I gave in, stepping closer, reaching out to snap the lid of her sunscreen bottle shut.
“Sunt multe lucruri pe care a? vrea sa le înva? de la tine, so?ie,” I murmured.There are many things I’d like to learn from you, wife.
Her pink lips parted on a tiny gasp. “Like what?” she breathed.
I stepped closer again, closing the gap between us. I opened my mouth to say something filthy, and out of character, and so absolutely true it hurt. Something along the lines of,like what it feels like to fuck you, right here on the deck of my yacht, with the sun blazing down on our naked bodies.
“Excuse me, Henry,” Josie interrupted, and I blinked, my eyes sliding away from my pretty, panting wife, towards the captain.
“Is this important?” I barked.
She nodded, her face set. “We need to secure the vessel. There’s a storm coming.”
Ri tucked her knees up to her chin on the lounge and stared pensively out the window. Slate clouds rolled closer, the wind had already picked up, and the swell was beginning to sway theGirl on Fire.
“We aren’t going to sink, are we?” she asked, her fingers digging into the leather.
“Of course not!” I set our dinner—a simple grazing board withcheese, cold meat, fruit and crackers—on the coffee table. “You heard Josie earlier when she briefed us; it’s only a mild storm, she’s sailed through far worse than this front before. And the tech on theGirl on Fireis state of the art when it comes to handling inclement weather.”
I found her knee and squeezed. She wound her fingers through mine, a spectre of her usual, beautiful smile flitting at the edges of her mouth.
“The worst that might happen is this platter spilling on the floor,” I added, reaching for a piece of prosciutto. “So, we should probably eat up before the storm reaches us.”
She leaned over, plucking an olive from the platter and popping it into her mouth. I watched her chew with longing playing a tune on my ribcage. I wanted that mouth all to myself.
And everything else that was attached to it.
“I suppose we’ll probably sleep through the worst of it,” she said softly, untethering her hand from mine to smear some cheese on a rice cracker.
“That’s the spirit,” I cajoled, unwilling to remove my hand from her knee despite it being almost impossible for me to eat one-handed. As if she sensed this, she quirked an eyebrow.
“What’s your favourite cheese, Hubby?”
I gestured to the wedge of cheddar. “I’m boring, I know.”
She collected a Jatz and sliced expertly into the cheddar. “There’s nothing boring about cheddar. When I was growing up, it was like a delicacy.” She handed me the biscuit. “We eat a lot of cheese in Romania, butTelemeawas always what we were served. Cheddar was a special treat.”
She made herself a replica of mine and bit into it.
“Telemea?” I asked.
“It’s sort of like Feta—a very salty cheese. My uncle’s partial to it. The cook used to make cheese pies in the dozens and freeze them, because if my uncle couldn’t get his hands on one when he had a craving …” She looked away, gnawing on her lip. “Well … I’ve already told you the kinds of things he would do to people who displeased him.”
Anger surged inside me, boiling up from my stomach like lava atthe thought of how terrifying her childhood would have been having to stay on the good side of a monster like Bogdan ‘Lupucojoc’ Rusnac. I swallowed it back and changed the subject.
“Tell me more about this Masters Games plan of yours.”
Thankfully, this seemed to distract her, and she launched into a monologue, explaining how she wouldn’t need Australian citizenship to compete. Her eyes brightened as she talked, and ate, and talked some more.
I loved the sound of her voice. Her accent.
I loved …
“And didn’t I tell you that I was already considered ‘too old’ for swimming? Most sports in the Masters have a minimum age of thirty. Guess what the minimum is for swimming?”
“Eighteen.”
“Yes! How did you know?” she asked, nibbling on a date.
