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Chaya went silent. Even her thoughts seemed to stop in shock as she stared back at Natches. He couldn’t have said that. He didn’t just say that.
“I see. ” She wet her lips. Had he changed his mind that quickly? Was she misunderstanding something important in this conversation? “If you don’t want to have sex with me, I can understand . . . ”
“I want to lay you down and lick every inch of your body. I want to bring you over me and watch you ride me. I want to fuck you so many ways, so many times, that neither of us can find the energy to crawl from the floor let alone the bed. Oh, baby, wanting you is like a sickness with me, and it never fucking goes away. ”
“Oh. ” Her heart was racing. Each word out of his mouth had her skin sensitizing, her clit swelling. “Then what do you mean, no condom?”
He stalked to her then. Slowly. His expression was more savage than she could ever remember seeing it, his eyes bright, his lashes lowered over them. He looked dark. Dangerous. And something in that look terrified her.
“I mean, if you don’t want my baby, then you better get your ass to a clinic and take care of the birth control yourself. ” His hand flattened on her stomach as she stared back at him in a shock so deep, so overwhelming, she wondered how she was standing upright. “Because I’m betting I have the fastest, slickest little soldiers in the state of Kentucky. Just a breath of a chance, sweetheart, and you’re pregnant. ” His expression, his eyes, grew taut with possessiveness. Possessiveness and lust. “And I could very much get into making damned certain they have every chance. ”
Chaya felt herself swaying. She could feel the blood draining from her face, even as it began to thunder in her ears.
She could feel Natches’s hand on her belly, his eyes boring into her soul, as though will alone, and nothing more, could make her conceive.
And it didn’t make sense. She couldn’t understand this. He couldn’t be serious.
“Why?” She forced the word past numb lips. Why would he want to tie himself to her like that?
“Ah, Chay,” he whispered, his expression gentling, just a bit, just enough to force her to trap a sob in her chest rather than give rise to the cry that seemed to echo through her soul. “Sweetheart. Don’t you know I’d give everything I possess to hold you to me? And the thought of giving you my child, of watching that pretty belly grow large with my baby, makes my dick so damned hard I wonder if it’s going to push straight past the zipper of my jeans. ”
She felt the briefcase drop from her fingers as she stared back at him, searching his eyes, searching for the lie. There had to be a lie there. But lying didn’t make sense. She knew Natches. Knew he would never, ever risk a child of his so cavalierly. He was so damned protective over family that even Cranston feared him. He would kill for them. He had proven it.
“Chay. ” He breathed her name against her lips, and she felt herself weaken. Her knees. Her soul. Something inside her, something she needed for protection, to hold back the dreams and the loss and the years she had run, even from herself, began to crack. “Let me have you like that. Just us. Just the chance that we could dream together like that. ”
ELEVEN
Natches could feel himself shaking inside, a need, a hunger he couldn’t control, didn’t want to control, rising inside him.
Chaya. Just her name invoked the power to make his knees weak, to make him hard, to make him want to believe in miracles and to reach for them.
The boy inside him that had once screamed out in the darkened forest, howling in fury at the loneliness, the pain that melded through his body, howled out now in hope.
Because Chaya was here. For such a brief moment in time in a foreign desert, in a hostile land, Natches had known peace. One night, so far away that it felt like a dream, he had held her in his arms and knew she belonged to him. No matter what happened, no matter where life took either of them, he had found the one person that was his alone.
Chaya.
He stared into her eyes. Honey eyes. Eyes that drew him in and promised him life, promised him joy. He could find joy with her. He found joy with her.
“You’re not serious,” she murmured, her voice as dazed as he felt lowering his hand once more to her stomach. There, his child could be growing even now. Sheltered in the warmth of her body, growing strong and sure.
Sweet God—the prayer slipped into his mind unbidden—let my child rest there. Within the woman who held his soul.
“I’d die for you,” he said softly. “I’d kill for you, Chay. And I’d go to my knees for you. ”
He had never willingly gone to his knees for anyone, man or woman, no matter how many times his father had tried to force him there.
She blinked back at him. Those clear golden eyes of hers flickering with dreams that she fought to keep buried, with hope that he knew she tried to hide.
She was his hope, but he knew, to the bottom of his soul he knew, he was hers as well.
“Natches. ” She shook her head, her lips parted, fully, lush now with the arousal he knew was moving through her.
It made her wet, just as it made him hard, the thought of coming together, bare, unprotected, spilling into each other to create something new. Something innocent.
It shouldn’t have been that way. He knew that. Hell, the last thing he needed to think about with his childhood was a kid. But a baby with Chaya? Something to bind her to him forever, just as he would be bound to her.
Family was his salvation. His uncle Ray, his cousins, they were all the family he’d had. He’d never had his own. Until now, he hadn’t wanted his own.
