They lay like that for a moment, both breathing heavily until the throbbing in his erection eased a bit, and then he asked the first question to pop into his head. “Why are you still a virgin?”

Allie stiffened in his arms and he was guessing the question washed away a lot of her desire, because his own quite suddenly receded like a wave pulling back from the shore. Finally, she shrugged against him, and muttered, “I don’t know. I guess I never met anyone I was interested in sleeping with.”

They were both silent for a minute, and then she said, “That’s not true. I guess . . . while I was interested a time or two, I was afraid.”

“Of sex?” he asked uncertainly.

“No. Of getting involved with someone,” she admitted quietly.

He considered that briefly, thinking that while it was causing them difficulties right now, he was actually quite pleased that he was her first lover. And her last. At least as long as he lived. She would not be interested in sex with anyone else so long as they both lived. However, he didn’t like the idea that she’d spent her life in fear of relationships. That would certainly affect them, so he asked, “Why?”

Allie was silent so long he began to think she would not answer, but then she sighed and said, “I had a weird childhood. I told you my father was raised a Follower of Christ.”

“Yes,” he acknowledged, though he wasn’t sure what that meant. He’d thought it was a cult, and knew they didn’t believe in medical intervention, but that was about where his knowledge of the subject ended.

“Well, I don’t know if he still followed all their tenets or made up some of his own after he left the US, moved to Canada, and married my mother, but life with him was . . . difficult,” she ended solemnly, and recalling the scars on her back he suspected that was something of an understatement.

“We were raised on a farm that was . . . well, it was practically Little House on the Prairie,” she said dryly, and then raised her head slightly to look at him. “Seriously. We had no electricity, and a hand pump faucet on the kitchen sink was how we got water. We used to drag this big tub into the middle of the kitchen once a week and we had to pump and boil water for a bath.” She dropped down to lie on his chest again with a sigh, and then admitted, “It was all I knew, so it was fine at the time.”

“But?” he prompted when she fell silent again.

Allie didn’t respond at first, but then said, “We were homeschooled, and weren’t supposed to make friends of children on nearby farms lest they—as my father put it—corrupted us.”

Magnus felt her begin to move a finger over his chest, circling his nipple in a wide arc before she admitted, “But I did make a friend.”