The Billionaire Playboy's Regret (Lark and Max)

Max shot Lark a sideways glance as they neared the top of the trail where a bench marked the turn of the trail which would loop them back to the car. They'd been walking for more than an hour and they'd barely spoken a word but the quiet was peaceful.

"Remember when you, me, Ollie and Johan came up here?" she asked suddenly as they reached the bench.

"Yes. Johan picked up the rattlesnake." He chuckled at the memory. "The man is nuts."

"Is he still so crazy? I haven't really spent time with him yet."

"He's traded in wild animals for wild women." Max laughed, "the last woman he dated, before the cowgirl from the hospital last week, showed up at his parents' house on a Sunday afternoon and reenacted a scene from an eighty's movie with a boom box. He needed to call the cops."

"He dated her?"

"For four weeks. He said she was crazy in the sack. Apparently, she was crazy out of it too." She shook her head at him, "I'm sure you have your fair share of crazies.

"Maybe," he thought about it. "In high school all the girls wanted to hook up because they thought my c**k could get their father's closer to Papa. Seriously, the number of girls who would blow me and then ask if my parents would come over to dinner at her house so our fathers could meet was unbelievable. Enjoy this chapter for free and stay updated with the latest version on Jo bn I b.com. Don't miss out, visit it now. Then in college, there were two different girls in two different years try to baby trap me." He saw her incredulous look and he shrugged, "I was already making my own millions by then. They were hoping for a ring and alimony."

"How did you get out of it?"

"Easy. DNA is pretty easy to sort out now."

"Weren't you worried?"

He noted the concern in her blue eyes and his heart skipped a beat. He'd missed her caring nature so much. He shrugged, "I'm very conscientious about s**** protection. I never take risks with my s****I health or the health of my partners. It's my responsibility to make sure both I and my partner are safe. I take necessary precautions and I have never engaged in s*x unprotected without a condom."

She stared at him as if confused, "you've never had s*x without a condom?"

"I mean I've been blown without a condom but not intercourse." He kept his face straight as her cheeks burned bright red at his blunt comment. "Anyway, both women were forced to accept I was not the father when DNA cleared me."

"You've never had anyone show up with a boom box?"

"No but I did have a girl once show up to crash a date I was on wearing nothing but a raincoat." "She crashed your date wearing a raincoat?"

"And nothing else."

"What did you do?"

"Took them both home." He took perverse pleasure in the way her mouth opened and closed at his comment. "I'm kidding, Lark. My security took raincoat-lady home, and I finished my date."

"Oh." She shook her head.

"You really do think the worst of me, don't you? You really think I'm into threesomes and orgies?" He lifted an inquisitive eyebrow as she plunked back down on the bench and uncapped her water bottle. "I promise, I've never engaged in s*x with two women at the same time and I've never been intimate with two girls on the same day, despite what everyone likes to say."

"Come on, Max. You collected a bloody harem in high school."

"You do know most of the girls who hung around, I never actually screwed, right? I might have made out with a handful, a few got on their knees but there weren't that many I actually f****d. Most of the time it was for show or to prove a point or, "he shrugged, "to ease an ache."

"What ache?" she sneered at the comment. "You were the wealthiest kid at school with the world at your feet. What were you aching over so bad you needed to drown your sorrows in p***y?"

"Lark Hoffman, language."

She lifted an eyebrow at him.

"Unrequited love. The girl I adored and wanted more than anything in the world was not mine and I believed I would never have her. I tried to mend my heart by attempting to see if another girl, any other girl, would compare. None did so I kept trying. Eventually, as I got older, I was much more discerning with my partners and the reasons why, but it is the reason behind my high school behavior." He watched a myriad of emotions cross her features as he spelled it out. Shock, hurt, disgust and then sadness all flitted in the blue eyes he'd loved forever.

They quietly absorbed the moment before she startled him with her next question.

"What's your number?"

He froze at the boldness. "What?"

"What's your number? How many girls have you made love with?"

"Lark." He shook his head at her question, his stomach plummeting as he realized she was going to judge him to hell and back. "Any woman I've been with has been a purely consensual experience." "Too high to count?"

"No!" he folded his arms over his chest, frowning at her.

"Five." She held up her digits. "My number is five. I lost my virginity to a guy in my first month at university because I didn't want to spend my entire youth worried about explaining I'd never made love with a man, she dropped a finger. "My other three experiences were while I was at university in Mississippi. I met a guy when I was doing my law degree in Houston. Then there was Doug and we met when I was breaking up with the guy I was seeing at school. Five." Her fingers now closed in a fist. "Do you need to remove your shoes to count toes? Do you need to borrow my digits too?" she wiggled her fingers at him. "Surely you're not embarrassed by your number."

"Intercourse only or do you want the number to include oral s*x or girls I fingered? All of the above?" he watched two patches of pink stain her cheeks to a rosy hue as he called her bluff.

"You can break it down?" she was incredulous.

"Eleven women I would consider lovers, eight of which were done after a date or two and I slept with them only one time and discovered we were not even remotely compatible. Twenty-six singular blow jobs," he smirked, "eighteen of which were in high school and five in college. There were three hand jobs and I've fingered twelve girls again mostly in high school and most were the ones who blew me. Tit for tat." "You remember them all?"

"I'm a numbers guy and I like organization. It's all sorted in here," he tapped his temple. "But if you ask me to put faces to names, I can't help you there."

"You do realize how awful it sounds to know you can't remember names or faces of people you were intimate with." "I have no guilt for it. For most of them my eyes were closed, and there was a different face in my mind. Their names didn't matter because it was never going to match the face in my thoughts or who I was thinking of when I came." He shrugged, "There were lovers I have dated for a month or more but inevitably they've said or done something to ruin my fantasy and I've shown them the door." "Your fantasy?"

He could hear the breathlessness in her question. "From the time I experienced my first kiss, there has only ever been one girl I wanted Lark."

He could see the confusion and anger on her face.

"You said it felt like you were kissing Ollie!" the pain in her voice made it sharp and shrill.

He nodded, "you cried Lark. We kissed and you cried like you wasted something special on me. Ollie and Johan were laughing because you were crying, and it hurt my twelve-year-old feelings, so I made it seem like it wasn't a big deal." She hopped off the bench and shoved his chest angrily, "you are the biggest i***t on the planet. I cried because I was happy. In my head it was the perfect, sweetest kiss which rivaled any stupid Disney princess movie we watched, and you ruined it by declaring it gross and like kissing Ollie!" tears edged her eyes.

He caught her hands to his chest and stared down at her, "I am so sorry Lark. I wish my emotional development at twelve would have been the equivalent of my intellectual function. I wish I could go back in time and have a do over."

"Well, you can't." she tugged her hands from his grip frustratedly avoiding his gaze.

"I know but chère, I promise you, I will spend the rest of our lives making it up to you. We are starting this relationship over. We will start as friends, like we were always meant to and then when you're not crying over the buffoon you were living with in Houston, I am going to spend the rest of our natural lives and then the one in the afterlife, loving you the way you deserve to be loved."

"It's too late Max" she whispered shaking her head. "Friendship is all I can offer and even then, it is hard." "It is hard because it still hurts and if it still hurts it means the love in your heart for me is still there otherwise you wouldn't give a s**t. You forget, I am the man who can take the tiniest thing and turn it into the biggest and best in the world. I am going to take the little sliver of love," he tapped his forefinger on her chest, "still in here and I am going to bring it to life until it burns like a raging inferno, and I will stoke those flames forever."

He watched her chest heaving, her eyes watering, and her lips parting as the lawyer in her struggled to argue but he could see it in her eyes. The desperate desire for his words to be true and he mentally kicked himself a thousand times for missing what was right in front of him all along. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. "Let's finish our walk before the sun is up too high and we melt. We have a lifetime to have these discussions.'

Without another word he turned and began walking down the second half of the loop wondering if the ache in his chest was medical or emotional and too scared to face either option.