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He groaned. "That's right. Agape mou, your touch is perfect."
He'd called her his love again. It must be a sex thing, but she liked it. She caressed him with her hand, marveling at how new it all felt even though they'd spent an entire passion filled night together.
There was something infinitely distinctive about this experience, but she was too caught up in her desire to figure out what.
"I need you, Rachel."
She smiled a secret woman's smile to herself. "Then have me, Sebastian, my love."
If he could use such words during sex, so could she. It might be the only time she would ever reveal the depth of her feeling to him.
He stilled in the act of pressing her backward, his gaze so intense it made her shiver. "Am I?"
"What?"
"Am I your love?" he growled, no pretense of patience or tolerant lover present.
Her mouth opened, her lips working, but no sound came out. She could not admit the truth, but she could not make herself lie either.
His face spasmed with pain. "Of course I am not, but you married me and for that I must be grateful."
"Do you want to be my beloved?" she croaked, her voice cracked from both excitement and strain.
Wariness filled his expression. "What husband does not wish to be loved by his wife?"
One who had married her for the sake of passion and their unborn child?
Only, it was apparent that he did want her to love him. Maybe his pride balked at being a means to an end as much as hers did. If she thought it was his heart involved, she didn't know what she would do. Expire from happiness maybe.
However, it was far more likely his pride talking. He had been adamant she not marry him because she had no other alternative. Had fought to get her to take property and money to guarantee such an eventuality could not come to pass. She'd refused and he'd married her anyway, but perhaps this was another side to his insecurity in that area.
One thing became crystal clear as they hung suspended between making love and talking about it: what she felt for him was not limited to his feelings for her. It never had been.
Love was a generous emotion with a need to be expressed, not hidden. If he wanted her love, she would give it to him and they would both feel better because of it.
"I love you, Sebastian."
What he said in response was indecipherable in the swirling vortex of passion he took her to after she said the words.
He finished undressing her with fingers, whose trembling clumsiness made her heart squeeze in response. He touched her all over again, pleasuring her with words and actions so tender she started to cry again. When his hand trespassed between her thighs, she was swollen and ready for him. He touched her until she was crying out with her desire and then he joined their bodies, setting a rhythm that brought them to a mutual, soul altering climax within minutes.
Afterward, he rolled onto his back, taking her with him, so they stayed connected intimately. It was an odd sensation, but incredibly special. She lay, making patterns on his shoulder with her fingertip, loving the feel of his hard muscles under her hands.
“Tell me about the assault when you were younger."
Of all the words she'd expected to hear in the drowsy aftermath of passion, those were not the ones.
She lifted her head from its comfy spot on his sweat dampened chest and looked at him. "Why?"
"I shut you down the morning after we made love because I'd gone crazy with my own assumptions. After I realized how wrong I was, I was haunted by what you'd said."
"So now you want me to tell you about it?"
"Yes, but if it is too painful to talk about, I understand."
A sensitive Sebastian was an unknown quantity. Even before the untimely death of his uncle, Sebastian had been kind to her, but not sensitive. He'd brought his women around, breaking her youthful heart while repairing it with a smile and a compliment.
"But why do you want to know?"
He looked uncomfortable, but very, very serious. "I never want to do anything that might inadvertently remind you of him."
The words shocked her, but his reasoning touched her deeply. "Nothing you could ever do would remind me of him, even if you touched me in exactly the same way."
And she knew it was true, because with Sebastian, everything was different. Her love made it so.
“I am glad.''
She took a deep breath, ugly memories playing at the edge of her consciousness. "I've never told anyone but Andrea."
He grimaced. "Knowing her, she was not sympathetic."
That was a major understatement of her mother's cold reaction to Rachel's trauma. That's when she lost all love for her mother. "She told me to keep quiet about it afterward, never to bring it up again."
"I am sorry for that, yineka mou. She did not protect you like a mother should protect her daughter."
She never had.
"No, she didn't." Then Rachel started to tell him.
It had been the night of one of her mother's parties. Rachel had been hiding in her bedroom as usual, trying to ignore what was happening in the rest of the apartment.
A man came into the room and shut the door. He switched on her light and she recognized him as the younger brother of her mother's current lover. He made her feel dirty when he looked at her because he noticed parts of her body her innocent sixteen-year-old mind knew he wasn't supposed to. He was drunk. She could smell the liquor from across the room.
It scared her.
When he sat down on her bed, it scared her even more. He talked to her in the slurring tones drunks use. She told him to leave, but he just laughed and
started touching her, telling her she was just like her mother. She screamed and he slapped her. No one in the apartment heard because the music was too loud. She fought, but he got her panties off and his hand was between her legs. He roughly shoved his fingers inside her and she felt a tearing pain that made her scream again.
This time longer and louder than any sound she'd ever made.
The door to her room crashed open and his brother rushed inside. He grabbed the younger man and punched him, calling him names and telling him what a lowlife bastard he was. Her mother came in to see what the ruckus was because her boyfriend's voice had carried where Rachel's hadn't.
When she took in the scene before her, she told her boyfriend to get his brother out of the apartment. Rachel had been sobbing uncontrollably, still hurting between her legs, blood all over her thighs from her ripped hymen.
"Andrea refused to take me to the hospital, saying lots of w
omen bled her first time. But it wasn't my first time. We hadn't had sex and the blood terrified me."
Sebastian's hands were soothing her back although there was tension in his body beneath hers.
"Did you press charges?"
"No. Andrea told me not to say anything, got a lock for my bedroom door and that was the end of it. She married your uncle six months later and we moved to Greece."
"And she appropriated your experience as part of the lure she used to trap him in her net."
"Yes."
The knowledge Sebastian had accused her of doing the same thing shimmered between them.
Grief reflected in the depths of his gray eyes. "I am more sorry than I can ever say for the accusations I made the morning after we made love the first time." The words came out stilted, the English heavily accented with his Greek intonation. "I will understand if you can never forgive me."
She felt a blessed freedom having told him about her past and release from its power in his ready acceptance and apology. "I do forgive you. You were mixed up and said things you didn't mean."
