The Bridal Path: Ashley by Sherryl Woods

girls’ slumber party.”
    “Well, actually…”
    Ashley chuckled. “I should have known. Whose was it?”
    “I never, ever kissed and told,” he declared piously. “I don’t intend to start now.”
    “Well, your dates certainly did. How much were they making up, Dillon?” she asked again, refusing to let the matter drop until he’d given her a straight answer.
    He stood and poured himself another cup of coffee. He took a very long time doing it. A suspicious person might think he was trying to hide something. Ashley had gone beyond suspicion to flat-out conviction.
    “How old were you when you made love for the first time?” she asked.
    “Isn’t that awfully personal?”
    “Considering how close we’ve become, to quote you, I’d say I have a right to ask a few personal questions.”
    “Can I plead the Fifth?”
    “This isn’t a court of law.”
    “It feels like it.”
    “Dillon, the question isn’t all that complicated or particularly damning. Quite the contrary, in fact.”
    “No, you’re just suggesting that I was a fraud back then.”
    So she was, Ashley realized. “Well, only in the best possible way.”
    He laughed at that. “Is it any wonder I find you fascinating? You have the most convoluted, twisted logic of any woman I’ve ever known. Most women try to prove the men they’re involved with are sleeping around on them. You’re dead certain I wasn’t sleeping around ten years ago, when all the evidence points to the contrary.”
    “What evidence? A bunch of hormonal seventeen-year-olds out to prove how grown-up and daring they were?”
    Dillon sighed. “Where were you a decade ago?”
    “Trying to figure out how to get on your list of conquests,” she admitted candidly.
    Pure lust suddenly shimmered in his eyes. “It’s never too late.”
    “So they say,” Ashley agreed. “But I want straight answers first.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I can’t figure out why you’d let everyone in town believe you were so bad when my guess is that you never touched those girls.”
    “Oh, I touched a few of them,” he confessed, then sighed. “But you’re right. It never went any further than that. I was twenty when I made love for the first time.”
    “Mind-boggling,” she said, half to herself. “Then why did you let everyone believe you were so bad?”
    “You won’t understand.”
    “Try me.”
    “Because having a reputation as a juvenile delinquent seemed better to me at seventeen than having no reputation at all.”
    Ashley struggled with the implications of that for several minutes before conceding defeat. “You’re right. I don’t understand.”
    “Why should you?” he said bitterly. “You were the daughter of the most powerful man in town. You were bright and beautiful and just about as close to perfect as a summer sky. You were everyone’s role model. Mothers berated their daughters for not being more like you, and fathers berated their sons for not courting you.”
    Ashley winced at the assessment. “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an exaggeration?”
    “Do you?” he countered.
    Ashley sighed. “Okay, I suppose people did think that, but they were all overestimating me. I was just an insecure teenage girl, like all the rest. At any rate, what does that have to do with you?”
    “I was a nobody, with a father who wasn’t around most of the time and no mother at all,” he said.
    He said it with surprisingly little resentment. Apparently he’d been saving that for her all these years. She began to wonder if his feelings for her back then had been fascination or antagonism. Based on what he was saying now, she must have represented a lot of things he disliked. She listened intently for some clue as he continued to describe the way it had been for him.
    “I had to take on too much responsibility at home too early. My grades were lousy. The first time anybody paid any attention to me was when my best friend at the time shoplifted a pack of gum and I got blamed