by Dani Collins
“Why are they like that?”
He stripped his tie and threw it away with a sigh. “My father is a scientific genius. He only speaks logic and rational debate. Emotion has no effect on him. It’s one of the reasons he makes a genuinely good politician. He reads and considers policy on its own merit, not worrying about his popularity or future prospects. Mother was born with a title, but no money. She had to marry it and prove she was worth the investment. Having brought herself up this far, she refuses to backslide. And, after thirty-five years of my father’s lack of sentiment, she’s abandoned any herself.”
“That sounds so empty. Is she happy?”
“They set out with specific goals and achieved them. They are content, which is the standard to which we’ve been taught to aspire.”
She searched his expression. “And you’re content with that?”
“Why wouldn’t I be? My life is extremely comfortable.” He peeled off his shirt, revealing his gorgeous chest and tight abs.
She swallowed and turned away, annoyed with herself for reacting so promptly to the sight of him.
“Is that why you agreed to an arranged marriage the first time? To maintain the status quo?”
“Yes. I was expected to do my part in preserving the life we all enjoy.” His voice was suddenly right behind her, surprising her into lifting her gaze to the mirror.
He lightly smoothed his hand across her shoulders, grazing an absent caress against her nape as he ensured no tendrils of hair would catch as he unzipped her.
“How angry are they that Lily and I ruined everything?” She braced herself as she held his gaze. “Be honest. I need to know.”
“They don’t get angry.” He sounded mild, but she thought she caught a flicker of something in his stoic expression.
“What about you? You were angry when you showed up at my door.”
“And I wound up telling you something I had sworn to take to my grave. Heightened emotions don’t help any situation.”
“What does that mean?” With a niggling premonition, she began unpinning her hair, not wanting to remove the gaping dress and be naked when she was beginning to feel defenseless. “I want to fit in, Rico. I want to be a team player and know what to say about decor and houses and all those different people she was talking about. But along with not being prepared to live at this level of wealth, I’m wired for emotion. Don’t expect me never to get angry. Or to stop feeling.”
His cheek ticked and she could hear the thoughts behind that stiff mask. Don’t expect me to start.
Which made her angry. Furious that she’d spent every minute since he’d shown up on her doorstep having her emotions bombarded until they were right there, under the thin surface of her skin, tender and raw, while he had somehow used tonight’s endurance event of a dinner to shore up his shields so he was more withdrawn than ever.
“That’s what you want, though, isn’t it?” she realized, appalled to see her shimmering nascent hopes for deeper intimacy disappearing faster than she could conjure them. “You want me to learn not to care. To feel nothing. Certainly I shouldn’t aspire to happiness, should I?”
“Happiness is achieved by keeping your expectations realistic. That’s a proven fact.”
It was such a cynical thing to say, it physically hurt her to hear it.
“What about desire?” In a small stab at getting through to him, she let the dress fall off her arms. She stepped out of it before tossing it onto the foot of the bed. “Do you want me to quit feeling that?”
“That’s physical.” He let his gaze rake slowly down her pale form from shoulder to thighs, jaw hardening along with his voice. “And you’re starting a fight for no reason.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said facetiously. “I’m going to shower. Would you like to join me? Yesterday it was one of your many fantasies, but maybe you feel different today.”
His eye ticked and she knew he was sorry he had ever told her that. Did she feel guilty for using it? Not one bit.
She slid her panties down and left them on the floor.
It was a bold move, one far beyond her experience level. If he left her to shower alone, she would probably drown herself in there, but she desperately wanted to prove to both of them that she had some kind of effect on him. Some means of reaching through that armor of his.
She moved into the bathroom and stepped into the marble-tiled stall, bigger than the porch on Gran’s bungalow.
He came into the bathroom as the steam began to gather around her. He dimmed the light so the gilded space became golden and moody and he stripped off his pants.
She watched him, reacting with an internal clench when she saw he was aroused.
When he came into the shower, she lost some of her moxie and turned her face into the rain of warm water from the sunflower head above her.
His cool hands settled on her hips and his thumbs dug lightly into the tops of her butt cheeks. “You have a gorgeous ass.”
“Even with the dimples?” Her heartbeat was unsteady.
“Especially with.” He took hold of the wet mass of her hair, holding her head tipped back while he scraped his teeth against the side of her neck. “I will always accept this invitation, Poppy. But you had better know what you’re inviting.”
She gasped. The sensations he was causing were cataclysmic. All her senses came alive. He settled his cool body against her back, his chest hair lightly brushing before the warm water sealed them together. His hard shaft pressed into the small of her back and her buttocks tightened in excited reaction. Her breasts grew heavy, her loins tingled. The humid air became too heavy to breathe and her bones melted like wax in the sun.
Blindly she shot a hand out to the slick wall and wound up leaning both hands there while her hips instinctively tipped with invitation.
“What are you trying to prove?” he growled, slapping one hand beside her own on the wall.
Nothing. She was reacting, pure and simple.
He briefly covered her like any male mounting his mate and his teeth sank lightly against her nape again. His free hand splayed across her abdomen, then roamed her wet skin to cup her breast.
In a sudden move, he pulled her upright and spun her so the world tilted around her. She found the hard tiles against her shoulders. His knees nudged between hers and his thighs pinned hers. He bracketed her head between his forearms and touched his nose to hers before he claimed the kiss she was starving for.
He held nothing back, wet mouth sliding across hers with carnal greed, slaking her thirst after this arid day. She flowered. She opened and ran with dewy nectar. She unfurled her arms around him and twined them across his back, lifted her knee up to his hip and invited him into her center. Rocked and tried to make him lose control the way she continued to abandon hers.
“Let’s talk about your fantasies, hmm?” His hands caught her wrists and pinned them beside her head while his tongue slithered down her neck and licked into the hollow at the base of her throat. “What do you want?”
He drew back slightly and gazed down on her with unabashed hunger.
“Rico.” She turned her wrist in his grasp and shifted with self-consciousness. Her nipples stood up with blatant, stinging arousal. She brought her foot back down to the floor, but his feet were still between hers.
“Did you ever touch yourself and imagine it was me?” He dropped one hand and drew his fingertip through her swollen folds, looking down again as he languidly caressed her. “Did you want to feel my hand here?”
She was immediately disoriented, glad for the hard wall at her back as she rose into his touch and draped her arm across his shoulders, seeking balance.
“Tell me,” he commanded between kisses. “Tell me or I’ll stop.”
“Yes,” she gasped.
He rewarded her by bending to suck one nipple, then the other, drivi
ng further spikes of pleasure into that place he continued to tease. A keening noise sounded and she realized it was her, unable to express her agonizing climb of desire in any other way.
Now he was on his knees, licking at her. Splaying her and gently probing and circling and driving her to the brink of madness. She realized distantly that she had her hands fisted in his wet hair, that she had completely abandoned herself to him. To the exquisite pleasure he relentlessly inflicted upon her. Within moments, cries of ecstasy tore from her throat, filling the steamy, hollow chamber.
He ran his mouth all over her thighs and stomach, soft bites that claimed his right to do so as she stood there weakly, heart palpitating, breath still splintered.
He stood and snapped the water off, staring at her while she leaned helpless and overwhelmed. Outdone.
Meeting his gaze was like looking into the sun, painful in its intensity. Painful in how blind and exposed she felt, but she couldn’t look away. Couldn’t pretend he hadn’t peeled her down to her core until she was utterly at his mercy.
While he remained visibly aroused, but in complete control.
“The way we make each other feel is a hell of a lot more than many couples have. Recognize that. Be satisfied with it.”
She wasn’t and never would be.
But when he held out a hand, she let him balance her as she stepped out onto the mat. He dried her off and took her to his bed, where he satisfied her again and again and again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RICO WOKE IN the guest bed he’d been using all week and listened, thinking Lily must be stirring. He ought to be sleeping more heavily considering the quantity and quality of sex he was enjoying, but his radar remained alert to the other occupants of his penthouse.
He listened, thought he must be imagining things, started to drift off then heard the burble of a video chat being connected. The volume lowered.
He rose, already wearing boxers in case he had to go to Lily. His door was cracked and it swung open silently, allowing him to hear Poppy’s hushed voice reassuring her grandmother.
“No, everything’s fine. I couldn’t sleep and thought this would be a good chance to chat without a baby crawling all over me. How are you settling in?”
“Same as I told you yesterday,” her grandmother said wryly. “You’re the one with the gadabout life. What have you been up to?”
He stood and listened to Poppy relay that the nanny had taken Lily for a walk today while she had pored over properties with a real estate agent. He’d been going in to work each day, but taking her out at night. She mentioned this evening’s cocktail party where he had introduced her to some of his top executives and their wives.
She made it sound as though she had had the time of her life when she’d actually been petrified and miserable, not that she’d been obvious about it. He knew how she behaved when she was comfortable, though. She laughed with Lily and traded wry remarks with her grandmother.
That woman was making fewer and fewer appearances when she was with him, however, which was beginning to niggle at him. He glimpsed her when they made love. She held nothing back in bed, but tonight she had disappeared quickly after they had wrung untold pleasure from each other. She had rolled away and her voice had pulled him from his postcoital doze.
“Will you check on Lily as you go?”
“Of course.” He had told himself he was glad she’d kept him from falling asleep beside her. His will to leave her each night grew fainter and fainter, but staying seemed the even weaker action. He wasn’t Lily, needing his cuddle bear clutched in his arm in order to drift off.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected from this marriage. When contemplating his first to Faustina, he had anticipated following his parents’ example. Like his siblings, he had been raised to keep his emotions firmly within a four-point-five and a four-point-seven. Not a sociopath, but only a few scant notches above one. He had never been a man of grand passions anyway and had been comfortable with the idea of a businesslike partnership with his spouse.
That certainly hadn’t worked out. Given the betrayal and drama he’d suffered at Faustina’s hands, he had wanted this marriage to conform to that original ideal.
It didn’t. Poppy didn’t. He kept telling himself she would get used to this life, but seeing her natural exuberance dim by the day was eating at him. He didn’t know what to do about it, though. This was their reality.
“Dinner will be served soon. I have to start making my way or it will be cold by the time I arrive,” Eleanor said with a papery chuckle.
“Okay. I love you. I miss you.” She ended the call, but didn’t rise.
He was growing cold standing there, but didn’t go back to bed. He could see her shoulders over the back of the sofa. They rose slightly as she sighed deeply. Her breath caught with a jag. She sniffed.
A terrible swoop of alarm unbalanced him. The embarrassed moment of walking in on something personal struck, yet he couldn’t turn away and leave her to it.
As her shoulders began to shake and she ducked her head into her hands, beginning to weep in earnest, a rush of something indefinable came over him. A sharp, shimmering, deeply uncomfortable ache gripped him. It was so excruciating, it made him want to close himself in the guest room and wait for it to pass.
But he couldn’t turn his back on her while she was like that. A far stronger compulsion pushed him down the hall toward her.
“Poppy.” Her name scratched behind his breastbone. At some level he understood he was responsible for this misery she was exhibiting. He had some scattered thoughts of all that he was providing her, but he knew she didn’t care about those things. She was a complex, emotional creature and it struck him how completely ill-equipped he was to handle that.
She lifted a face tracked with silver and made an anguished noise, clearly mortified that he was seeing her this way. Again he thought to give her privacy, but he couldn’t let her suffer alone. This was his fault. That much he understood and it weighed very heavily on him.
“Come.” He gathered her up, the silk of her pajamas cool against his naked chest.
“I don’t want to make love, Rico. I want to go h-home.” The break in her voice rent another hole in him.
“Shh.” He carried her to the bed where he’d left her a few hours before and crawled in with her to warm both of them. He told himself that was what this was, even though the feel of her against him had the effect of pressing a cut together. It didn’t fix it, but it eased some of the pain. Slowed the bleeding and calmed the distress. “It’s okay,” he murmured.
“No, it’s not.” Her words were angry, despairing sobs. “I’m so homesick I hurt all the time. At least the last time I was stuck here, I made friends, but no one will talk to me.”
“Who’s refusing to speak to you?” he asked with sharp concern.
“Everyone. The staff. They only ask me if I want something, never joke or make me feel like they like me. They’re only being polite because you pay them to be.”
“That’s not true.” He suddenly glimpsed how isolated she must be in her new position and cursed himself for not recognizing it would be so acute.
“I have nothing in common with your friends. They talk too fast for me to even understand them. You’re Lily’s father and I want her to know you, Rico. I know I have to stay here for her sake, but why does the nanny get to take her for a walk while I have to go to stupid parties? I hate it here. I hate it so much.”
“Shh,” he soothed, closing his hand around the tight fist on his chest and kissing her hard knuckles. “This is going to be an adjustment for all of us.”
“How is this an adjustment for you? You’re completely unaffected! I can’t do this, Rico. I can’t.”
His neck was wet and her hair stuck to the tear tracks, keeping that fissure in him stinging. He rubbed her back, trying to calm her while her desolation shredde
d his ability to remain detached.
There are some realities that are not worth crying about, he had told Mateo a few weeks ago. He’d been taught to believe no one would care, but he did care. Not the generic regard of one human for another, but a deeper, more frightening feeling he didn’t know how to process.
Everything in him warned that he should distance himself, but he couldn’t ignore her pain.
He knew what he had to do. It would cost him, but he would do it. This anguish of hers was more than he could bear.
* * *
Poppy woke from the dense fog of a deep sleep to hear Rico’s morning voice rasping on the baby monitor.
“We’ll let Mama sleep this morning.”
The transmission clicked off, but as Poppy rolled onto her back and straightened her limbs, she discovered the warm patch beside her on the bed.
He had stayed the night? She was chagrined that he’d caught her in the middle of a pity party, but she hadn’t been able to hold it in any longer. She had tried, honestly tried not to care about all of those things.
She did care, though. She was lonely and out of her depth. Her only friend was the daughter she had to share with a nanny who adored her, but whom Poppy was growing to resent by the day.
She threw her arm over her eyes, trying not to spiral back into melancholy. They had appointments to view properties today, she recalled. She could hardly wait to have a bigger house to get lost in, and more staff to treat her like some kind of visiting foreign official.
A few hours later, she was beside Rico as he drove a shiny new SUV up the coast. Poppy had understood the property agent would be driving them to view potential homes, but she didn’t complain. It felt nice to be just the three of them for a change.
“You should have told me to bring my camera,” she murmured, quite sure she would have a kink in her neck from swiveling her attention between the sunny coastal beaches and the craggy hillocks interspersed with picturesque ancient villages. “I’m used to staring at wheat and sunflower fields on long drives.”