She reared back, looking up into his taut face. She’d expected to see him laugh, but Logan was dead serious. Shock pinged through her body.
“The pattern sort of repeated itself a lot for the next few years. I’d meet a random girl, pick her up hoping she could bring me out of my funk. At first, I’d realize how lousy I felt after the sex. Then the feeling began to hit me in the middle. I got a lot of girls off, then sent them on their way, leaving them to wonder why I hadn’t finished f**king them.” He shrugged. “Masturbating was easier, less emotional.
“Then I found BDSM and met Mitchell Thorpe. A whole new avenue opened to me. I suddenly controlled everything. The females didn’t expect sex. And I realized that I could absorb a sub’s sexual energy and use it to propel me to my next self-induced orgasm. It worked.”
“Logan . . .” God, such a damaged life broke her heart. Because of her? Really? Tara didn’t know what to say.
He stepped closer and wrapped a hand around her nape, his hot touch searing her skin. “It worked until I saw you again. I never got over you. A week ago, I couldn’t find a woman on the planet who could tempt me to want to have sex with her. One look at you—even before I knew it was you—and my first thought was of getting deep inside you and never leaving.” He trailed his thumb down her cheek. “That’s what I think every time I look at you, Cherry.”
A whole new wave of shock reverberated through her body. The girl who had once loved him wanted to leap up, wrap her arms around him, and offer him whatever he needed to feel whole. The woman she’d become after he’d burned her wasn’t sure how to believe him. He’d said that he loved her the day he took her virginity. Barely twenty-four hours later, he’d broken her heart and taken another girl to bed.
“We weren’t together long enough for you to get that hung up on me, and I—”
“Yeah, we were.” He closed his eyes. “And I think I left scars on you, too. Cherry, please, ask me why I broke up with you.”
Tara trembled. The million-dollar question. If she asked it, she feared that everything would change, that the answer could throw her into a tailspin all over again. Being able to open up physically and emotionally to Brad had been a real step up for her. In college, she’d only managed drunk sex. Sober, she couldn’t bring herself to let anyone touch her. But she’d broken through with Brad.
And now he was gone.
If she didn’t get the answer to this question, would she remain in limbo, hung up on Logan forever? Maybe they both needed this to cleanse themselves of the past and move on.
That didn’t mean that she wasn’t scared as hell to hear the answer.
“A-All right, Logan. Tell me.” Her voice broke up as tears welled. She was f**king terrified. “Why?”
“Thank you.” He leaped on the bed, pushing her flat on her back and covering her body with his own. He pressed their foreheads together and drew in a deep breath.
“Logan . . .” He was so close, felt so good, that she couldn’t breathe.
“Tara, I had to protect you. The sick f**k who’d killed my mother sent me more than one note threatening to kill you if I didn’t walk away. Then when you showed up at school late that day with a broken arm . . .” Logan told the entire story, the words halting at first, as though recounting all this hurt him, but Tara could feel his will and his anguish as he explained.
When he was done, she blinked and tears filled her eyes. If he’d told her this story earlier, she would have tossed it back in his face angrily and called him a liar. She would have assumed it was some sob tale he’d spent years inventing, designed to dupe her into dropping her panties so he could get her into bed again. Now, looking at the torment tightening his face, she couldn’t doubt that this was the truth as he knew it.
“Why didn’t you tell the police? Or tell me?”
“There was no way I was going to risk you any further. You were beyond precious to me.” He cupped her cheek. “I would have done anything to keep you safe, and at sixteen, I couldn’t think of another way. Please understand.”
Oddly, given the circumstances and their age, she did. And she was both touched and crushed by his words. All the time they’d never had together, all the things they’d never had the opportunity to do . . . The relationship may not have been one to last happily ever after. But how much pain would they have never experienced if it hadn’t been for that note on his pillow and the relationship had come to its natural conclusion?
“Your mom was such a nice lady. I’m sorry. And the police never caught her killer?”
Logan shook his head with deep regret. “It’s in cold-case status now. A new detective tried to tackle it about four years ago. He called my dad and me, checked with some of Mom’s old neighbors, asked questions of the people she once worked for. Nothing. One of her neighbors said she thought she saw a man entering her apartment that afternoon, but she was elderly and a bit senile. My mother never mentioned a boyfriend, not to me, to her neighbors, or her coworkers. There were no prints at the scene, no DNA left behind. This psycho randomly chose my mother. The police have no record of any similar case, either.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pain crawled all over his face. “I am never going to forget what it was like to drive to her house, so excited to tell her about us, then find her so still. Dead.”
Her heart went out to Logan. It was a lot to deal with at sixteen. He’d been reeling, grief-stricken. A note like the one he’d received from the killer warning him away from her would have both scared and confused him. Tara couldn’t blame him for the decisions he’d made then.
“Cherry, if I’d had my way, we would have stayed together, gone to prom as a couple, graduated hand-in-hand.” He shrugged. “Built a life together.”
A part of her really wanted to believe that, but after everything that had happened, she couldn’t imagine that alternate universe. “Why didn’t you ever try to tell me all this after your mom’s case cooled down?”
“After you changed your cell, I only had your stepfather’s home number.”
And she’d always made Adam answer the phone and tell him off. “You could have come to see me.”
“I tried. Remember a couple of Christmases ago? You slammed the door in my face.”
She had. And now she regretted it like hell. “We’ll never know the paths our lives would have taken if things had been different. I may be training to be a submissive. I may even have submissive tendencies. I don’t know that I could live this life.”
“You could, baby, under the right circumstances. It doesn’t have to be in a club, if you don’t like that setting. I just want to be with you. I’d vow to be the most loving Dom ever.”