“If you’re worried about the baby, it is perfectly safe. Every book I read said so with annoying clarity.” She moved to him again, this time putting her palms on his chest like she had the first time she’d kissed him. “Like a constant reminder Icouldbe having sex with you and wasn’t. Because you weren’t there.”
He looked down at her, his expression stoic and unmoved. But his body wasn’t.
“What do you think is happening here?” he demanded.
“We are married. I like the way you make me feel. I likeyou.I don’t know why you hate me so much, but I know you enjoy my body.”
His scowl deepened, if that was even possible. “I do not hate you.”
“You do a marvelous impression of dislike then.”
“Dislike.” He said the word with such disdain. “If only I disliked you, Evelyne.”
She cocked her head. He sounded sotorturedand she didn’t understand. “I think if you liked me, you wouldn’t be so dismayed to find yourself here.” And still she moved her hands up his chest, around his neck, pressing her body against him—though that was quite a different experience with a baby bump between them.
“It must be nice to have such a simplistic view of things. Like. Dislike. Black. White.”
She wondered if it was a flaw in herself that she found his disdain so funny. “All right. I have a simplistic view, what with this simplistic life I’ve been given.” She gestured around her. She didn’t need sarcasm to do the hefty lifting here. The palace itself would have been a complication even if her father had been given a heart.
Nothingwas ever simplistic, but maybe that’s why she did not get hung up in the complexities. They simply were.
“What is your complex view of the situation, Gabriel? Enlighten me.”
“You are a smart, vibrant young woman.” She thought he made a kind of move to remove her arms from his neck, but it was almost like he was afraid to touch her, even though she was touching him. “Your resourcefulness has been incredibly impressive. You’re even funny, when you aren’t trying to torture me. I have no reason to dislike you. Except for the torture, I suppose.”
I have no reason to dislike you. It wasn’t poetry, and yet she felt her poor romantic heart softening. He’d called her impressive. “Then why do youbehaveas though you dislike me?”
“Have you ever considered something darker and far more volatile?” he demanded. “Has it ever occurred to you that my obsession with you is unhealthy and that your insistence we act on it makes an already difficult situation untenable?”
He sounded so—the word he used—tortured. It made very little sense to her, but she liked the explanation. If it were true.
“You’re obsessed with me?” She eyed him critically. She didn’t know how leaving her for six months was obsession, but if that’s what he claimed…maybe she’d claim it as well. “Though a six-month disappearance doesn’t quite support that theory, I rather like the idea.”
He shook his head as if despairing of her. “You won’t,” he said darkly.
“Perhaps I should be the one to judge.” She moved to her toes, managed to angle herself enough to press her mouth to his. She wanted obsession. That all-encompassing need and pleasure she’d found in his arms back in Maine.
She wantedhim. Here in her old life that would soon become her new life. With him and their baby. Somanycomplexities. But what else was new?
He kissed her back in spite of himself, she knew. That it was physical reaction, not choice. Because he kept his hands off her, like he thought he could avoid this if he only kept his hands away from her body.
She pulled her mouth from his, scowled at him. “Oh, touch me, Gabriel. It is what we both want.”
As if he’d been waiting for a command—and God knew he was not waiting to be told what to do, since hecouldn’tbe told what to do—the leash on all he held back broke.
His hands were reverent, and it send waves of warmth and need through her. It was different, because her body was different. Because they were married. Because they were home. Because nothing had actually been settled, but he couldn’t run away this time.
She wouldn’t let him. Alex wouldn’t let him, and actually, she didn’t think he’d let himself. He would feel too responsible for the baby she carried now that he knew about his existence.
And so while the tensions he tightened inside her were the same, it was not the storm crashing between them. It was not anger and fear, and maybe that word he used—obsession. It was something deeper.
They were in it now. No way out. So they sank into the ocean that took them over. Onto the pretty pink bed, ridding each other of their clothes, until they were skin to skin, body to body.
His mouth tasted, his hands tormented in all the best ways. His body was a thing of glory—muscled and masculine. She roamed him with her hands, with her mouth, as he returned the favor.
When he moved her on top of him, seated deep inside, she looked down at him and felt like the ocean herself. A powerful, undulating storm that would not be satisfied until she’d crashed to shore over and over and over again.
And his gaze, stark and hungry, a powerful magnet. She moved against him, and they watched each other as the tension grew, coiled, and hers…exploded. He sat up, holding her in his lap, still deep inside her, and pushed her up, up, up again. Closer and closer to one more shuddering release.
