Everything she said made sense, but I was still worried. “That’s just it, though. He doesn’t see what they did to him as rape because he agreed to it.”
“That doesn’t matter. He didn’t willingly choose that to happen. They pretty much gave him no choice. If he didn’t agree to the ritual, they were going after you.”
”I know that.” I braced my hand on my forehead, sick all over again at the impossible position they’d put him in. “But he won’t talk to me about it. Not about the ritual or the rape or the beating. Every time I try to bring any of it up, he changes the subject. How is he ever going to heal—emotionally or sexually—if he won’t talk about it?”
“It’s only been a couple of weeks, Natalie.”
“I know, but I feel this dark cloud looming over us. Every day, the wounds on his back are getting better, but his head and his heart aren’t. And what happens when they force me to take him back to Italy? This isn’t a permanent situation. We all know that. They want him back. I’m just scared to death what going back too soon will do to him. He’s not himself yet. I don’t even know if he’s ever going to be the man I knew before. And I have no idea what facing them—when he’s still so unstable—will make him do.”
“I hear you,” Felicity said. “You have every reason to be concerned. But I want you to keep a couple of things in mind. First, Luc is strong. He will get through this. And he has you to help him. That’s a huge plus. He loves you, he trusts you. If anyone can help him heal, it’s you. But second and most importantly, we have time. Marco will get a heads-up when they want him back. And if that’s sooner than we hope, Marco will figure out a way to stall. It doesn’t benefit anyone for Luc to go back before he’s ready. We’re here to help you both, Natalie. We’ll do whatever we can to help Luc in his recovery.”
I knew she meant every word. But I also knew Marco and Felicity had their own agenda. They wanted Luc healthy so that when he eventually took his father’s position as the Grand Duke, he could challenge the leaders of his House and instigate a rebellion. But I didn’t give a shit about any of that. All I cared about was Luc and finding a way to bring back the confident, sexy, charismatic man I’d fallen in love with. And I was deathly afraid that I was never going to be able to reach that man.
“Has he setup an appointment with the counselor I wrote down before I left?” Felicity asked.
“No. And I haven’t pushed after the first time I suggested it, when he nearly lost it with me.”
“Probably smart. Leave the name out somewhere he can see it. Maybe that will get him thinking about talking to someone. And in the meantime, just keep doing what you’re doing. He’ll get there, Natalie. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but this will get better.”
I tried to tell myself that all through the rest of our call, but by the time I hung up, I still wasn’t convinced. As Luc slowed to a walk in the afternoon light and drew close to where I sat in the sand, though, I fixed a smile on my face and pretended to be the optimistic, strong wife he needed. Even if inside I was bubbling with nerves and fears and a thousand self doubts.
“Hey, you,” I said as he stopped, all sweaty and muscular and gorgeous in his gym shorts, tennis shoes, and loose tank, and leaned down to grab the water bottle he’d left by my side. “How was your run?”
“Tough. I hate the fucking sand.”
My grin widened. “It’s supposed to be tough. That’s why athletes train in the sand.”
He frowned, tipped his head back and poured water into his mouth. After swallowing, he said, “I’m not an athlete.”
No, he was mine. And I wasn’t about to let him forget that.
“How’s Fee?” he asked, lowering the water bottle.
“Fine. A little frustrated at her parents’ place, I think. Her mother’s been badgering her about grandchildren.”
Luc huffed and looked out at the gray water lashing the beach. “Marco and Felicity with a kid. That’d be a sight to see.”
I studied his profile, strong and handsome and almost regal. No one who saw him on the street would ever know what kind of hell he’d been through. “Do you ever think about that? Kids?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Nope.”
I was a little taken aback by that. I knew he came from a really screwed up family, but he adored his sister, and underneath his burly exterior, he was a very kind and loving man. One who was nurturing and protective. The kind of man who’d make an excellent father.
He looked down at me in the sand, but it wasn’t with the same loving, awe-filled eyes he’d gazed at me with the last few days. His gray eyes were choppy, swirling stormy waves that matched the ocean at his back. “You obviously have.”
“Well, no. I mean...” I looked out at the water, suddenly unsettled. We hadn’t ever had this conversation, and I knew this wasn’t really the time to be having it now, not with everything else he was dealing with but... “I don’t know. I haven’t not thought about it. It just hasn’t come up.”
“You want kids.”
There was no excitement in his voice. In fact, I was pretty sure I heard disappointment.
Heart suddenly pounding, I looked up at him. “Not right now. But in five to ten years...” I shrugged, thinking about his island, how relaxed he’d been there, and I suddenly couldn’t help but envision him chasing a little miniature him or me down the beach. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
He stared at me for several moments, and in the silence I shivered, not from the cold but from the fact I couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling or if that was the wrong thing for me to have said.
Finally, he blinked and held out his hand. “Come on. It’s cold. You need to get inside where it’s warm. And I need a shower.”
I lifted my hand to his and let him pull me to my feet. He didn’t let go of me as we crossed the sand and stepped onto the grass. Didn’t let go of me as we entered the house and he closed the kitchen door at my back. Didn’t let go of me as we climbed the back stairs and he led me into our room. And when he turned to me and tugged the blanket from my shoulders, then reached for the hem of my sweater and pulled it up and over my head, I let him.
I let him without protest or question because I sensed he needed me again. Whatever our brief conversation on the beach had stirred in him was dark and threatened to pull him under. And he needed me—my touch, my lips, my body—to bring him back.
He stripped me of the rest of my clothes and pulled me into the bathroom. After flipping on the water, he came back to me and tugged off his own garments. And when he reached for me, I willingly went into his arms under the spray of the shower and let him have whatever he wanted. As often as he wanted it. Just as I’d done this whole last week.
And I prayed that somehow, I would be enough. And that eventually, this shadow living beside me would transform back into the man I couldn’t live without.
“Natalie,” a voice whispered near my ear. “Wake up.”
I sighed and snuggled into my pillow, wondering what had pulled me out of the deep and mindless sleep I’d been in, wanting only to drift right back into it again.
“Angioletto,” Luc whispered in my ear again, this time shaking me. “I need to talk to you.”
I grunted and tried to roll away from him, but his hand on my side wouldn’t let me. “Tired,” I mumbled. “Talk later.”
“No, we need to talk now. It’s important.”
I sighed again and blinked, realizing the room was still dark. Pulling my eyes open, I looked up to find he was sitting up in bed, looking down at me with very focused, almost troubled eyes.
Alarm bells went off in my head, bringing me fully awake. For nearly a week, all he’d wanted to do was sleep and make love. Talking had not been high on his priority list, so the fact he wanted to talk now, in the middle of the night, set off a tremor of nerves inside me.
Brushing the hair out of my eyes, I pushed up from the mattress and tried to stay calm. “What time is i
t?”
“Late.”
Okay, that didn’t tell me a lot. “Did something happen?”
“No. Yes. Merda. Sorta.” He raked a hand through his hair. “I need to know what you meant earlier.”
My brow lowered, and I racked my brain, trying to figure out what I could have said that had thrown him so off-kilter. After we’d made love in the shower, we’d had dinner, watched a movie, and gone to bed. I’d barely talked at all. “I-I don’t know what you mean.”
“On the beach.” He threw back the covers and climbed out of bed in his boxers, then paced back in forth at the foot of the bed. “You brought up kids. I need to know if that’s a deal breaker for you.”
“A deal breaker? What do you mean?”
“I mean a family, kids. We never talked about it.”
My mind spun. I didn’t know why he was bringing this up now or why it even mattered. “No, we didn’t. But we have lots of time to talk about it.”
“No, we don’t. I need to know now.” He stopped and stared at me in the dark. “Do you have to have kids, yes or no?”
I didn’t like that he was pressuring me about this now, especially after everything that had happened recently and in the middle of the night. “I don’t know. Not right now, but in a few years...maybe.”
“Merda.” He rested his hands on his hips and turned to stare out at the moonlight shining over the water out the balcony windows.
My heart picked up speed. “Luc, what’s this all about?”
“I don’t want kids,” he said quietly, not looking at me. “Ever. And if that’s a deal breaker for you, we’ll get the marriage annulled. All you have to do is say I forced you, which I did. Fee can use her contacts to get you set up somewhere new.”
“Whoa. Hold up.” I threw the covers back and pushed out of the bed, moving to stand in front of him in his T-shirt that I’d worn to bed. “You didn’t force me to marry you. I asked you, remember?”
“Doesn’t really make a difference.”
I wasn’t sure what was going on here, but I didn’t like the chill to his voice or the fact he wouldn’t look down at me. I rested my hand on his arm. “Luc, what is this all about?”
“It’s about the future. Something I should have fucking thought of before.” He finally met my gaze, but his eyes were hurricanes, not the tender, loving eyes I’d looked into the last few days. “I’m never going to give you children, Natalie. And if you can’t handle that fact, then we need to deal with it right now.”
He was making this an ultimatum, about something I hadn’t even thought much about. And I didn’t like that. I didn’t like having to make a decision right this very second. But I didn’t say so, because he looked as if he might lose his shaky grasp on control, and after everything he’d been through, I didn’t want to push him and possibly lose him forever. Not when I’d just gotten him back. “I don’t need children, Luc. But I do need you.”
His jaw clenched in the moonlight as he stared down at me with those swirling, stormy eyes. And in the silence that stretched between us, I saw heat. I saw danger. I saw an inferno of emotions he was struggling to contain. And I felt a rush of warmth slide through my belly in response and gather between my legs because I recognized that look. It was the dark Luc. The domineering Luc. The one who could make me weak in the knees with just one command.
The one I had been waiting to come back to me.
My fingers trembled with need as I slid my hand down to his and squeezed. “I want you,” I whispered. “Let me show you.”
He stared at me for several beats with those eyes like roaring tempests, then tugged his hand from mine. “I’m not tired. Go back to bed.”
My heart rate shot up as he turned away, grabbed his sweats from the floor, and pulled them on. “Luc. Wait.”
He headed for the door. “This conversation’s over. Don’t follow me, Natalie.”
He tugged the door closed with a clack that echoed through the room around me. Alone, as I stared at where he’d just been, I tried to figure out what the hell had just happened.
I had no explanation. Whatever had caused that reaction was rooted in something dark. In something he refused to share with me. And I had no idea how to reach him in that dark place. I didn’t even know if I should try.
A hole open inside me. A chasm created by the growing distance between us. Along with a feeling that somehow, in some way, his family was responsible for this too.
Especially when I thought of that kitten who’d climbed over Luc in that ritual, and his mother’s comments in my ear about that woman possibly being fertile.
I couldn’t read Luc. He’d been on edge ever since that weird conversation about kids several nights ago. Every time I’d tried to broach the topic with him since, he’d said he was too tired to talk or he just flat out walked away from me.
He was doing that more and more—avoiding talking about anything even remotely serious, leaving me alone to go deal with his thoughts in private. I was trying to be patient. I knew he was dealing with a lot. But I was growing more frustrated by the day. And I was also starting to worry that not forcing him to deal with me and what had happened in that ritual room was actually hurting us instead of helping.
He was slipping away from me. I couldn’t deny that fact as I sat at the kitchen table, sipping my tea in the quiet afternoon light. We hadn’t been intimate in three days. Not since he’d woken me for that odd conversation in the middle of the night. And all that cuddling and touching he’d seemed to need before was gone now too. We were still sharing a bed at night, but instead of rolling into me as he’d done before, he was turning his back to me. And I felt the void growing bigger between us each day. One that made my heart ache because I didn’t know how to bridge it. One I was afraid was just going to keep growing unless I found a way to get through to him.
That thought made my whole body hurt. But before I could get lost in the pain, a knock sounded at the kitchen door. I startled and twisted toward the sound, then breathed a sigh of relief when I recognized Felicity’s face in the window.
Pushing out of my chair, I quickly crossed the tiles and pulled the door open. “Oh my God.” I hugged her, then Marco as they both stepped into the house. “What are you doing here?”
“Marco was tired of my parents.”
Setting several bags of groceries on the counter, Marco huffed. “She lies. I like her parents. She’s the one who wanted to leave.”
Felicity rolled her eyes then grinned. “Okay he’s right. My mother would not stop pestering me about weddings and babies. It was making me claustrophobic.”
I smiled, but inside nausea swirled in my gut because her comment just made me think about Luc’s declaration the other night that we were never having children. Yes, I understood why he didn’t want them, and I didn’t want his family using our kids in any way either, but I still didn’t like the way he’d presented it—with no discussion. Either accept it or we have the whole marriage annulled. And I was frustrated that he wouldn’t talk about it with me. That since then, he’d stopped talking about everything.
“Where’s Luc?” Marco asked.
Running a hand through my hair, I told myself the whole kid thing didn’t even matter. I’d never even thought about having kids before him, so how could I be upset about the idea of not having kids now? “Upstairs. He just got back from a run. He should be out of the shower if you want to go up and say hi.”
“Think I will.” With an ominous glance toward Felicity, Marco disappeared up the back stairs.
“What was that about?” I asked when he was gone.
Felicity moved around the island and sat on a barstool. “Guy stuff. I’m more curious about you. That look on your face makes me think things haven’t improved a whole lot since our conversation the other day.”
Unable to keep from frowning, I crossed my arms over my chest and leaned back against the counter. “They haven’t.”
“He’s still not talking to you about what happened
?”
I shook my head and looked down at my bare feet. “He’s not talking to me about anything anymore. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
Felicity tipped her head. “Did something happen?”
I wasn’t sure if I should bring it up but decided, what the hell. Maybe she could help me figure out what was going on with him. “We had this really weird conversation the other night. About kids.”
“What about kids?”
“About the fact he’s never having any and if that was a deal breaker for me, we could get the marriage annulled, and you could smuggle me out of the House.”
“He actually said that?”
“Yeah,” I said with a huff. “Verbatim. And since then, he’s been emotionally withdrawn and physically distant. Not as bad as before you and Marco left, but...” I shrugged, unsure what else to say
“Distant as in...?”
“Distant as in no more sex. None at all. Anytime I touch him, he says he’s tired. He’s done a complete one-eighty in that department.”
“Shit. How did you respond to the kid thing?”
“I tried to be understanding. Honestly, though, it came out of nowhere, and I was a little sideswiped by the whole conversation. I don’t need kids to be happy, but I’d like to have more than a five-minute conversation about it in the middle of the night. And I’d like it not to end with him storming out of the room and telling me we’re never talking about it again.”
“Jesus, Luc.” Felicity shook her head. “God, he can be an ass sometimes.”
“I know.” My shoulders slumped. “And yet, I still love him, even when he’s being a complete asshat.”
I bit my lip, wondering if I should bring up the rest, then figured Felicity of all people might be the only one to put my fears to rest. “Can I ask you something? About how this House works?”
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