Chapter Twenty-Two
Natalia
He lay me down on the bed, still inside of me, and propped himself on top of me after he came, and I never wanted him to leave. The weight of his body was not enough, not enough to hold me to the earth. I loved him, and I wanted him inside of me forever. I knew as soon as he began to speak that something would shatter what had just happened between us. But there was no way out for me and lying there I knew I had started loving him a long time ago.
He rolled to the side and I went with him, looking into his eyes. He entwined his fingers in mine. The man next to me was so different than the one I had come to know.
“I wanted this for a long time,” he said.
My heart dropped and swelled and seemed to take on a life of its own inside my chest. He touched my mouth before I could say anything.
Then, abruptly, he sat up, resting his arms on his knees.
I sat up slowly next to him and put my hand on his arm. I traced the tattoos with my fingertips. When I reached the middle of his bicep, he closed his fingers around my hand, and held it so firmly it almost hurt. “Natalia,” he said.
I waited. He was closing up again.
“Please just tell me what—”
He moved, with his panther-like grace, quickly, so that he was standing up at the foot of the bed. “I’m a bad man, Natalia,” he said without looking at me. “I’m a bad man, with a lot of enemies.”
I pushed myself close to the edge of the bed. I had known he was ‘bad’ for a long time, wondered exactly how bad his ‘bad’ could be. The money, the guns, the tattoos, the mystery—of course he wasn’t a schoolteacher, but it was too frightening sometimes to think of just how bad he might be.
I wanted to ask, but I didn’t dare. My heart went cold before I mustered the strength to ask the question I really wanted to, and instead I said, almost stupidly, “You don’t seem like a bad man to me.”
Like lightning, the way his mood often changed, his eyes went dark and the man he had been while making love to me seemed to disappear beneath his dark exterior. “Don’t make that mistake for a minute,” he seethed.
The same cold feeling that had washed over me when I met him what seemed like another lifetime ago in Kitty Bang Bang rose up from my feet to my chest—but it didn’t consume me. “What’s ‘bad,’ then?” I asked. “What have you done?”
For a moment it looked as if the darker, colder side of him would tell me, but his expression softened suddenly. His fists closed and he walked to the window, as though he wanted to hide something from me.
I waited, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to get from him, which side of him would begin speaking.
“I’m a bad man, Natalia, and I want to leave it at that. There’s no—” He sucked in his breath. “There’s no reason to tell you anything more than that. I don’t want to be that. I want to be a different man. You deserve a different man.”
My heart felt like it would balloon until it burst. “Alaric—”
He turned to face me, to interrupt me. “I’ve never had anything I was afraid of losing. Do you understand?”
I was on the bed, on my knees, unable to speak for an entirely different reason than I had ever expected.
He stepped toward me and brushed a strand of my hair away from my cheeks, where it had clung with the sweat of our lovemaking. The hair snaked over my skin with the pull of his fingers, and the shudder it gave me traveled down my spine. His blue eyes burned into mine, and the love inside of them was almost too intense to look at. “I’m afraid of losing you, Natalia. Very, very afraid of losing you. And I don’t like fear.”
His thumb had traveled to my lips and brushed them gently.
“That’s what you overheard, me talking to Eric, Eric talking to me...” He closed his eyes with impatience. “It doesn’t matter. Eric is an old friend, a friend of the man I used to be, the man I don’t want to be anymore. Eric is the one who suggested that I get rid of you.”
“I think I’m pregnant,” I blurted in a whisper.
He leaned forward to kiss me and put his forehead to mine, intertwining our fingers. “I knew that,” he said quietly. “That was why Eric was here, to be your doctor.”
I was stunned for a moment, and then just as quickly it seemed silly to me that I had ever thought I could hide something like that from him.
