by Amber Bardan
He takes forever to undress me. Maybe because for the first time we actually have forever. He tugs one sleeve over my shoulder trapping an arm. Then kisses me there at the soft part of my upper arm.
I’m drunk on feelings, and crammed full of bliss.
He does the same to the other side. Then slides the robe down, and frees my arms. He runs his big hands from my naked neck to my naked knees. His touch, the drag of his fingers on my skin, runs on loop for my body to absorb a step at a time. A process. Like holding champagne in my mouth, first it’s a fizz on my tongue, I swallow, taste it, then it fills me. His touch is like that, conquering my senses one by one.
His lips press into the base of my neck. I run my fingers down his back, gripping his shirt but don’t pull the cotton free. I revel in the vulnerability of lying naked under this fully clothed man. I soak in the luxury of this gradual pace.
We have all the time.
He strokes my belly, the curve of my waist, the outside of my thigh. I bow into his touch as though greeting the sun.
We are free.
Chapter Thirty-Five
One year later.
I’ve experienced more than a few miracles in my time. Like the way you can still feel a person when they are gone. Or the way fate can quite literally knock you off your feet and land you someplace unbelievable. Like in a lifeboat on a yacht in the middle of the ocean. I’ve done things I’d never have believed possible. With Haithem, together we’ve achieved more than cleaning up a little smog. We’ve influenced policies, bailed out nations, funded research for blood cancers that has meant not only better treatments, but now the idea of a cure is no longer a matter of if, but of when.
I’ve seen my name up in lights in New York, Sydney and Rome.
Yet, of everything we’ve done, and all that we’ve been through, this right here, right now, is the greatest moment I’ve ever known.
I’m walking down the aisle.
Holding my father’s arm, striding towards a man whose very existence seems surreal. This is supposed to be too good to be true, but sometimes life throws you a bone. So maybe the one I caught is colossal, Jurassic even, but I’ll never let it go.
I take another step in the shoes I’ve been breaking in all week.
I’d thought a wedding would be nothing more than a formality. Signing on a dotted line for something we already live. But as I cross through a path of fairy lights at midnight, an outdoor orchestra of strings putting a melody to the magic of our love, it’s my heart performing pyrotechnics.
Maybe it’s the eyes of the world on us. The helicopters circling overhead. The cameras going off in a symphony of flashes like fireworks. But I see him waiting, hands held in front of him, the way he watches me move closer, and this is more than a certificate or the changing of names.
This is us falling into place.
This is where we become not just lovers, best friends, and soul mates, but husband and wife. We reach the bridal arch where he waits. It’s decorated with lights instead of flowers. Dad lifts my veil, kisses my cheek, then Haithem takes my hand. Our fingers touch, and we create our own electricity.
The vows we speak are our own. Then, I say I do.
“I told you a big wedding would be worth it.”
I glance up at my husband. “That’s because you don’t do understated.”
He grins and takes a sip of champagne. We’ve snuck off from our own wedding, but I couldn’t resist coming out here to the balcony off the honeymoon suite just to look down on it all. The music wafts up to where we are, weaving a romantic enchantment around us. Not that we’d need music for that. The aroma of Florence in summer is enough. Warm Italian air that compels you to dance in the moonlight. To take off your shoes and hold hands with the people around you. My body sways towards his, but I take one last look down.
Mum and Dad laugh with friends at a table glowing with candlelight. Everyone we love is here. Emma dances with Avner. Together they make quite a sight. Her in her ivory bridesmaid’s dress, and him in the triple black we’ve chosen to echo the bride and groom. She’s giving him that melt-for-me command with her eyes that renders any other woman for miles invisible. Maybe I should have warned her about him before she started playing in flames. But Emma’s a big girl.
Avner won’t know what’s hit him.
Haithem hands me the glass of champagne.
I shake my head. “No, thanks. Don’t think I’ll be drinking much anymore.”
He frowns slightly, then his brow smoothes. His glass meets the flat stone railing with a clink, then I’m in his arms, and we’re moving through the balcony doors. He sets me on the bed, shuts the doors, then he’s standing over me. Looking down at me in a way that tells me my handmade dress is at risk at being torn off.
“Wait.” I laugh.
Considering the particular Italian designer who made this dress, it’d be sacrilege even to me.
His gaze scans me, resting on my stomach, not that there’s much to see under yards of fabric. “Tell me.”
He reaches for the hem of my wedding gown, and begins drawing it up. It’s over my knees, and harder to remember what I was trying to tell him.
“That’s not what I meant.”
He slows a little, but doesn’t stop until there’s enough lace to curtain a village bunched under my arms. He runs his fingers over my bare abdomen, slightly bloated from our wedding feast. He brushes over the place where my white thong begins. “So what did you mean?”
I swallow and lean up onto my elbows. This is harder than I thought. Not sure why, when Haithem wants a baby. His timeline for parenthood is pretty much him being on standby until the moment I say okay.
“I meant that I’ve stopped taking the pill.”
He glances up from my belly, then climbs over me, resting his hand beside my head. “Sorry, my love, but I’m going to make you spell it out.”
His breath comes fast. His hips settle between mine. Fabric can’t hide that he’s hard.
Hard because he knows what I want and what it means. The bastard wants me to say it out loud though—ask him to do it.
My lips tremble even though I actually want to say it. Want to say it out loud because while sometimes the most amazing things take us by surprise, I want to take this next thing for myself.
I want us to choose it together.
I want him to hold me and to fuck me with the intention of putting a part of himself inside me. I touch his face, sliding my palm over his cheek, then grip the back of his head and pull him closer.
“Put your baby in me, Haithem.”
He groans. The rumble moves from his chest to mine and tightens my nipples. He rocks his hips against mine, and I groan too.
“Tell me what do you want, a girl or a boy?”
I laugh, but hold him tighter. As though he could control such a thing. But if he wants a challenge I’ll give him a real one. “One of each, give me twins.”
My chest pings.
His features soften, filled with so much more than the lust we started out with. “If effort counts for anything, then that’s what you’ll get.” He leans in and kisses my lips. “We’ll just have to do it twice as often.”
I curl my fingers in the back of his hair and give it a little tug. “And twice as hard.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Eight months, one week, and two days later.
Bogus witch-doctoring, that’s what this is. I hit the trigger again. My teeth clamp down as another wave of pain tears through my belly. It washes over me then dissipates. I’m hot, so hot. I roll my hips back and forth on the Gym Ball, flap the front of my nightgown then hold the trigger out to Haithem. “Get this stupid thing off me.”
He pries the trigger out of my clutching fingers. So much for natural alternatives. I flop forw
ard on the ball and bury my head in Haithem’s stomach. “I should have asked you to invent something for this.”
He leans over me and lifts my nightgown then peels the sticky pads off my lower back. My stomach contracts, but it’s not just my stomach, it’s my whole freaking torso. I moan, pushing my face deeper against his middle. He pauses from removing the electrodes and strokes my hair. Whispers to me about breathing through it.
I try that ridiculous puffing thing they showed us in the antenatal classes. Except this seems more like hyperventilating. The contraction finishes and I sniff into Haithem’s shirt. Fuck, and I thought getting stabbed was bad.
“Why didn’t you invent me something?”
He removes the TENS machine, smoothes my nightgown over my hips and leans back. “Want to try the bath?”
He dares look down at me so pained—as though he’s the one whose insides are trying to become outsides.
“The bath?” I pant and push him away. “Why would I want to be wet right now?”
I glance across the room to the midwife who’s managed to find a million things to do and none of them are bringing me something to eat. “I’m hungry.”
She walks towards me, checks the other machine I’m attached to. “Sorry, honey, you can have something after.”
My gaze snaps to Haithem. “It’s been eleven hours. This is your fault. Make her feed me.”
He frowns, and exchanges a look with the midwife.
“Right now, Haithem, you had better do it nowww—” My words are sliced by the strike of a hatchet to my midsection. At least that’s what I’d swear it is. I rock on the ball, and push my hands against his thighs.
“Well, everyone is doing just fine,” the midwife says. “You can try the bath if you like.”
I lock my elbows and puff air. “Fuck you both.”
“You seem angry?” Haithem says and strokes my arms.
“Maybe because you put two people in me.” I scrunch my face and scowl at him. “Two you-sized people.”
Oh why didn’t I think before I asked for this to happen—this man is a giant. I’m having two times giant spawn.
Giant spawns that want out.
I reach for his hand, and start to cry. “Please just help me into the bath.”
The midwife unhooks me from the heart rate monitor. I strip and let Haithem help me towards the massive hospital bath. I try not to look down at my enormous—ridiculously enormous—belly. My god, the things that have happened to my stomach. This shit’s never going to snap back.
I settle into the water. Haithem ties my hair up into some kind of bun at the top of my head.
“How are you feeling now?” he asks.
I shut my eyes. “Honestly, a lot fearful for my vagina.”
He leaves me some small shred of dignity by not laughing. I just hope I get to hold on to what’s left.
Something changes in the heart of the pain. Haithem pours warm water over my back. Kneels on the outside of the tub, keeping his cheek against mine, and tells me soft soothing things in Arabic that I’ve actually begun to understand. Everything goes quiet. I’m boxed in my body, and locked in a haze. But I keep on breathing, because his breath reminds me to. I grip his hand, fingers interlocked. Squeeze so hard we both shake from it. When it gets too much then he’s in the bath with me. I push while holding his shoulders, then there’s a baby.
A girl, wrinkled, angry and red. They put her between us, but Haithem has to hold her. It’s not over yet. I might not be able to do it, might not be able to push again, if it weren’t for this—the look on Haithem’s face with our squirming newborn in his arms. They tell me to wait, but my body won’t listen. He comes out so much faster, as though his sister showed him how.
Haithem eases me against his side as I collapse. Our daughter squawks, and my heart stills, because our son has not. I turn. The nurse holds him up, then puts him on my chest. I curl around his tiny body. His lips purse, and I can breathe—he’s fine. The same size and just as strong as his sister.
He’s just, somehow, still trying to sleep.
I look at Haithem. He looks at me. There’s no possible way to fall in love with each other more, yet we just did.
Haithem
I fell in love the first time in a shower—the second time in a bathtub. But the girl who stole my heart today, I can hold with one hand. She pushes up off my chest with balled fists. At hours old she’s strong. Her head bobs, and huge eyes settle on me.
No, this girl stole my soul. I touch her baby cheek with the pad of my finger. Her mouth turns towards the touch. I move my hand away but the greedy child chases after it. I drag her higher, touch my nose to the top of her head, and breathe in her baby smell.
She’s tiny, my hands engulf her, but I’m not afraid of breaking her. Like her mother, she’s nowhere near as delicate as she looks. She wiggles, trying to move.
“I think it’s her turn now,” Angelina says, and pulls her nipple out of the mouth of our other child. This one, the boy, doesn’t fidget. His head lolls to the side, milk trickles out of the corner of his lips, and he appears to have fallen into a state of milk-drunkenness.
But then he greeted the world that way. He came out with a double chin, and his eyes closed. Didn’t cry, just joined his hands in front of him. As though he could have used the three extra weeks they were supposed to be baking for nap time.
I’d never seen such a content human until him.
Propped up against the pillows, Angelina lays our son along her forearms, her knees drawn up for support. She runs her gaze over his tiny naked form, a dreamy smile on her full edible lips. Then she closes the blanket around him loosely, and holds him out to me.
I take my son, but can’t relinquish my daughter just yet. I set the twins next to each other on my chest, tug the blanket off him, and lay it over both siblings. I’m sold on this skin-to-skin bonding. In fact, I may never allow another person back into this hospital room.
I’ll steal this moment, and extend it forever.
The twins turn to each other, and our daughter winds her arms around her brother. His lazy arms find their way around her. They fuse like two links in a chain. Our fussy girl falls still.
“Ohh...” Angelina says, “Look at that.”
I brush the bottom of my chin gently against the tops of their heads. “Must have been her brother she was after all along.”
Angelina glances at me. There’s so much in her eyes. Something joyful and bittersweet. Her hair’s a wild tangle over her bare shoulders, and her breasts—sweet mercy, her breasts—like the rest of her they’ve developed a layer of maternal softness that I want nothing more than to bury myself in. These babies will need to learn to share.
Fuck me, I love this woman.
“I suppose they need names,” she says, drawing her bottom lip between her teeth to conceal a rueful smile.
“Do they now?” I wrap my arm around the twins and lunge forward to kiss that mouth of hers. “Any ideas?”
She does chuckle now, a husky sound that makes me grin. She refused to talk names until they were born. As though naming a thing allows it to be taken away. I’d have named them at conception if I’d been allowed to know their sex. She wouldn’t have us know that either, only that there were two. She sighs, and draws the blanket farther from their faces and studies them, then brushes the what I’d call red, but what she calls auburn, hair from our daughter’s crown. Her little head wiggles.
“She’s busy,” I say. “Bet she’ll never sit still.”
Angelina looks up from our children and smiles. “I’m sure she’ll grow up to fit forty hours in a day and spend all of them tormenting you.”
I clear my thickening throat, and watch my beautiful wife say the name I already know she’s chosen.
“I think she’s a Leila.”
She leans down and plants a kiss on my mouth. We both know the same longing, and apparently, we both also think the same way.
She draws back. “What about him?”
We gaze at our son.
His lips press together. Pink, pouty lips I could catch between two fingers. “Hmm, he’s kind of sweet.” I shift my gaze to Angelina, and watch her expression, in case I have this wrong. “Joshua?”
Her mouth opens, then she lays down beside me and rests her arm over our babies. I move my arm under her, and haul her closer to my side. Nothing has ever been so warm. Our family wrapped around each other.
“Yeah, that’s perfect.”
* * * * *
“This isn’t a romance for the lighthearted. It’s gritty and wild and passionate...will have readers falling hard and fast.” —Smart Bitches, Trashy Books on Didn’t I Warn You
Amber Bardan returns with a heart-stopping third installment in her high-octane, highly addictive Bad For You series
A fling with her best friend’s reclusive business partner should’ve been harmless.
When Emma meets him, the only way she’s looking to be tied down is in the literal sense. But Avner—shady hacker, off-the-books investigator, occasional spy—takes her breath away. He’s the first man who doesn’t turn to mush under her sexual spell: a fact that makes what’s between them very different, and very real.
Beautiful and uninhibited, Emma is everything Avner thought she would be and more. Yet his deadly past and dark duties can never be forgotten...not even as he succumbs to their seductive intimacy. But for the first time he’s after something of his own, as well.
And now that he’s found Emma, he’ll protect her, no matter what. Because anything worth loving is worth fighting for.
But nothing about Avner is remotely harmless.
Soon, Avner has infiltrated Emma’s personal life, stalled her career and nearly destroyed everything she’s worked for—all in the name of protection. Desperate and heartbroken, drawn into a secret criminal underworld in her quest for understanding, Emma discovers the truth: Avner’s secrets are far more devastating than his lies.