“I really was,” she said with dawning understanding. “I always had this lingering fear they’d reject me if I didn’t stay between the lines. On the surface, Todd was cookie-cutter husband material. That’s why I tried so hard to make it work with him.”
“And when you realized he wouldn’t make you happy, that their way didn’t makeyouhappy, you took up dancing for money, trying to show them that you could support them on your own terms.”
“I wasn’t that passive-aggressive about it. Not consciously, anyway.” But he wasn’t wrong. “I was trying to keep my dream alive in whatever way I could make it happen.”
“Then I played on that to force this marriage on you, but I don’t regret it. Not as much as I should.” He took her hands and pulled them behind his back so she came up against him. “I see how much it means to you. It’s where you feel you truly belong, isn’t it?”
She nodded, growing emotional because he saw her so much more clearly than her family ever had.
I love him, she thought as she tightened her arms around him.
As his arms enfolded her, she knew she would remember this as the moment she fell. It wasn’t even a fall. It was a sense of coming to rest. Because Axel might be demanding and remote and ferocious, but he always took such care with her.
His hands moved over her, and as so often happened with him, she felt pulled into him as though magnetized. This was where belonged, she thought, closing her eyes against the press of heat behind them.
She tilted back her head, and they kissed, long and slow and with such a deep tenderness, her heart ached in the best possible way.
His hands moved lazily over her. They were still capable of frantic lovemaking, but neither of them was in a hurry tonight. This was a coming together that went beyond their bodies. For whatever reason, he was making her feel cherished, and she was drinking it up, wanting to give him all of herself. Not just her body, but the heart that felt cradled by his palm when he cupped her breast. The soul that condensed on the air when she gasped in pleasure.
I love you, she thought, as she licked beneath his ear and breathed his name toward the ceiling.
When she reached between them to caress his erection, he swore and said with quiet urgency, “I need to be inside you.”
His hands went under her butt, and she hopped, grasping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. As he carried her to the bed and came down on her, she felt his erection against the tender folds that were aching to envelop him.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“I want you so much,” she said helplessly, feeling hot and wet and so aroused, she thought she would combust. “I don’t know how to…” Express it. Reveal it. Make him feel it.
“Me, too.”
Then they were tumbling across the bed, stripping off clothes until finally he pressed inside her.
They both calmed. Now his kiss turned languorous. He shifted so his weight was on one elbow, and he could send tingling pleasure through her with the lazy stroke of his hand. His knee crooked, and he secured their hips tighter, so they were locked like one of those brain-teaser puzzles she had never figured out how to unravel.
Who would want to? This was how they were meant to be. It was where she wanted to be.This is home.
I love you, she thought as he shifted over her and began to move in slow, powerful thrusts.I love you, she thought as the glorious tension built and sunlight filled her veins.I love you, was the only thought in her mind as the pleasure coalesced into a pinpoint of utter perfection, then expanding in waves of ecstasy.
His hand clamped on her shoulder, and his sweating body shook. A broken shout left him, and she lifted her hips for his final, rocking thrusts.
It was seismic. Cataclysmic. For a long, timeless moment, they were melded into one, caught in pure, shared ecstasy.
Joy wanted to stay in this liminal space of blissful unity forever, but physical reality crept in. Their hearts were pounding, their skin tacky enough to sting as he made the monumental effort to roll off her. Her body was weak, her mouth dry from panting.
But she was still in the glorious and dazed state of harmony. The words left her before she’d thought them through.
“I love you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AXEL WAS ONhis back, scraped clean of thought while his body was still recovering from lovemaking that had been intense even by the standard he and Joy usually set. His heart was still hammering, his chest billowing as his lungs snatched for oxygen.
She was on the pill now so he didn’t have an excuse to roll away to remove the condom. He was too weak to do something like that anyway. And he couldn’t do that to her. He might not know how to return that emotion, but if Joy was offering it to him, he couldn’t reject it. Not when he knew how sensitive she was to being scorned.
But,I love you?
It shouldn’t hurt like an acid burn, but it did.
