Czech Mate by Sloane Taylor

my home. Protect you. Treat you with kindness and warmth.” His nostrils flared wider the louder he yelled. “Not once did I suspect you were a woman without a speck of morals.”
    “Just a damned minute here.” Two can play in his pissing contest. She backed off the chair arm and inched forward. “Who said my morals are garbage? C’mon, don’t just stand there gawking. Spit it out.”

    Dragan wanted to strangle her. Slow and long until all the frustration this situation had caused no longer festered in his soul. He required peace. A perfect state he had not achieved in almost a week.
    How could she stand there with those pouty lips and pretend she had no idea what his words meant? Why had she debased herself and sabotaged an excellent future? The woman had every prerequisite for an ideal life. He mentally tallied her qualities: intelligent, educated, warmhearted, spirited, and sexy.
    No. Do not think of sex .
    Or the way her body curled around his while they slept.
    Or that she made every new day fresh and alive.
    He needed to regain control and learn what form of woman he had wanted to marry. He raked his hands through his hair. How the hell could he have fallen in love with her? Was all this a cruel joke?
    Souložit Arnost and his ridiculous intuition.
    If only she had been honest with him. Told him about her past, these men, confessed she needed more in bed than he would ever be able to provide. In a matter of minutes, his world had crashed. All his plans for their future were destroyed. His heart ached for what should have been.
    Unsure of how to begin, but knowing he had to before his ethics compelled him to let her go, he fell into a chair and gathered his thoughts. She paced back and forth and demanded answers.
    He glanced up; sorrow twisted his insides. Kristus, she is even more beautiful when angry .
    He forced his mind to behave, along with his traitorous cock.
    “How could you participate in a ménage à trois with that vile person?” His heart was breaking, but he had to ask to make a clean break from the hold she had on him. “Or with anyone ?”
    “You rotten snake.”
    She punched him in the shoulder, startling him.
    “How dare you sit there on your throne and judge me.”
    “Lacey, please do not make this more difficult for either of us.” He studied his shoes as he was unable to face her.
    She leaned over him and grabbed his face between her warm palms.
    “Look at me when I’m talking to you. You want to know, bucko? I’ll tell you everything, then you can go pound sand up your tight ass.”
    Tears welled in her eyes. He clenched his fists. Anything to keep his hands at his side and not wrap her in his arms and cuddle her like a lost child.
    “That limp dick sonovabitch could never get it up. Christ, we never once had real sex. Don’t look so surprised. You heard me right, you miserable pissant.”
    She sank into a chair. Tears spilled onto her clenched hands.
    “All he wanted from me was to tease his little pecker back to life. But no touching his little thing. He wanted a good girl for that. That’s why all the costumes and toys you saw. They were all his idea. The idiot thought they would give him the hard-on Mother Nature wouldn’t. I felt sorry for him. Underneath all that bullshit and bravado is a troubled man who refuses to help himself. He focuses on his dick, and that’s probably why his tiny peeper won’t work. The man is impotent and can’t stand the reality. No drugs to help him because the freak created his problem with his mind, and you thought… God, you disgust me.”
    She ran from the room while he tried to absorb all she had said. He believed her! His heart soared like the doves off the King Wenceslas statue at feeding time.

    Lacey slammed the bedroom door, then flung herself onto the bed. She hated her typical female response to misery. But the tears poured until no more would come to relieve her pain. After the great gulps of air that produced uncontrollable