I would like to be your wife in truth.
Could she say the phrase?Shouldshe?
He was drunk. Very drunk, despite the occasional lucidity of his words.
Moreover, she knew that Fox didn’t wish to kiss her. Not sober. He rarely sought her company and seemed generally disinterested in her as a woman. After all, she would never be blond, buxom, or flirtatious, and so he would never be attracted to her. Not in that way. His stricken expression after their wedding vows arose in her mind—panicked, dismayed—recoiling at the thought of kissing even her cheek.
No, it would be morally wrong to kiss Fox in his current drunken state, would it not? Taking something from him that he would not offer her when sober.
His present amorous words were surely just the drink and dark of night speaking. Any female body would cause him to act the same way.
So, she likely needed to—
Fox abruptly angled his head closer to hers.
Leah panicked as she hadn’t had time to properly weigh her actions, to determine the correct, moral response.
She lifted her chin to remove her lips from his trajectory, anything to give herself a chance tothink, think, think.
To her—horror? surprise? delight?—Fox took her lifted chin as an invitation.
He dragged his nose up her neck and then followed the same path again with his lips, leaving fire in his wake.
Her breathing hitched and every nerve in her body flared to life, destroying all coherent thought. Involuntarily, her eyes rolled back in her head, her chin lifting helplessly higher to give him further access. His mouth on her throat sent butterflies pulsing along her skin and amassed a cloud of wings in her chest.
“Love . . . smell . . . wife.” He continued nuzzling her neck.
His hands had somehow come around her waist in the stairwell, and he pulled her infinitesimally closer to him. Any farther and Leah would be in his lap.
Helplessly, the hand she had on his chest moved to his head, her fingers threading into his hair.
Heaven preserve her. What was she to do?
And still he pressed soft words into her skin, sounds she could scarcely understand, though she thought she heard ‘delicious’ and ‘want’ and ‘need.’
It was too much.
Too close to her own fantasies.
She was helpless before his onslaught.
Leah feared she would die if she did not kiss him. That her skin would simply combust, and she would drift away as so much charred ash on the wind.
Courage. She could summon the courage to do this.
“Fox, I like your hands on me, too,” she whispered.
He grunted and continued to nuzzle her neck.
Swallowing, Leah forced her next words out—
“Perhaps . . . perhaps, Fox, I could . . . I could be your wife in truth.”
He stilled at that, his body sagging heavily into hers.
Leah froze.
Notquitethe reaction she had hoped for.
