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His eyebrows rose. “Really? You didn’t tell me about that.”

“I never tell on the first date, and we really haven’t had a first date yet.”

He laughed and reached for my hand again. On our way back to his room, he introduced me to their maid and cook, Martha Cooper. She was an African American woman in her fifties from Louisiana who had been trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Texas. I gathered that she had been working for the Garfields for the last two years. Ryder told me she had always worked for celebrities. He said the world of the rich and famous was like a closed little club in which the members shared not only servants but also beauty and health references.

“This sharing is another thing that makes them all feel special,” he said as we headed back to his room. “Not that they need much more to do that.”

“You sound prejudiced,” I said, only half kidding.

“Huh? Prejudiced?”

“Don’t hold their fame against them. They’re not inferior just because they’re well known.”

That brought another smile to his face. I was beginning to think that if I could accumulate smile after smile, I might be able to make a difference with Ryder Garfield. The worry was that I would try too hard and lose him that way, too.

“That’s my sister’s room,” he said, nodding at a closed door.

He paused and looked as if he might go charging at it to pound on it and start yelling at her again. Then he looked at me and thought better of it. We went into his room and he closed the door.

“Tell me about this tattoo,” he said, and threw himself onto his bed. I hesitated. Neither Jordan nor Donald had mentioned it to me ever since. Occasionally, I looked at myself in a full-length mirror, but I was more comfortable pretending that it didn’t exist. It was all just a nightmare.

“C’mon,” he said. “You let the cat out of the bag.”

I began to describe the club Kiera and her friends had created, Virgins Anonymous, in more detail and how they had shown me their tattoos, which I was later to discover were removable, temporary.

“Why would you do it, anyway?”

“They convinced me it was sort of an initiation rite, only they convinced me to do a real one.”

I described how they had taken me to a tattoo parlor and voted on what I should have put on me. He sat listening intently. I was worried that he might think less of me when he learned how I had been so easily duped. I even told him that was the reason I didn’t like describing what had happened to me.

“The few people I did tell always looked as if they thought it was as much my fault as Kiera’s and her friends’ fault.”

“If they did, they’re stupid,” he said. “You were pretty vulnerable then, considering all you had suffered and how alone you felt.”

“True, but I couldn’t help feeling stupid.”

“Where was this tattoo?”

“Here,” I said, turning to place my hand over the spot that was just above my rear end.

“What happened to it? Is it still there?”

“No. It was removed, but there’s a scar.”

He stared.

“You want to see it?”

“Yes, but not because I don’t believe you,” he said.

I thought a moment, and then I began to unfasten my belt. I turned my back to him and slowly began to lower my jeans. He said nothing, but before I could raise them again, I felt his lips on my scar. They felt hot, and when I felt the tip of his tongue, my heart began to thump. I closed my eyes as his hands moved around my hips and gently held on to mine. Ever so slowly, he guided my jeans farther down, hooking my panties, too. He kept kissing me softly. When my jeans and my panties were down to my ankles, he turned me and kissed me on the lips.

Gently, he pulled me onto the bed, and we kissed again. He lifted his face from mine and stared.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, stroking my hair. “From the moment I saw you, I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

“You certainly didn’t show it.”