, playing like a little girl with something forbidden. Her eyes half-close as she feels her way up my chest to my neck. It’s like she can read me through her fingers.

I’m so crazy with the need to fuck her that I almost start barking orders. Unbutton my shirt, Grace. Unzip my pants. Stroke my big cock.

But it’s time for me to train myself for once, and be patient.

She’s getting more confident. Her hands splay open as they touch and massage, and her breath is heavy. I gaze down at her, letting her touch and control. It’s all about her desires tonight. And serving mine by showing me hers.

She goes up on her pretty tiptoes and offers her glistening mouth to me. Instead of lowering my head, I let her struggle like a kitten to reach me. Clawing her nails at my shoulders, she presses her hot lips to mine and feeds me her sexy little tongue.

I have to bite back a growl. My cock is about to explode.

To feel her shy but passionate desires is a gift. She’s not putting on a show for me. She’s not adopting a persona like so many other girls I’ve known, who copy porn stars but don’t know who they really are.

She’s herself. She’s real.

Still on her tiptoes, she tries to open the top button of my shirt. Her fingers fumble as her tongue darts around mine. She has no idea how fucking cute she is. How sick I am of practiced, come-hither bullshit.

Our kiss is deep and frenzied. We fit together perfectly. We can’t get enough of each other.

But I won’t touch her. The first time she feels me change her life with my cock, she’ll be begging me to do it.

With a sweet cry of frustration, she grabs both sides of my shirt and rips it open. Buttons pop off. With a sound that’s music to my ears, the handwoven Italian fabric rips down the front.

“I’m sorry,” she says, straddling my thigh with her hot pussy. “It was an accident.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“No,” she admits with a little pout. “It wasn’t.”

I feel her warm wetness through my jeans. She must be drenched. “Why won’t you touch me?” she asks, a sweet note of hurt in her voice.

“I’m kissing you, aren’t I?”

“Yes, but...” She grabs my wrist and clamps my hand to her hip. Her girlish lust makes me smile.

“You’re just desperate to get that little cunt fucked, aren’t you?”

A silky auburn strand obscures one of her beautiful eyes. She nods. “Isn’t that awful?” she whispers.

“No,” I say. “It’s fucking beautiful.”