Page 63 of Graciously His

“Anything else.” I hesitate, my body tingling with the heat so soon after the cold. “Why did you stop before? You didn’t—I didn’t want you to. You could have finished.”

He moves me, taking me off his lap and seating me at his side instead. We’re both naked, but the sexual charge is absent.

When it comes, his voice is thoughtful. “You got me to fuck you bareback and fertile, Grace, and not because you needed comfort or because you wanted it. You tried to use me to self-harm. And I won’t have that.”

I draw back, disgust curling in my belly. “It was your idea.”

“Correct,” he snaps, “until you tried to turn a moment of reconciliation into something else.”

“It’s just about control with you.” I stand, ready to leave both the sauna and this conversation behind.

He catches my wrist, stopping me before I can reach for the door handle. “Ten more minutes, love. You need this as much as I do, especially after that appointment.”

That appointment.

He pulls at me until I’m sitting beside him once more.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, you wanted to fuck about it.”

I laugh, unable to help myself, thumbing a last tear from my eye. It dries instantly in the warm, red air.

“I really was sorry I didn’t let you stay. I knew what might be coming during that,” I choose a different word deliberately, “talk with Eileen. But seeing it like that in her files, hearing her tell me what I already knew but never really put together… I wasn’t ready for any of it, Nate.”

“Of course you weren’t.” He puts an arm around me. I lean in, despite the way we’re both starting to sweat. “How could anyone be ready to discover something like that?”

“What…” I trail off, considering the question before I ask it. It’s something that came up only a handful of times with Nick, and which he refused to address. “What happened to your mother, Nate?”

He draws in a breath and I pull back to look at him. His regard is careful, almost cool.

“Nick never told you, eh?”

I shake my head, wondering if he’ll continue.

“She died of ALS when we were ten. But our father moved on before she was even dead.”

“Oh, God, Nate—”

“She used to rescue cats. Dogs too, of course, but kittens were her favourite. She’d go into places no one else had the guts to even look at. Crawl spaces. Junked cars. Garbage heaps. Anything to rescue her little hearts.”

I swallow, refusing to cry during Nate’s moment of grief. He’s sitting still and stoic, eyes distant, his hand squeezing my thigh almost as an afterthought.

Her little hearts…

“You called me little heart the first time we met, all those years ago, when you tried to rescue me.”

“I failed.” He meets my eyes. “And I failed again when you married Nick. But now, here we are.”

I smile. It feels like a minor miracle, sitting here with him, with all that’s come before. I realise that I’ve never given him a nickname before. I want to, despite all our problems. And I already have something to call him.

“Here we are, big heart.”

I see the moment the words hit home. Nate’s nostrils flare and then—my heart clenches hard—he blinks back tears as I watch.

“Is that what I am to you, Grace?” He cups my cheek, keeping me from looking away. “Am I your big heart?”

I try to remind myself: this is messed up, wrong, impossible. My husband is dead. He’s my brother-in-law.