It was still too much.
“Andrew always said,” she continued in that same, small voice, “pride was my biggest shortcoming. The thought of begging you for help, it made me so angry. I wanted you to look at me and not feel pity... I wanted to prove to you that I could somehow make it without your help... Pathetic, right, that even then, I was so fixated on you.”
“Theos, Jas...”
“Tonight I told myself I had nothing to be ashamed of. That I wasn’t going to hold myself responsible for their mistakes, that I... But I’m in your bed and you are looking at me as if you wish you had never laid a finger on me. Exactly what I had always wanted to avoid.”
She didn’t give him a chance to negate her; she didn’t give him a chance to even process everything she had blurted out in that usual blatantly raw way of hers.
Dragging the red sheet behind her, her shoulders a stiff line, she walked away.
* * *
Jasmine didn’t know how long she stood under the hot spray of the shower after Dmitri had walked out. But there was such cold in her chest that she felt as though she would never warm up ever again.
Dmitri was disgusted by her illustrious career. She had asked him straight and he hadn’t denied her. But even worse than his disgust was the turmoil that churned through her gut.
Because even if he had been able to stomach his disgust, she had betrayed herself, hadn’t she? She hadn’t known what she had been about to say, had only wanted to make him understand why she hadn’t come to him for help. Only wanted to make him see that it had been so hard. Only wanted to take away that anguish in his eyes.
Instead, she had blurted out things even she hadn’t fully realized, didn’t know what to make of.
She rubbed her head, where an ache was beginning. In reality, she was sore all over, between her thighs especially. Her skin felt extrasensitive to the spray of the complicated jets of the shower. On her hips, where his fingers had dug in so hard and held her down when he had been thrusting into her, her scalp where he had held her for his kiss... He was all over her, inside and out.
Fixated on him, really, had she no self-respect left? Was she going to beg him next to keep her in his bed?
He had made love to her—no, sex. It had been explosive sex, yes, but only that, and here she was, pushing her fears, her fixation for him onto his plate. A long jump for a man who had admitted to just wanting her, under extreme conditions, too, to her dumping her sob story over him.
No wonder he had said he couldn’t bear to look at her. No wonder he hadn’t been able to even stay in the room another minute.
It felt as if there was a lead weight in her chest that she couldn’t push down or breathe out, blocking her very breath.
And knowing what she had learned from him today, she wondered if even his attraction to her was a product of his protective nature, couldn’t help but wonder if he would ever really see the real her.
Not his friend’s sister, that friend whom he thought he hadn’t been able to save, not as a way to satisfy the guilt that obviously had settled inside him as a teenager who had seen his mother’s horrific death...
But just her, Jasmine Douglas, ex-virgin pole dancer, penniless and with no prospects of a career, weak when it came to helping abusive family members and desperately falling for the teenage boy she had known once.
But hurting all over, she couldn’t summon the energy to be angry with herself. She had decided today to carve her own life, to make her own mistakes if that was what it took, to stop living in the shadow of the past.
Maybe her first mistake was to fall for a man who would never see her, much less want her in his life.
She had a career that reminded him of a past he clearly wanted to forget, she had thrown herself at him, first for help and now for sex, and she had blurted out her obsession over him. Why would a man who had everything in the world want a woman like her?
* * *
Dmitri stepped out from the house into the open grounds, the desolation and shame he had heard in Jas’s voice running through him in an endless loop.
Theos, he had only realized after he had lost it so thoroughly how she had lived with that shame for so long, how low her self-esteem must have been.
He had thought her merely attracted to him, whereas it went so much deeper. And tonight, by telling her about Andrew’s deceit, he had torn down the last barrier.
Her words and the weight of them... He was not ready for them. He was never going to be worthy of them.
He saw another shadow join his in the silence and turned.
His suit jacket gone, Stavros stood with his hand on the stone bench. They had spent many nights sitting on the bench, looking at the stars, each increasingly awed by the generosity of the man who had saved them both from certain hell. And determined to their last breath that they would make him proud of them.