by Dani Collins
Anticipation was like a bed of nails in his back, pushing him toward her. On that first occasion, she had worn a blush-pink negligee and a cloak of reserve he’d enjoyed peeling away very, very slowly.
Don’t screw this up, he’d told himself then, and reiterated it to himself today. The first night of their marriage, he’d had one chance to get their intimate relationship off on the right foot. He had one chance to press the reset button now.
The primal mate in him wanted to move across the room, kiss her into receptiveness and fall on the bed in a familiar act of simple, much-needed release.
But it wouldn’t be enough. He saw it in the way her lashes flicked to his expression and she read the direction of his thoughts. Rather than coloring in the pretty way he so enjoyed watching when he suggested a visit to her room, she paled a little and her lips trembled before she bit them together.
“You don’t...” Licking her lips, she looked to him with huge eyes that nearly brimmed with defensiveness. “You don’t expect me to fall into bed with you just because you’ve got a condom, do you?”
Expect it? The animal in him howled, Yes.
“It’s always been good, hasn’t it?” He bit out the words, perhaps a little too confrontational, but his confidence was unexpectedly deserting him.
She crossed her arms, shoulders so tight he thought she’d snap herself in half. “It’s always been fine.”
“Fine?” he charged, gutted by the faint praise.
She sent him a helpless look that made him feel like a bully.
“I can hardly deny that I’ve enjoyed it, can I?” she said, but the undertone of something like embarrassment or shame stole all the excitement he might have felt if she’d said it another way. “I just...”
“Don’t trust me.” He ground out the words with realization. It was an unexpectedly harsh blow. “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand before he lost what was left of his fraying self-control.
She stilled with guardedness. “What? Where?”
“Anywhere but this room or I’ll be all over you and you’re obviously not ready for that.”
A funny little frisson went through Adara as she took in the rugged, intimidating presence that was her husband. He held out a commanding hand, as imperious and inscrutable as ever, but his words had an undercurrent of...was it compassion?
Whatever it was, it did things to her, softening her, but it scared her at the same time. She was already too susceptible to him.
And his desire for her was a seduction in itself. Her insecurity as a woman had been ramped to maximum with everything that had happened, but things had shifted in the last twenty-four hours. She was looking at him, hearing him. His sexual hunger wasn’t an act. She knew the signs of interest and excitement in him. His chiseled features were tense with focus. A light flush stained his cheekbones—almost a flag of temper if not for the line of his mouth softened into a hungry, feral near smile.
Her body responded the way it always did, skin prickling with a yearning to be stroked, breasts tightening, loins clenching in longing for him.
Oh, God. If she stayed in this room, she’d beg him to be all over her, and where would that lead beyond a great orgasm? She didn’t know what sort of relationship she wanted with Gideon, but knew unequivocally she couldn’t go back to great sex and nothing else.
She moved to the door, not expecting him to fall in beside her and take her hand. A zing of excitement went through her as he enveloped her narrow fingers in his strong grasp. Stark defenselessness flared and she wanted to pull herself away. Why?
“It’s not that I distrust you,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as him while they walked down the stairs, her hand like a disembodied limb she was so aware of it in his. “I know you’d never hurt me. You can be stubborn and bossy, but you’re not cruel.” It still felt strange to speak her mind so openly, increasing her sense of vulnerability and risk. Her heart tremored.
“But you don’t trust me with who you are,” he goaded lightly.
Her hand betrayed her, wriggling self-consciously in his firm grip. He eyed her knowingly as he reached with his free hand to slide open the glass door on the back of the house.
An outdoor kitchen was tucked to the side of a lounge area. A free-form pool glittered a few steps away, half in the sun, the rest in the shadow of the house. The paving stones dwindled past it to a meandering path down the lawn to the beach. The grounds were bordered on one side by the vineyard and by an orange grove on the other.
“Swim?” he suggested as they stood at the edge of the pool staring into the hypnotic stillness of the turquoise water.
Working up her courage, she asked softly, “Do you trust me, Gideon?”
His hold on her loosened slightly and his mouth twitched with dismay. “I don’t wholly trust anyone,” he admitted gruffly. “It’s not because I don’t think you’re trustworthy. It’s me. The way I’m made.”
“The “it’s not you, it’s me” brush-off. There’s a firm foundation.” Disgruntled, she would have walked away, but he tightened his hold on her hand and followed her into the sunshine toward the orange grove.
“Would it help to know that I’ve been more open with you than I’ve been with anyone else in my life? Ever? Perhaps you learned to keep your feelings to yourself because you were afraid of how your father would react, but after my mother died, no one responded to what I wanted or needed. Even when she was alive, she was hardly there. Not her fault, but I’ve had to be completely self-sufficient most of my life. It shocks me every time you appear to genuinely care what I’m thinking or feeling.”
The sheer lonesomeness of what he was saying gouged a furrow into her heart. She might have a stilted relationship with her younger brothers, but they would be there if she absolutely needed them. She unconsciously tightened her hand on his and saw a subtle shift in his stony expression, as if her instinctive need to comfort him had the opposite effect, making him uncomfortable.
“You never talk about your mom. She was a single mother? Constantly working to make ends meet?”
His face became marble hard. “A child. I have a memory of asking her how old she was and she said twenty-one. That doesn’t penetrate when you’re young. It sounds ancient, but if I can remember it, I was probably five or six, which puts her pregnant at fifteen or sixteen. I suspect she was a runaway, but I’ve never tried to investigate. I don’t think I’d like any of the answers.”
She understood. At best, his mother might have been shunned by her family for a teen pregnancy, forcing her to leave her home; at worst, he could be the product of rape.
A little chill went through her before she asked, “What happened after you lost her? Where did you go?”
His mouth pressed tight.
Her heart fell. This was one of those times he wouldn’t answer.
He surprised her by saying gruffly, “There was a sailor who was decent to me.”
“A kindly old salt?” she asked, starting to smile.
“The furthest thing from it. My palms would be wet with broken blisters and all he’d say was, ‘There’s no room for crybabies on a ship,’ and send me back to work.”
She gasped in horror, checking her footstep to pause and look at him.
He shook his head at her concern. “It’s true. It wasn’t a cruise liner. If you’re not crew, you’re cargo and cargo has to pay. If he hadn’t pushed me, I wouldn’t be where I am today. He taught me the ropes—that’s not a pun. Everything from casting off to switching out the bilge pump. He taught me how to hang on to my money, not drink or gamble it away. Even how to fight. Solid life skills.”
“Does he know where you are today? What you’ve made of yourself?”
“No.” His stoic expression flinched and his tone went flat. “He died. He was mugged on a dock for twenty American dollars.
Stabbed and left to bleed to death. I came back too late to help him.”
“Oh, Gideon.” She wanted to bring his hand to her aching heart. Of course he was reticent and hard-edged with that sort of pain in his background. Questions bubbled in her mind. How old had he been? What had he done next?
She bit back pressing him. Baby steps, she reminded herself, but baby steps toward what? Their marriage was broken because they were broken.
She frowned. The future they’d mapped out with such simplistic determination five years ago had mostly gone according to plan. When it came to goal achievement in a materialistic sense, they were an unstoppable force. A really great team.
But what use was a mansion if no patter of tiny feet filled it? Without her father goading for expansion, she was content to slow the pace and concentrate on fine-tuning what they had.
She wasn’t sure what she wanted from her marriage, only knew she couldn’t be what Gideon seemed to expect her to be.
Where could they go from here?
The sweet scent of orange blossoms coated the air as they wandered in silence between the rows of trees. Gideon lazily reached up to steal a flower from a branch and brought it to his nose. A bemused smile tugged at his lips.
“Your hair smelled like this on our wedding night.”
Adara’s abdomen contracted in a purely sensual kick of anticipation, stunning her with the wash of acute hunger his single statement provoked. She swallowed, trying to hide how such a little thing as him recalling that could affect her so deeply.
“I wore a crown of them,” she said, trying to sound light and unaffected.
“I remember.” He looked at her in a way that swelled the words with meaning, even though she wasn’t sure what the meaning was.
A flood of pleasure and self-consciousness brimmed up in her.
“That almost sounds sentimental, but the night can only be memorable for how awkward I was,” she dismissed, accosted anew by embarrassment at how gauche and inexperienced she’d been.
“Nervous,” he corrected. “As nervous as you are now.” He halted her and stood in front of her to drift the petal of the flower down her cheek, leaving a tickling, perfumed path. “So was I.”
“I’m sure,” she scoffed, lips coming alive under the feathery stroke of the blossom. She licked the sensation away. “What are you doing?”
“Seducing you. It’d be nice if you noticed.”
She might have smiled, but he distracted her by brushing the flower under her chin. She lifted to escape the disturbing tickle and he stole a kiss.
It was a tender press of his mouth over hers, not demanding and possessive as she’d come to expect from him. This was more like those first kisses they’d shared a lifetime ago, during their short engagement. Brief and exploratory. Patient.
Sweet but frustrating. She was too schooled in how delicious it was to give in to passion to go back to chaste premarital nuzzling.
He drew back and looked into her eyes through a hooded gaze. “I remember every single thing about that night. How soft your skin was.” The blossom dropped away as he stroked the back of his bent fingers down her cheek and into the crook of her neck. His gaze went lower and his hand followed. “I remember how I had to learn to be careful with your nipples because they’re so sensitive.”
They were. Sensitive and responsive. Tightening now so they poked against the dual layers of bra and shirt, standing out visibly and seeming to throb as he lightly traced a finger around the point of one. A whimper of hungry distress escaped her.
“I remember that most especially.” The timbre of his voice became very low and intense. “The little noises of pleasure you made that got me so hot because it meant you liked what I was doing to you. I almost lost it the first time you came. Then you fell apart again when I was inside you and you were so tight—”
“Gideon, stop!” She grasped the hand that had drifted to the button at the waistband of her shorts. Her lungs felt as if all the air in them had evaporated and a distinctive throb pulsed between her thighs.
“I don’t want to stop,” he growled with masculine ferocity. “The only thing hotter than our first time together has been every time since.”
She wanted to believe that, but yesterday...
Gideon watched Adara withdraw and knew he was losing her. He’d come on too strong, but hunger for her was like a wolf in him, snapping and predatory from starvation.
“What’s wrong?” he demanded, then swore silently at himself when he saw that his roughened tone made her flinch. He wasn’t enjoying these heart-to-hearts any more than she was, but they were necessary. He accepted that, but it was hard. He was the type to attack, not expose his throat.
Adara flicked him a wary glance and stepped back, arms crossing her chest in the way he was beginning to hate because it shut him out so effectively. She chewed her bottom lip for a few seconds before cutting him another careful glance.
“Yesterday you said... Maybe I’m being oversensitive, but what you said when we were swimming really hurt, Gideon. About me not being good enough. I try to give you as much pleasure as you give me—”
He cut her off with a string of Greek epithets that should have curled the leaves off the surrounding trees. “Yesterday was a completely different era in this relationship. What I said—” The chill of frustration gripped his vital organs. How could he explain that his appetite for her went beyond what even seemed human? He understood now why she’d confined their relations to oral sex, but it didn’t change the fact that he ached constantly for release inside her. “I felt managed, Adara. I don’t say that with blame. I’m only telling you how it seemed from what I knew then. I want you. Not other women. Not tarts like Lexi. You. Having you hold yourself back from me made me nuts. I need you to be as caught up as I am. To want me. It’s the only way I can cope with how intense my need for you is.”
She blinked at him in shock.
He rubbed a hand down his face, wishing he could wipe away his blurted confession. “If that scares the hell out of you, then I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have told you.”
“No,” she breathed, head shaking in befuddlement. “But I find it hard to believe you feel like that. I’m not a siren. You’re the one with all the experience, the one who thinks about using condoms because you’ve used them before.”
“Yes, I have,” he said with forcible bluntness, not liking how defensive he felt for having a sexual history when she’d come to him pristine and pure. “But you know when the last time I used one was? The night before we met. I don’t remember much about the woman I was dating then, only that the next evening she left me because I asked her if she knew anything about you. Pretty crass, I know. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
Her searching gaze made him extremely uncomfortable. He jerked his chin.
“Let’s keep walking.”
“And talking? Because it’s such fun?” Adara bent to retrieve the blossom he’d dropped and twirled it beneath her nose as they continued deeper into the orange grove. His revelations were disturbing on so many levels, most especially because they were creating emotional intimacy, something that was completely foreign to their marriage. Nevertheless, as painful as it was to dredge up her hurts, she was learning that it was cathartic to acknowledge them. Letting him explain his side lessened the hurt.
She glanced at him as they walked, no longer touching.
“I hate thinking of you with other women.” The confession felt like a barbed hook dragged all the way from the center of her heart across the back of her throat. “Infidelity destroyed our family. We were quite normal at first, then Nico was sent away and it was awful. Both my parents drank. My father fooled around and made sure my mother knew about it. She was devastated. So much yelling and crying and fighting. I never wanted anything like that to happen to me.”
“It won’t,” he assured her, reaching across with light fingers to smooth her hair off her shoulder so he could tuck his hand under the fall of loose tresses and cup the back of her neck. “But tell me you were jealous of Lexi anyway. My ego needs it.”
“I felt insecure and useless,” she said flatly.
He checked his step and a spasm of pain flashed across his face before he seared her with a look. “Exactly how I felt when I saw you walk up the driveway here. Like I’d been rejected because I wasn’t good enough.”
She bit her lips together in compunction while her heart quivered in her chest, shimmering with the kind of pain a seed must feel before the first shoot breaks through its shell. She wanted to cry and throw herself into him and run away and protect herself.
“We’re never going to be able to make this work, Gideon. I don’t want the power to hurt you any more than I want you to be able to hurt me. This is a mess. We’re messing each other up and it’s going to be—”
“Messy?” he prompted dryly. “Just take it one day at a time, Adara. That’s all we can do.”
She drew in and released a shaken breath, nodding tightly as they kept walking. Their steps made soft crunches in the dry grass while cicadas chirped in accompaniment. No breeze stirred beneath the trees and the heat clutched the air in a tight grip.
“Should we go back and swim?” she suggested.
“If you like.”
It didn’t matter what they did, she realized. They were filling time until her brother returned, distracting themselves while sexual attraction struggled for supremacy over hurt and misgivings. They should give in. Sex would take the edge off their tension and God knew she wanted him. Lovemaking with Gideon was a transcendent experience as far as she was concerned.
But she’d never felt this vulnerable with him before. It made physical intimacy seem that much more intimate. Her normal defenses were a trampled mess. The idea of letting him touch her and watch her lose control was terrifying. He’d see how much he meant to her and that was too much to bear.