“Thank you. I like the way you look in the tux.” The way the wool clung to his shoulders and smoothed over his chest. The way his cheekbones made his face so stern, but she knew she could make him melt if she wanted. The way she was already melting.
But acknowledging what you wanted out of a night wasn’t the same thing as being willing to risk getting it.
He held out her coat, and the lining slipped over her bare skin as she put her arms through the sleeves. She buttoned up the coat he’d bought her over the dress he’d bought her, and all the reasons she’d put the brakes on a physical relationship came screaming back. Was tonight different? She was still dependent on Karl for health insurance, but at least she had a job and a place to live—even if both those things were provided by his mother. She’d like to believe Susan’s assurances that that little bit of security wasn’t dependent on Karl.
“Will you be warm enough?” His hand was cool when he handed over the fancy clutch he’d bought her to match her dress. She wanted him to run that hand over her belly and down until his arctic tranquility melted under her heat.
She hoped her smile covered up the nonsense in her brain. “Of course.”
Susan called out, “Have fun, kids,” as they walked out the front door.
* * *
THEIR PROGRESS THROUGH the Civic Opera House lobby was slowed as Karl greeted people he knew. While he shook hands, Vivian took the opportunity to gawk at her surroundings. After living in Las Vegas, she wasn’t a country bumpkin any longer and could recognize the difference between a historic building restored to grandeur and a modern building designed to look old. The towering white columns and red carpet looked like Hollywood glamour meets a downtown bank as reimagined for the opera. Or what she supposed opera was—over-the-top, loud and in a language she wouldn’t understand. The only thing she knew about the opera they were watching tonight was that it was one of Karl’s favorites.
She’d passed this building many times on her daily walks through the city while she’d still been living with Karl. The front of the structure looked like a towering office building, and she’d had to cross the river to see why it was called Insull’s Throne.
In the midst of the women in elegant dresses and silver-haired men in tuxes milling around in the white stone lobby, she was glad Karl had bought her a dress. The black pants, white shirt and Asian-print brocade vest she’d worn dealing would have looked out of place and it was the nicest thing she owned—she’d sold her dresses before moving.
When they’d settled into their seats, Vivian opened her program to learn about the spectacle she was about to watch and blinked when she read the description. Then she read the description again. “You brought me to an opera about a woman whose baby is murdered?”
She flipped the program over to look at the cover, Jenůfa. She flipped back to the synopsis.
Karl looked at the program open in her hands. “The peasant girl is the title character, but the story is more about the decisions of the Kostelnička, the stepmother who murders the baby.”
“I still can’t believe you brought a pregnant woman to an opera about infanticide.”
“Makes how my mom greeted you at that first family dinner seem insignificant in comparison.”
She jerked up from the program to look at him. His eyes were twinkling and the corners of his mouth kicked up in a smile. She laughed. “It’s even worse that you would joke about it.”
The tightness in his jawline as he had walked through the lobby was gone and his smile was real—and blinding. “Don’t tell anyone. It will ruin my reputation.”
The lights dimmed and the curtain rose on a bare set. Even after having read the description, she was expecting castles and giant sailing ships—props to wow her, not a bare stage with a table and a couple boulders. The orchestra started and she peeked at Karl.
If she hadn’t spent so much time watching him, she wouldn’t have noticed the small evidence of his immersion in the music. His face wasn’t void of emotion; his feelings were simmering just below the surface. The corners of his eyes dipped and his brows lowered as his shoulders relaxed. His body leaned forward as an extension of his attention reaching all the way to the stage. Seeing those small movements were her reward for paying attention to him.
When he blinked rapidly, she turned her eyes back to the stage in time to see Jenůfa grasping her face. One of the characters, Laca, had just slashed her cheek to make her less attractive to Śteva, the father of Jenůfa’s child and Laca’s half brother. The music swept through Vivian and she didn’t turn to look at her husband again until the curtain dropped and the lights came back on.
Karl sniffed and his eyes were red, but the look on his face was pure joy. They walked through the lobby, his arm around her as he occasionally stopped to press a kiss into her hair.
“I don’t believe Jenůfa would forgive the Kostelnička so easily after the woman murdered her child. Or that she would forgive Laca for slashing her cheek. Sins out of love, indeed,” Vivian said after they’d settled into a cab.
Karl slipped his gloves off and reached for one of her hands, taking his time to peel her glove off, staring down and intent on his task. Once her hand was bare and wrapped up in his, he looked at her. “Like I said, the story is only nominally about Jenůfa. It’s more about the Kostelnička, who has a duty to care for Jenůfa—her stepdaughter, not her own child—and who understands the social pressures and prejudices acting against a young girl, even a pretty one, who allows herself to get pregnant by a drunk and whom no one will marry. Jenůfa is too overwhelmed with love of her baby to see her future. The Kostelnička is responsible for Jenůfa’s future and fixes it the only way she knows how.”
“By murdering a baby and marrying Jenůfa to the man who knifed her?”
He shrugged and said matter-of-factly, “Better than the drunk who got her pregnant, then tried to marry the mayor’s pretty daughter.”
Karl’s eyes twinkled in the passing streetlights and Vivian was surprised enough to laugh. “I thought you didn’t have a sense of humor, but now I realize you have a macabre one.”
His head fell back against the headrest. He lifted her hand up to his lips, kissed her palm gently then closed his eyes. “The world is full of pain. If you can’t find humor in it, you’ll drown.” He raised his head and turned to look at her. “You can imagine people wouldn’t find my sense of humor appropriate in my current job.”
“So you think the Kostelnička was right to do what she did?”
“Not right—crimes are never right. She will be tried for drowning the infant and deserves death. That is justice. But there is also social justice for Śteva, who got a girl pregnant when she was pretty and abandoned her when she was disfigured.”
“Laca seems to come out all right. He gets the girl.”
“Neither social justice nor legal justice work perfectly. Maybe Laca will come to realize he is complicit in the death of an infant because he refused to marry Jenůfa, the woman he says he loves, while she still had his brother’s child.” He was resting against the headrest and his eyes were closed again. “Or maybe he will never take the time to evaluate the consequences of his actions and die confident in his infallibility.”
“His sins are sins of love.”
His voice was sleepy as he replied, “That’s the stupidest line in the whole opera. I think it’s supposed to be romantic, but love doesn’t excuse sin.”
Which, Vivian supposed, was why she was living with her mother-in-law instead of with the man she loved.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
INVITING A PREGNANT woman up to his apartment for a nightcap had been an obvious pretext, but Karl had done it and Vivian had said yes. He hadn’t even bothered to smooth out his ploy with “before I drive you back to my mom’s.” They both knew a “nightcap” meant she was sleeping over.
> His fingers brushed the skin of Vivian’s bare arms as he helped her out of her coat, and the smoothness burned through his body. He walked over to the closet to hang up their coats before she could turn around and notice his increased heart rate.
He’d spent years practicing how to cover up his emotions so that when people looked at him they saw who and what they needed to see—and who and what he wanted them to see. But Vivian read him. Not the perfect son, not the Golden Pole overcoming tragedy for a greater purpose, not the man in a suit on a woman’s arm. She saw him. He had felt her perceptive gaze the first time she’d sat next to him in Las Vegas, and in his drunkenness it had been invigorating. When she’d sat on the couch in his Chicago condo and begged for health insurance, it had been scary. Now he wasn’t sure he could live without it.
He also wasn’t sure how to reconcile his need for her with his opinions of her past. Tonight would surely jumble any hope he had of being rational about her, but he found he didn’t care.
“Thank you.” She swept her hair over her shoulder, revealing the length of her neck. The neck he still wanted to kiss his way down. “For the dress, for the night out, for the music, for everything.”
“You look beautiful.” Bronze silk the color of her eyes glistened next to her pale golden skin. The dress skimmed over her slight figure, peaking over her nipples. She glowed like a goddess risen from the molten depths of the earth.
The copper in her eyes blazed when her mouth curved in a knowing smile and she took a step forward, slipping her hand into his. He had called her Helen of Troy. A siren. Some temptress risen from the deep to test him on his journey through life. But then he’d seen her at Healthy Food, smiling and teasing the regulars, and with his mom, taking care of her. And now he knew she was more Penelope than Lorelei. Underestimated for her cleverness and resourcefulness, like Penelope, using tricks to keep her unwanted suitors at bay. Her femininity and softness made her a tougher character, not a weaker one as a less confident man might think.
Her dress rustled when he tugged her close to him. He lifted one hand to her face and ran it down the length of her neck to smooth the stiff neckline of her dress away from her collarbone. She wasn’t wearing a bra. He could sweep the dress completely off her shoulders and worship at her breasts until his body burst into lava. He could melt with her.
He bent to kiss the juncture of her neck and shoulder, just once, feeling her heart beat against his lips, and someone moaned. “I could barely pay attention to the opera, wondering what your skin tasted like.”
“Liar.” She tilted her head to the side in offering, and he didn’t hesitate. When he licked the line of her clavicle she gasped and lifted herself up onto her toes. “I was sitting right next to you. You were entranced.”
“I’m a good actor.” He slid one hand down to grasp her butt. Silk slipped under his fingers as he lifted her leg up, pulling her so that his erection was settled against her belly and she had to rely on him to stand. He was beyond want; he needed her. He needed her to need him.
She righted her head and turned her eyes on him, her lips opening in invitation. He would be engulfed in flames if he didn’t kiss her lips. Still...
“You don’t have to do this.” He’d said similar words once before, and that night had ended with him taking a cold shower, but the words needed to be said again. “The dress, the opera—none of that has a price.”
“I want to.” She hadn’t finished her sentence before he finally felt the lush softness of her lips melt under his.
* * *
KARL SLIPPED HIS tongue into Vivian’s mouth and all her reason disappeared, replaced with a blessed insanity and the knowledge that his cool lips burned. She thrust her hips forward, but he was too tall for her. She didn’t want the feel of dress and wool against her skin. She wanted him—his cool skin, his fine brown hairs, his hard length and lean muscles. She moaned and shifted, meeting his tongue with hers. When she ran her tongue over his bottom teeth he grunted and lifted her leg higher, pushing himself against her but still not meeting her where she pulsed with desire.
She broke the kiss. “This will never work.”
His chest rose and fell in exertion as he closed his eyes and nodded. “I understand.” His hand slipped from her butt.
She reached around to keep it there. “No.” She smiled, and the uncertainty she hadn’t even been convinced was in his eyes disappeared. “Standing. This will never work standing. Either I grow several inches or you shrink.”
He pulled back enough to sweep her into his arms. “It’ll be more expedient if I carry my wife across the threshold—any threshold.”
She tilted her head back and allowed herself to be a princess, swept off her feet into the arms of a waiting prince. A fairy tale of a girl plucked from daily toils and lifted into a castle tower. There was no question of whether she deserved this—all women deserved to be swept away at least once in their lives.
A down comforter embraced her when he set her gently on his bed. She’d not been in his bedroom before. Two weeks of living in his apartment and she’d never been willing to broach the doorway and invade his privacy. Now she was too overcome by his hand running down the length of her body and hiking up the skirts of her dress to do more than notice that his pillows smelled like his shaving cream. Desire coursed through her body, and she lifted her arms over her head to give the craving an escape. All she succeeded in doing was speeding up her heart rate.
Two thunks sounded as her shoes hit the floor, followed by two more, his shoes. Then his hand skimmed up her body, dancing over her hip and stalling under her arms. “Ah, zipper.” Butterfly kisses followed the rasp of the zipper down her side. She wiggled as he pushed the dress over her head, cool air streaming in to zing newly revealed parts of her body. When she shifted to sit up and help him undress, he pushed her back on the bed and took her mouth in a consuming kiss.
“I want you undressed,” she said against his mouth. She clicked open the buttons of his tuxedo shirt and smoothed her hand over his hard chest, coarse hairs catching in her fingers. He bucked and groaned when she ran a thumb over his nipple.
He hopped off the bed, shucking his bow tie and clothes. Under his pants, where she had expected him to wear staid tighty-whities or gray boxer briefs, were lime-green boxers with pink flamingos on them. Buried deep down along with his macabre humor, her husband also had a sense of whimsy. She smiled, both at the silliness of his underwear and at the sight of the erection nudging open his fly.
He answered her smile with a wry one of his own, his hands stalled on the waistband of his boxers. “Now you know all my secrets,” he said before shedding the last bit of fabric.
The mattress bounced when Karl hopped to all fours on it and climbed such that he was above her, an unexpectedly playful smile on his face. She waited while he tilted his head to the left and the right, her body tense with desire, afraid movement would wreck the moment. “Finally, those wonderful breasts are bare and waiting for me.” He shifted back and sat on his heels, his erection so close to being inside her that her body clenched in anticipation.
She ran her hands up his legs. When she reached the thickening hair at the juncture of his thighs and pelvic bone, his playful smile grew wider. She kept one hand tickling his thigh while the other ran over the slight bulge of her belly to her breasts. When his eyes darkened in response, she pinched her nipple. “Are you going to do anything with them?”
“I have been waiting a long time to get you naked and under me.” His hand followed the same trail over her belly to her breasts that her hand had just made, stopping just shy of her breast. She shifted her hand to touch his, stopping when he shook his head. “I’ve had lustful thoughts about you while at my mother’s restaurant talking to my priest.”
Finally, his fingers grazed the underside of her breast and her body trembled. Her breasts had been extra sensitive and
had just stopped being tender, but the edge of pain and pleasure that his hand walked stilled her breath with anticipation. “If I want to take all night to fully appreciate the value of what I am about to have in my hand, I will.” When he slid his hand under hers and pinched her nipple, her hips bucked. “I’ll make the anticipation worth your while.”
“I’ll make the anticipation worth my while,” she said, not so far gone with desire that she didn’t miss the twinkle in his eye as he bent his head and took the other nipple into his mouth. When he bit down, she amended her statement. “But you can help,” she said and felt his smile.
His thighs tightened around hers when her hand traveled from the indent of his hip to grip his erection. His answering moan sent trembles through her body, though he didn’t stop his veneration of her breasts. Desire burned within her, such that she could feel the electricity between them. Even where their bodies didn’t touch, the heat off his body sizzled.
When she could no longer stand the hunger, she shifted her knees in an attempt to get him between her legs and inside her.
“I know what you’re doing,” he murmured as he licked his way up her neck to nibble her ear. Sometime during his attentions, her free hand had found his shoulder and was now gripping it. He ran his tongue along the outside of her ear, and she closed both hands, digging her nails into his shoulder with one hand and clenching his cock with the other. “That was interesting,” he said before shifting to catch her mouth with his. He teased her lips apart with his tongue, slipping into her mouth as she wished he’d slip into her.
The movements her hand made on his cock echoed the pulling and tormenting of her lips on his tongue, but no matter how she aroused him, she couldn’t get him to reposition himself so that she could put him inside her. He wasn’t so much denying her as taunting her with what she wanted. Tantalus, she remembered from her Greek literature class, satisfaction within sight but never within reach.
Harlequin Superromance January 2014 - Bundle 1 of 2: Everywhere She GoesA Promise for the BabyThat Summer at the Shore Page 45