“Hi.”

As she moved closer, a dark cloud in the sky shifted precisely so that a sudden ray of light coming in through the kitchen windows behind him obscured his expression. “I hope you don’t mind my going through your closet,” she said in a playful voice. “We were in such a hurry to get my clothes off last night that they’re pretty much goners.”

Expecting him to tease her back, when he didn’t say anything, and she still couldn’t quite see his face clearly, those old nerves she always used to have around him started popping back to life.

But that was crazy. There was no way he could have touched her, kissed her, spoken to her the way he had if he didn’t feel the same way she did.

Only, when she finally stepped in front of him, he didn’t reach for her, didn’t drag her against him the way she loved so much. And he still hadn’t said a word. Instead, he was looking down at her with an expression of such clear regret that, for a moment, she almost started to worry that she’d made a mistake.

No. She couldn’t have.

Last night, Ian had shown her a hundred times over just how much he cared about her, hadn’t he? First with have-to-have-you sex and then with the care he’d taken in her pleasure until she hadn’t known where one orgasm ended and the next began.

She wanted to say something that would ease the strangely tense air between them, but before she could, he spoke first. “Tatiana, last night—”

“—was incredible.” She lifted her hand to his smooth, freshly shaved jaw. “It was the most beautiful, perfect night of my life.”

“You’re right, it was incredible.” His eyes gleamed with the same fierce emotion he hadn’t been able to hold back when they were making love. “You are incredible.” That was when she realized that he looked positively tormented with every word he spoke...and guiltier by the second. “But you were also a virgin, Tatiana.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Untouched.”

She didn’t know how everything could possibly be going from beautiful to weird so quickly, just that she needed to make it stop. Needed to make him see that things didn’t have to be weird or strained between them. And that she didn’t want him to spend one more second feeling guilty about being her first.

“I thought we already talked about this last night, about the fact that I wanted to do everything we did together. But maybe,” she said when she could see that she still wasn’t getting through to him, “it would help if you knew why I was still a virgin when I could have slept with dozens of guys by now?”

“Tatiana.” Her name was more a growl than anything else, but she wasn’t nearly done making her point—had barely begun, in fact.

“All the guys who wanted to take me to bed were nice men. Good-looking men. Heck, most of them were rich, famous men. But I always knew I would wait to have sex until it wasn’t just sex, but something so much bigger than that. So that’s exactly what I did, Ian. I waited until I fell in love. With you.”

* * *

Just as his body had immediately stilled over hers when he’d realized she was a virgin, now Ian’s heart stopped dead in his chest.

It was one thing to think Tatiana had whispered I love you while falling asleep against his chest. He could have written that off as heightened emotion from all the orgasms, or even pure exhaustion right before she dropped into sleep.

But hearing her say it to him in the clear light of day, her eyes bright and sure...

No, he couldn’t let himself believe her, and he needed to stop the warmth, the longing that had shot through him when she’d said it.

“You don’t love me.”

“I do.”

He didn’t want to hurt her any more than he already had...and yet that didn’t change his boundaries or his limits. If she were someone else, maybe they could have had a fling, just enjoyed each other casually the way he had with other women since his divorce. But Tatiana wasn’t like anyone else. Partly because she was going to become part of his extended family by marriage soon, but mostly because she deserved so much more than a simple no-strings affair with a man who could never give her anything else.

“We’ve only spent a few days together,” he reminded her, “and one night.”

“So what? People fall in love at first sight all the time.”

“Nobody can possibly fall in love that fast,” he insisted, despite how jumbled up his insides had felt from the moment he’d met her in Napa Valley. “You’re just trying to convince yourself that you love me because—”

“Don’t you dare try to say you know how I feel or why I feel it.” Her eyes flashed emerald fire as she moved closer. “I know what I feel, just like I know that you could never have touched me the way you did last night if you didn’t care about me, too. Maybe it’s not love yet for you like it is for me, but there’s something there inside of you for me. Something big. Something real.”

All morning long, he’d gone over and over what had happened between them, trying to figure out what could have driven him to go against everything he’d known was right. In the end, he’d decided it had to have been pure hormones and primal attraction, rather than an emotion Tatiana wanted to call love. And what man on the planet wouldn’t have been infatuated with her beauty, with the sounds she made when she came, with the thrill of being with someone so full of life and boundless dreams?

The last thing he wanted was to hurt her, but at the same time, he needed her to understand without even the barest doubt that he simply wasn’t capable of loving a woman more than he loved his company, his work, the power and the rush of business.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever have to force himself to do, hurting her now so that he wouldn’t hurt her even worse in the future, as he made himself tell her, “Of course I touched you like that. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t resist you, not after you kissed me. No one could have, Tatiana.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been with way prettier women than me. I’ve seen pictures of the women you’ve been with, not to mention your ex-wife.”

“Those women all bought their faces, their bodies, with high-priced surgeons. But every curve on your body, every expression on your face is you.”

“Okay then, why don’t you tell me—how was sex with those women compared with me?”

Just when he thought she couldn’t shock him more, she went right ahead and did it without so much as blinking. First, she’d stunned the crap out of him by actually being as innocent as she’d seemed, and then she’d blown his mind by unleashing such sweet yet wild sensuality that he could barely keep up with her. Only to find that one little four-letter word falling from her lips could send him reeling harder and farther than any orgasm had.

And now, this. Actually asking him point-blank to compare his time in the sheets with other women to being with her just hours before.

When he didn’t answer her fast enough, she just kept pushing, “Was being with any of them as good as what you and I shared last night?”

“No.” Damn it. “Not even close.”

She smiled at him like she’d just made her point, and maybe it felt too much like she had, like she was getting too close, too deep again, because even though he’d already been cruel enough, he couldn’t stop himself from saying more. “You’re so tied to the fairy tales you’ve been acting out your whole life, and to the happily-ever-afters that screenwriters tie up into a neat and tidy bow, that you can’t see that nearly all of those perfect endings are just fiction. They’re nothing more than great stories meant to keep the audience coming back for more. So just because we burned up the sheets together doesn’t mean I love you. What it means is that I love your body. I love your face. I love touching you. And I love making you come. But that’s all it is, Tatiana. Just hot sex. Nothing more.”

Her skin lost more and more color as he kept going, kept swinging harder, aiming lower. But even if he had deliberately just said all those things to make sure Tatiana stopped saying how much she loved him, God, how he hated to watch her smile fall.

Hated it more than he could ever remember hating anything before in his life.

“Fine,” she snapped. “I get it. You don’t love me. You’ll never love me. And I’m a naïve idiot for ever thinking you did. Happy now?”

She spun around, ripping off his tie from around her waist and then his shirt from her shoulders. In seconds she was naked again and Ian realized, with no little fury at himself, that he was scum enough to respond to her astonishingly perfect body after he’d just done everything in his power to shove her out of his life.

“No, damn it,” he ground out, “I’m not happy about any of this.”

But she’d already hightailed it out of the kitchen toward his office. By the time he caught up to her, she was shoving her feet into her heels. She looked with obvious dismay at her shredded clothes on the floor, then stalked past him out of the office and toward his front door.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going without your clothes on?”

“Home.”

He knew how mad she was, and how hard she was trying to be tough, but he could also hear the slight break in her voice in the middle of that one syllable. Her pain twisted up everything inside of him...everything he didn’t want to feel for her but couldn’t seem to find a way to stop.

She grabbed her trench coat—one that barely grazed her kneecaps—from where she’d taken it off by the front door, and as she covered her naked body with it, then did up the buttons with trembling fingers, he nearly grabbed her to make her stop. But he already knew that making the mistake of ever touching her again could only lead them back to his bedroom.

It had been hard enough to push her away once—nearly impossible, in fact. He was dead certain he’d never manage it twice.

“You can’t leave dressed like that, wearing only your coat and nothing else.”

“Yes, I can. I can do anything I want. I can even make the mistake of sleeping with a man who’s too haunted by his past and too scared of what the future might hold to let himself believe that I love him.”

With that, she threw open the door, walked quickly to the elevator, and pressed the down arrow. The metal door slid open immediately, but right before it closed behind her, he moved into the small space with her.

“I’ll drive you home.”

“I’m going to walk.”

“You’re not wearing clothes. Hell, you’re not wearing underwear!” And Lord knew that in nothing but a coat and heels, with sex-tangled hair and her lips still slightly swollen from his kisses the night before, she was his every erotic fantasy.

But he couldn’t touch her. Should never have touched her, damn it.

“Well, then I guess I’d better hope there’s not a breeze coming in off the water today, or I’ll be giving people a show they haven’t paid for. And not the happily-ever-after kind this time,” she said, echoing his harsh words in a brittle tone.

Frustration with absolutely, positively everything had him growling, “You’re going to get in my car, even if I have to throw you over my shoulder to get you there.”

“That would mean touching me again...and we both know you’re not about to risk making that mistake again. So I’m pretty sure your car is off the list.”

“I’ll hail you a taxi, then.”

When she didn’t argue, he tried to convince himself that she was finally listening to reason. Not only was she barely dressed, it was pouring outside. Hard enough that even rain-hardened Seattleites weren’t hoofing it through town and the sidewalk was completely empty.