Page 92 of The Forbidden Billionaire
My eyebrows lift. “Uh… what do you want to know?”
“What was she like?”
The last thing I want to talk to her about is my ex. And yet… maybe it would help to dispel some of the ghosts that have been haunting me.
Chapter Twenty
Aurelia
I can see Luke wrestling with himself as to whether to answer. I wait patiently, sipping my wine, and eventually he sighs and says, “Medium height. Brown hair. Hazel eyes.”
That makes me laugh.
His lips curve up. “What?”
“I don’t want a police sketch,” I scold. “I meant what was she like?”
A frown flickers on his brow. “She was cool and composed. Organized. Structured.”
It’s an interesting description. Not beautiful, funny, warm, sexy.
“She was very clever,” he continues. “She knew how to argue her position. She was a barrister.”
“Wow.” That surprises me, I don’t know why.
“I know,” he says wryly. “I punched above my weight there.”
“Not at all. You’re a smart guy.” It’s only as I say it, though, that I realize how true that is. Previously, I’d thought of him as an army soldier, an automaton, trained to do as he was bid. But that’s incredibly unjust. I’m not surprised at all that a smart woman would find him attractive. Or did she just see him as the brawn to her brain?
“When did you meet?” I ask.
“Shortly after she left university. I’d already joined the army, and I was on leave.”
I know they only broke up last year, so they were obviously together for a few years. “Tough for both of you when you had to go back,” I say.
“I guess, although she was always super busy with her job. She worked really hard. She was abused as a teen by an uncle. She went into family law because she said she wanted to try to help other women who’d been in her position.” He looks down and scratches at a mark on his shorts.
There’s a deeper mystery here, something he wants to confess, but I know him well enough to understand that I’m going to have to tease it out of him. “Poor girl. That was commendable.”
“It was. But it meant she had a… complicated view of…” He trails off.
“Of what?”
His gaze rises to meet mine. “Of sex.”
My pulse picks up a little. The rain is lashing at the windows, and it feels as if we’re surrounded, cut off. The atmosphere has turned intimate. We’re not principal and CPO anymore. We’re two people getting to know one another, opening each other up like oyster shells.
“What happened?” I ask softly.
He hesitates, then says, “I don’t want this to come across wrong.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, I understand everyone’s different, and she’d been through a lot…”
“I know you’d never be purposefully mean or cruel,” I say. “You can tell me.”
“If anyone’s going to understand, it’s you,” he replies, somewhat mysteriously. He surveys me as if weighing up the pros and cons of confessing. Then he sighs again. “Her view of sex was somehow… I don’t know… transactional, I guess. It served a purpose. But she never… I mean she didn’t feel, you know…” He’s struggling to frame it.
