Robyn Donald - Innocent Surrender - The Virgin's Proposition / The Virgin and His Majesty / Untouched Until Marriage

He’d thought at the time it was because she’d wanted to spend some more time with him alone. Only later he began to realize a family vacation on Long Island wasn’t fast-lane enough for her.

But when she’d made the remark about sailing, he’d taken her suggestion at face value and offered to charter a sailboat so they could go to Cabo San Lucas as soon as he got back home.

Lissa had been delighted.

“Ooh, fun,” she’d squealed on the phone when he’d tossed out the idea to her.

They hadn’t seen each other for more than two days at a time in the past two months. It seemed like a great way to spend some time alone with her. And he’d been delighted she was as eager for some uninterrupted time together.

“It will be wonderful!” Lissa had crowed. And he knew that tone of voice—it was the one that went with the impossibly sparkly blue eyes. She’d let out a sigh of ecstasy. “The wind. The water. The two of us. Oh, yes. Let’s. I always feel as if I’m in communion with nature.”

So two days after he got home, he’d chartered a boat, and they’d set sail to Cabo from Marina del Rey.

For the first five minutes Lissa had looked exactly as content as Anny did now. But an hour later the contentment had vanished.

The wind was too cold. The boat tilted too much. The ocean spray wasn’t good for her complexion. She was afraid of sunburn.

Demetrios had tried to be sympathetic. Then he’d tried to joke her out of it. But Lissa didn’t take teasing at all. She pouted. She wept. She slammed around and threw things when she was upset. They weren’t two hours out of Marina del Rey and she had become seriously upset.

Demetrios did his best to placate her. “I’ve missed you, Lis. I’ve been waiting for this.”

She looked at him, appalled and flung her arms in despair. “This? This? There’s nothing here!”

“We’re here. The two of us. Alone,” he reminded her. “No press. No fans. No one at all. Just us. Relax and enjoy it.”

But Lissa hadn’t relaxed and she hadn’t enjoyed it. She’d gone below, she’d come up to the cockpit. She’d flipped through a magazine, tried to read a possible script. There was no one to talk to. She was bored.

He’d offered to let her take the wheel. She’d declined. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“I’ll teach you,” he’d offered.

She hadn’t wanted that, either.

As the hours passed, she’d become more agitated. She hadn’t been able to sit still.

“When do we get there?” she’d begun asking when they’d barely left Catalina behind. She had looked around hopefully, as if their destination might materialize on the horizon. “It’s only a couple of hours to Cabo.”

Demetrios had stared at her. “Flying,” he’d agreed. “Sailing it’ll probably take us about a week.”

“A week?” Lissa’s voice was so loud and so shrill he thought they probably could have heard it in Des Moines.

“Well, depending on the winds, of course, but—”

But she hadn’t let him get any more out than that. She’d lit into him with a fury he’d only seen before on the set when she’d played a drug addict deprived of her source. She’d got an Emmy nomination for the performance.

It turned out she hadn’t been acting. It turned out Lissa had more than a small drug habit. She’d been intending to score some in Mexico, though Demetrios hadn’t known it at the time. There was a whole lot about Lissa he hadn’t known then—things that even now he wished he’d never known.

It would have made it easier to forgive her. To forgive himself.

That disastrous trip had occurred just six months into their marriage. Later he’d thought it was the beginning of the slide downhill. Even that wasn’t true. The slide had begun before she’d even walked up the aisle to become his wife.

He’d been fooled. Conned. Duped into believing he’d found the woman of his dreams.

Because he’d wanted it so much that he’d convinced himself? Or because Lissa had played the role so well?

How much had been intentional misdirection and how much had simply been bad judgment? Demetrios had no idea still.

All he could remember is that she’d looked so perfect on their wedding day. So content. So happy, Anny looked that way now—happy, her eyes closed, her face in repose.

But hers was not like Lissa’s version of “happy.”

Lissa’s “happiness” had always had an effervescence to it. She had bubbled, emoted, reacted. She had acted happy.

Sitting here now basking in the sunshine, eyes shut, wind in her hair, Anny wasn’t acting. She simply was.

There was no bubbliness, no bounce. No reaction. Her emotion was quiet, accepting, serene—and, heaven help him, enticing in its very stillness.

Dangerously enticing.

And Demetrios understood quite clearly now what Anny meant about making love with him being “dangerous” because it would involve her heart.

Indulging these thoughts about Anny—seeing in her the antithesis of Lissa—was dangerous in the extreme. It could undermine his resolve. It could make him vulnerable.

She didn’t have to entice him intentionally. It was worse, in fact, that she wasn’t. It made him want things he had promised himself he would never want again.

“You’re going to get a sunburn if you keep doing that,” he said gruffly.

Anny’s eyes flicked open in surprise. She dipped her head so that Theo’s sun visor shaded her face again and she sat up straight, then smiled up at him. “You’re right,” she said, flexing her shoulders and stretching like a cat in the sun. “But it feels wonderful.”

To his ears, her voice almost sounded like a purr. He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say in the face of such inocent happiness.

He found himself wishing she were more like Lissa so she would be easier to resist.

At the same time he couldn’t help being glad she was not.

CINDERELLA ONLY GOT a single evening to indulge her fantasy.

Anny had had her evening with Demetrios. But now, amazingly, it seemed as if she was going to get two whole weeks.

Two weeks to be simply herself—not a princess, not Gerard’s fiancée. Just plain Anny. With no demands, no expectations at all.

Not even sex.

Not that she wouldn’t have liked to enjoy sex with Demetrios. The one night she’d spent with him had been astonishing, revelatory, incomparable.

It had made her want more.

Too much more.

So much more that she had not dared to allow herself to think about it. Limiting it to one night and walking away had been possible. But indulging herself in the joy of spending two weeks of nights in his bed, in his arms, would not work.

She would want more than those two weeks.

She would want a lifetime of them. And not just of making love with Demetrios, but of being loved by him.

She wasn’t there yet. But she would be if she allowed herself to give into the temptation. And so she’d said, “No sex.”

She hadn’t explained it well. She wasn’t sure that she could ever explain it so that it made sense to him. He was a man. Men didn’t think about sex the same way. And he clearly had no problem enjoying sex with her and then walking away without a backward glance.

He’d basically promised to do just that.

Well, more power to him, Anny thought wryly. She knew her own limitations. And she knew they precluded that. So she said she was sorry and she stuck to her guns.

Having made her statement, though, she went below to work on her dissertation for a while. It seemed a good idea to give Demetrios some space to get used to a platonic two weeks.

Apparently it didn’t bother him at all because when she came back out on deck late that afternoon, he was perfectly cheerful and equable—as if it didn’t matter to him a bit.