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my walls surrounding him.
    He groaned. It was so sexy. Heat drenched us both and pressed us together as we slowly returned to earth. That was when it hit me.
    Oh, holy, fucking shit. I’d been so selfish.
    He’d wanted to go slow and make a long memory to hold him through the next year, and in my greediness, that memory was now less than ten minutes. Maybe less than five. I’d lost all track of everything.
    He clutched me tightly to his heaving chest. I shrugged out of the jacket so I could touch him with my skin completely unhindered. My naked body wrapped around his and I gripped him fiercely. “Dom.” My voice was a ghost. “I’m sorry.”
    He lifted his head and blinked his disoriented eyes. “Sorry?”
    “I didn’t go slow.”
    He’d said it himself. No way was he going to be able to recover for a third round anytime soon. My stomach was in knots. I couldn’t do this to him. I’d wanted to feel something, and now I fucking did. Crushing guilt. This night was supposed to be about him, not me. I’d stolen what he wanted.
    In the quiet, there was only the sound of our breathing slowing, and I knew what I had to do. I climbed off of him.
    “Wait,” he said, but I ignored it.
    I picked his jacket up off of the floor and went to the table so I could set it beside his shirt.
    “Come back,” he said.
    Unsteady feet carried me to the silk robe hanging on the hook. My hand shook when I pulled it down and slipped it on, and turned to finally face him. He was devastatingly handsome, even when his face was full of confusion.
    “Please get dressed.” My voice was hollow since I was terrified by what I was about to do. “I have to talk to my manager.”
    He already had the condom off and knotted it, and dropped it into the trash. My eyes were fixed on him as he stood and pulled up his pants. I watched the muscles in his lean arms flex as he did the zipper and then the button, his gaze pinned on me.
    My whole body shook. My stomach was lined with lead.
    “Why do you have to talk to your manager?”
    “Because the deal’s off.”

chapter
    FIVE
    Dom froze mid-buckle of his belt. “What?”
    I took a hesitant step toward him, then another as my nervous hands tightened the sash at the waist of my robe. “Stay in the room, don’t leave until I get back.”
    Because if he stepped out into the hall, that was it. The transaction was complete and Marquis would escort Dom to the payment room, where I’d never see him again.
    The disorientation was clear on Dom’s face. “Why is the deal off?”
    “Because I didn’t do what I was supposed to.”
    I watched the confusion grow larger in his magnetic eyes. “Which was what? Give me the best sex I’ve ever had? Believe me, Paige, you delivered. And then some.”
    My goddamn knees turned to mush. He stormed at me, a blur of skin stretch over muscle and pulled me roughly into his arms.
    “What is this?” he asked.
    Maybe he thought this was some sort of ploy. A shake-down for more money. I wasn’t anywhere near a good enough actress to pull off the fractured feeling I was sure to be displaying.
    “I don’t want your money,” I gasped. “It will make what just happened . . . not real.”
    My brain scrambled, desperate to find a way to come out the other side of this. I’d rather have this night as whatever the fuck it was, than my percentage of his thirty grand. I’d have to drive myself to the ER after I left here, because something was very, very wrong with me.
    “I don’t understand,” he said. “I have the money. I mean, I got a huge bonus last month. I can pay–”
    “Don’t, just wait. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I shook in his arms. “All I know is I don’t want you to be another client. Don’t take what we did away from me.”
    Oh, god, I wanted these foreign emotions to get the fuck out. It helped that Dom looked at me now like I had two heads.
    His voice was barely a whisper. “Real?”
    “Terrifyingly real.” How was Joseph