Page 67 of Keeping The Virgin

“I never brought them up again because I don’t talk about my parents to anyone.” Now his gaze does go dark. “It’s because they were both drug addicts.”

Realization sweeps over me as I remember the last time Cage and I saw each other—in a dim lot behind the Russian restaurant where Igor Vasiliev took us; my phone screen exposing my nude photo and Liam’s threatening text; the story I told Cage about Liam’s drug addiction and the way Cage reacted and then how he said he was sick of all the lies.

But I hadn’t been lying to him. There was something way darker than my past that made him push me away.

He goes on, and it’s almost as if he’s exposing his entire soul to me. “I lived with my parents’ bullshit for seventeen long years, lying to our neighbors about why my mother and father would never come to the door when people knocked, why they always looked so sick during their infrequent appearances outside our disgusting apartment, why I never seemed to have enough to eat. I was good at hiding what was really going on behind those doors, so not even my teachers knew what was going on at home.” He pauses, and his darkness only grows. “My mother overdosed when I was fifteen, and it wasn’t until I was nearly out of high school that I found out that it was my dad who introduced her to heroin.”

I press my hand against his chest. His heart, my heart. My throat swells with emotion, making my voice thick. “I’m so sorry, Cage.”

“It is what it is…or was what it was.” He’s stroking my face again. “After my mother died, I grew so angry with my father. The bastard wouldn’t stop using, even after what happened to her.” He swallows. “But I was sick of the lies and the ugliness, so I moved out and began taking care of myself when I was seventeen. It wasn’t much different than what I’d been doing before, scrapping for meals and money, running a household long before I should’ve been. It’s just that I didn’t have to deal with them anymore. I put my energies toward succeeding in everything I tried, but it turned out that this wasn’t enough.”

Now I see the wounded boy in him—the one who grew up way too soon and hardened himself to the point where he turned that granite soul toward business, eventually becoming a billionaire who never took no for an answer. I see the makings of this cold-blooded titan of industry who never had a real home or family, and I understand why he seemed to doubt my story on the night of Igor’s dinner.

Liam only reminded Cage of his parents, didn’t he? And Cage was so very sick of addicts affecting his life, sick of the people close to him telling him lies, stealing money for drugs, even though that’s not what I was doing. But, in his eyes, I was enabling Liam.

Cage’s eyes weren’t clear that night, not like they are now.

“Your father,” I say. “What happened to him?”

“I have no idea. He could be dead for all I care.”

I can feel that emotional hardness as his arm tightens around me, but he came to me for a reason tonight. I know that he doesn’t want to live the rest of his life as he’s been doing, and I reach up to bring him down for a kiss. A long, I’ve-got-you, I’m-here-for-you kiss that has me swooning until he hauls me against his chest, my cheek against him.

I’m what he needed…he’s what I need, and I close my eyes, listening to the tenor of his voice as it flows into me.

“Can you see why I’ve never allowed myself to truly open up to a woman?” he asks. “To trust, to care for anyone. Not until you came along. Now I can’t stop caring.”

Love explodes in my chest. He’s really saying these things to me.

“I care, too,” I whisper, “and I understand everything.” I rub my face against him and slip my arms around him as I add, “Everything.”

His past, and his most secret, dark desires.

From the way he keeps holding me, I know that we don’t have to say what those dark desires are out loud.

But he speaks anyway. “God, I’ve never understood what it’s like to want a woman so badly that I lose control, but I did with you. Over and over again.”

The thought of being with him again—tied up, blindfolded, trusting him to do what he wants to do with me—makes me tremble. He’s so attuned to me that his breathing gnarls, catching once again as I feel how his body is responding to being so close to me. His cock is getting hard, and my pussy is getting wet.

“My god, Karini,” he says. “If you only knew how you frustrated me, even while I was so damned taken with you. All you had to do was walk through my door, and every second afterward, I was dying to touch you more, taste you, claim you. I wasn’t used to feeling that way, so I fought it off.”

“And I egged those desires on.” But now I have a good idea why he would lose control like that with me: This is about his mother, who was pushed into a dark way of life by his father, a way of life that eventually killed her. His past is as black as sin, and he never outran it until now.

But I think there’s something more that he still has to tell me.

“Every time I was with you,” he says, “all my dark impulses came out, and the last thing I wanted was to be like my old man. I was afraid those urges would engulf anyone I cared about. I thought it was better not to be close to anyone at all than to risk hurting the women I was with, but after you left, I knew better. I knew I couldn’t live without you.”

My heart jars to a stop. “Truly?”

“Truly.” He pulls back from me so that he can cup my face in his big hand.

As he bends to kiss me again, I feel as if I’m floating, but there’s something niggling at me, a question.

“Cage,” I whisper, ending the kiss against his mouth. “Have you heard about what happened to Liam?”

“Yes.”

He kisses the corner of my lips, my jaw, and I press my forehead against his.

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