A Debt Paid in Passion by Dani Collins Page B

name was Stephan. We lived together for almost two years, but we were both starving students, so date night was microwave popcorn and whatever movie was on the telly.” Stephan had had about a thousand allergies, including alcohol, so even a cheap wine or beer had been out of the question. “Sometimes we went crazy and rented a new release, but my hand-me-down player said ‘bad disc’ half the time, so it wasn’t worth the hassle.”
    “You lived with him?” Raoul’s brows went up in askance reaction.
    “It’s not the same as dating,” she hurried to argue. “It was—” Convenient. A desperate act in a lonely time. A mistake.
    “Serious?” he supplied in a honed voice. He moved a few steps closer, seeming confrontational, which disconcerted her.
    “Why are you judging me?” She rounded the conversation area, circling back to the bar, where she took a big gulp of wine before she set down her glass. “All I’m saying is that I never dated. This is turning into a long conversation about nothing.”
    “You lived with a man for two years. That’s not nothing, Sirena. Did you talk about marriage?”
    “I—” She didn’t want to go there, still feeling awful about it. Crossing her arms, she admitted, “He proposed. It didn’t work out.” There, that was vague enough to keep her from looking as bad as she felt.
    “You were engaged —”
    “Shh! You’re going to wake Lucy,” she hissed. “Why are you yelling? I’m sorry I said anything.” She looked for her watch, but she’d removed it because it didn’t go with this outfit. “David should be here with the meals soon, shouldn’t he?”
    Raoul could barely compute what he was hearing. Another man had been that close to locking Sirena into marriage forever. How could he not have known?
    “Did working for me cause the breakup?” he asked with a swift need to know.
    “No.” She sounded annoyed.
    “What then?” For some reason this was important. He needed to know she’d severed all ties with this other man, irrevocably. “Do you still have feelings for him?”
    “I’ll always love him,” she said with a self-conscious shrug.
    The words rocked him onto his heels, like the back draft from a semitruck that nearly flattened him.
    “In a friend way. That’s all it ever was. A friend thing. Do you really need all the gory details?”
    “I do, yes,” he said through lips that felt stiff and cold. He wondered how he’d kept his wine from spilling, because he’d forgotten he held the glass. He moved to set it on an end table before giving Sirena his full attention, still reeling with shock when really, it wasn’t as if people living together was a scandal. He just hadn’t realized she had been so deeply involved with anyone. Ever.
    When he lifted his gaze to prompt her into continuing, a shadow of persecution clouded her expression.
    “It was a lonely time in my life. Amber was in Canada, my family had left for Australia. Stephan was the first boy who’d ever noticed me—”
    “I find that hard to believe,” Raoul interjected.
    “The first boy I’d ever noticed had noticed me, then. Maybe there were crushes before that, but I wasn’t allowed to go out when I was living at home—not even to spend the night at Amber’s, in case we snuck out to a party. My stepmother wasn’t having a pregnant teenager on her watch, so there were chores and a curfew and a little sister to babysit. When I enrolled at college, Stephan was the first boy I had the opportunity to spend time with. He was nice and I was romantic enough to spin it into more than it was.” She shrugged again, looking as though she wanted to end there.
    “It was obviously more if he proposed.”
    “That was impulse on his part. I decided to quit my degree and go with the business certificate so I could start earning proper money, rather than temping and doing transcription around my courses. He was afraid I’d meet someone else and I realized I wanted to, so we broke