Unwrapping the Playboy / The Playboy's Gift. Marie Ferrarella
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to get back home because I had a paper I needed to finish for Monday. He told me he could get a paper on any topic under the sun, and that shouldn’t interrupt the good time we were having.”
She shrugged helplessly, wishing she could change the rest of the narrative. Wishing that it had never happened. But that would mean she’d have to wish away Jonathan and she could never do that.
“I told him I wouldn’t feel right about that. That I needed to earn my grade. He laughed and said I was a rare person. I left the party and went home. None of the other girls I lived with were there.” She paused for a moment, taking a shaky breath. “He followed me. When the doorbell rang, I thought one of my roommates had forgotten her key. But it was Erik. He pushed his way in….” Her voice broke.
The horror of the situation suddenly hit Kullen with the force of an anvil dropping on his head. He called himself seven kinds of a jackass. Here he’d been feeling sorry for himself for loving her, and all along she’d been a victim.
“He raped you?” Kullen asked, struggling to contain his outrage.
She drew her lips together in a thin line, then nodded.
He stared at her, stunned. “Why didn’t you report him to the police?”
“Because I was ashamed.” It was so hard not to cry. Talking had sharpened all the edges of the incident. She could feel them all pricking her flesh again. “It would have been just my word against his. People saw him at the party talking to me. Walking me out to my car. They’d think that the sex was consensual and that I cried rape after the fact because he wouldn’t allow himself to be blackmailed.”
It seemed too fantastic for words, but Kullen was acutely aware of the dead man’s reputation. “Is that what he said?”
She nodded, avoiding his eyes. “He told me it was my fault. That I’d asked for it and that I couldn’t expect a guy to shut down after I ‘got his engine going.’” She drew in another shaky breath. “All I wanted to do was forget that it ever happened.” She smiled at Kullen and it all but broke his heart. “You almost made me forget. And then I found out I was pregnant—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He would have taken care of her—after he’d beaten that scum to a pulp.
“Because I didn’t want you to look at me with disgust, or pity—”
“So letting me think that something was wrong, that you’d rather run away and disappear than marry me, was better?” he demanded. She made no answer. “Didn’t you know me any better than that?”
She wasn’t going to cry. Please, God, don’t let me cry. “At that point, I didn’t know anything except that what I had once hoped for was now completely out of reach. I had a child on the way. A child I didn’t want.”
“There were options,” he told her quietly. Not options that he would have chosen for her, but they were hers to reject, not his.
She shook her head. “Not for me.”
“Then adoption,” he suggested.
Lilli shook her head. “My mistake, my burden,” she said firmly.
Her reasoning frustrated him. His anger against the dead man bubbled up within him and he had nowhere to vent it. His temper flared and it was a struggle to keep it under wraps. “He raped you, you didn’t rape him. How the hell was any of this your mistake?” he asked.
She’d told him what he needed to know. She didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
She waved away his question. “That’s all in the past. And in one of those ironic twists of fate, Jonathan is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Pausing, she looked at him, then softly amended, “Well, one of the best.”
She could sense that he wanted to ask more questions. Lilli looked down at her hands. She’d just stripped herself naked and felt utterly vulnerable.
“Satisfied?” she asked in a whisper.
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