Page 7 of The Wife He Accused

His hand came up to her jaw, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone, the touch she had loved for two and a half years, the touch that had pulled her out of a hundred bad evenings. Her eyes closed in the old reflex of trust.

"I love you," he murmured. "Do you understand me? I love you."

And here was the thing about Alexander Winters that the press did not know, Catherine did not know and Vivienne, thank God, had never gotten to find out: when he saidI love youin his own apartment with no audience, his voice cracked very slightly on thelove. It had cracked the first time he had said it to her, on a balcony in Capri at one in the morning, and it had cracked every time since. She had never told him she could hear it because she was afraid that if he knew, he would learn to control it.

It cracked now.

"I love you," she said back, and meant it the way she had always meant it, and let him kiss her.

He kissed her, his hand at her jaw and his other hand finding her waist through the silk and resting there as if it had a reservation. Her body, which had always been honest with her about Alexander, leaned into him before her mind had decided whether to allow it.

His mouth moved to the corner of hers, then to the soft place under her ear where he knew, from two and a half years of practice, that she was undefended. She made a small sound she did not mean to make. He smiled against her skin.

"Bedroom?" he murmured.

"No," she said, surprising herself. "Here?”

He drew back half an inch to look at her. There was a question in his face, and an interest, and a slow private pleasure that she had asked. Alexander did not get asked for things often. He was the one who asked. He was the one who decided.

"Here," he agreed.

He found the zipper at the back of her dress without breaking the kiss, and the long slowzzzof the teeth coming apart was the loudest thing in the apartment. His knuckles brushed her spinethe whole way down. The silk loosened on her shoulders and he eased it forward, forward, let it slip from her arms and pool around her hips before he caught it and lowered it the rest of the way to the floor like something he respected.

She stepped out of it. She was wearing nothing underneath but the small nude lace of her underwear and her mother's pearl earrings. The cool of the floor traveled up through the soles of her feet.

Alexander looked at her.

"Christ, Melody."

He said it the way another man might say a prayer he had not meant to say out loud. His hand came up and traced the line of her collarbone with the back of one knuckle, then down between her breasts, then lower, his palm flattening against her stomach as if to feel her breathing.

"Tell me what you want," he said. His voice had gone rough at the edges in the way it did when he stopped negotiating.

"You. Touch me. Just — please."

He did.

His mouth found her throat first, and then the soft underside of her jaw, and then her breasts, slow, deliberate. When his mouth closed over her she made a noise that surprised her with how close it was to crying, and his hand at the small of her back tightened, holding her up, holding herthere, as if to sayI have you, I am paying attention, I am not anywhere else.

She got her hands on his shirt. She wanted skin. She wanted the live warm fact of him, the man, not the suit. Her fingers shook a little on the buttons and he made a low sound in his throat and helped her, freeing one cuff and then the other, shrugging the shirt off and tossing it somewhere onto the back of a chair he would later not be able to find.

His chest under her palms was warm and known. She had loved this chest in dark hotel rooms in Lisbon, on a sailboat offHydra, in their bed upstate on a hundred Sunday mornings. Her hands knew the shape of him now the way a musician's hands know an instrument. She pressed her mouth to the place over his heart. His pulse was fast.Good,she thought, with a fierce small possessiveness that surprised her.Good. Let me be the one who does that to you tonight.

"Sit down," she said.

He huffed something that was almost a laugh. "Bossy."

"Sitdown,Alexander."

He sat, on the long low cream sofa where he took meetings during the day, where his lawyers had been three days ago discussing a merger she did not understand. She climbed into his lap, knees on either side of his hips, the silk of her underwear and the wool of his pants the only things between them, and the friction of that — through fabric, careful, withheld — made her gasp before he had even moved.

His hands found her hips. He looked up at her. The lamplight caught his face from below and softened all the lines that the financial press loved him for, the strong jaw, the wavy chestnut brown hair, the cool gray eyes, and what was left was just a man in his own living room looking at his wife.

"Don't move yet," he said, low. "I want to look at you."

She did not move.

He looked. His thumbs traced small slow arcs on the bones of her hips. His eyes moved across her: her mouth, her throat, her collarbones, her breasts, the shadow between them.