My Hard-hearted Hero

Chapter 11 √

A cold ball of apprehension settled in his stomach. What else had she been telling the truth about?

Damn his brother. Ashton had misled him at least with respect to one critical little detail! Zach tried to fit in Ariana's lack of sexual experience with the predatory image Ashton had drawn. Could she have been simply guarding her virginity for a worthier prospect?

Even as the ugly rationalization took shape, he jettisoned it. That kind of cold calculation may have jibed with the woman Zach had expected when he'd engineered this mission, but it had nothing to do with the woman he'd come to know since. Still, he couldn't dismiss his brother's pain, his impassioned recounting of the treatment he'd suffered at her hands.

Who was he to believe? Ashton or Ariana? Or did the truth lie somewhere in between?

She looked away and then back at him, high color blossoming in her cheeks. "But even so, you knew I didn't want you to stop."

"Ariana." He squeezed her hand. "That was the hardest thing I've ever done, walking away from you this morning. But I had to. You're under my protection."

"Protection!"  She snatched her hand away. "How chivalrous. Most people call it unlawful imprisonment."

"Call it what you will, it boils down to one thing while you're here, I'm responsible for you. For providing for your needs and keeping you safe. And that as sure as hell doesn't include...." Making sweet, deep, scorching love to you till your head and heart and body are filled with nothing but me.

He cleared his throat. "This morning was....a mistake. I never should have let things get so out of hand. It won't happen again." After an uncomfortable silence he said, I thought twenty-five-year-old virgins were an extinct species."

She shrugged and circled the exercise bench to sit next to him facing the opposite direction.

"What can I tell you? We're making a comeback."

"What is it, the whole safe-s*x thing?"

"That's part of it. The only safe s*x is no s*x, right? But there's more to it than that. At least for me. I always figured....well, making love is the most intimate experience you can share with anyone. Why squander it_cheapen it by doing it with someone you don't really care for?"

Her explanation lingered in the silence that followed, along with its inescapable corollary. Ariana cared for him. Enough to give herself to him in this most intimate way. That knowledge thrilled him on a gut-deep level when he knew he ought to be dismayed.

"How did you survive three weeks at Underground, uh.....intact?" he asked.

With a sneer of distaste she said. "That Lucas a piece of work. He came on to me, pretty brazenly, the first day I was there."

"Were you surprised?"

"I was, yes. I knew they discourage that kind of thing at Underground. Free love has no place in their communal philosophy. It's all about the rhythms of nature and good hard work, mainly farming."

"And scrubbing latrines."

She grimaced at the reminder. "That's the job they give new people. You've gotta work your way up to tilling the good earth. Of course, there's a lot of harmony-and-love stuff, too, but strickly the platonic variety."

"So the sexual revolution kinda got left back in the sixties."

"I guess so. They're pretty conservative that way. Besides, everyone works so hard, they're too exhausted for s*x. The closest they get to physical intimacy is a group hug each morning."