AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Except now I learn that you saw me kissing Melinda Cartside and never told me until today. How many other secrets are you keeping from me?”
How many are you keeping from me? she thought, but couldn’t quite make herself ask.
Yet.
And that had brought her back around to the ugly things Fiona had said Monday night. Should she go there now, try to get him to talk about the cruel old stories concerning who his real father might be?
Maybe not. They’d covered enough dangerous emotional territory for one day.
He added, “A wife should tell her husband everything.”
“Of course you would say that. You’re the husband.”
He caught the edge of her towel. She tried to hold on, but he wouldn’t stop tugging on it. With a low, nervous laugh, she let go. He peeled it back. Then he took the other side and peeled it back, too. When she tried to wrap her arms across her bare breasts, he shook his head. “Don’t.”
“You’re very bossy.” She put her arms down.
“I like to look at you. It was bad in London.”
“Bad? Why?”
“You weren’t there.”
Gratifying. Definitely. “So you missed me?”
He nodded. “I find I’ve grown accustomed to having you in my bed. I don’t like it when you’re not there...to look at. To touch.” He put his big hand, fingers spread, on her belly. “A little fuller, I think.”
She blew out her cheeks with a breath. “Yes. I’ll be fat as an old cow in now time.”
“You’re not the least old.”
“Oh, you...” Her hand was wedged between them. All it took was a twist of her wrist and she was tugging on his towel. It came undone.
“Careful.” He bent over her and pressed those wonderful lips to her stomach, right where his hand had been.
She sighed. It ended on a tiny moan. “We never talked...”
“About?”
“Being true...”
“Do you want us to be true?” He kissed the words onto her skin right over where their baby slept.
“Yes. I want only the two of us in this marriage—you and me. Nobody on the side.”
He opened his mouth, brushed her belly with his tongue, nibbled on her belly button. Pleasure shimmered through her veins, flashed across her skin.
She murmured, “I know we started all wrong...”
“There are worse ways to start.” He laid a sweet string of nipping kisses up over her ribs to her left breast.
She moaned again as he sucked her nipple into his mouth. “I want a real marriage, Rafe. I’m a Bravo-Calabretti after all. We marry for...” Love, she thought, but didn’t let herself say. She let a moan of pleasure suffice.
He sucked more strongly and did something amazing with his tongue. She closed her eyes. A thread of pleasure seemed to connect her breast to her core. Fire licked along that thread.
And then he stopped.
She moaned in protest and blinked up at him.
He gazed down at her, eyes low and lazy, soft mouth a little swollen, red from kissing her. “Just you and me, then,” he whispered. “No one else.”
“Good.” She lifted the hand that wasn’t tucked in between them and finger combed his thick, inky hair.
It hadn’t been so awful—not awful at all, really. To reveal an old secret. To find out what she needed to know. To come to a workable agreement between the two of them.
They should do that more often—and she intended to see that they did.
“Gen.”
“Um?”
He bent close and bit her chin. Lightly. “Did you miss me?”
“Terribly.”
“That’s what I like to hear. I think next time I go up to London, you’ll have to come with me. That way I won’t have to go to bed without you.”
“I might go with you.”
He rubbed his nose against hers. “You will.”
“Bossy, bossy, bossy. Just because I want us to be true to each other doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have time apart now and then. It’s healthy for a couple to have some separate interests.”
“You’re becoming very opinionated.”
She laughed. “You’re bossy. I’m opinionated. It’s good we found each other. Who else would have us?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got each other. And a workable agreement between us. And you missed me.” He kissed her. “Say it.”
“What?”
“You know what. Say you missed me.”
“I said it already.”
“Say it again.”
“I...I missed you, Rafe.” She breathed the words, a little bit raggedly, against his lips.
He eased his arm down with hers, between them. And he caught her hand and guided her fingers to the silky, hard length of him. “Now I want you to show me, Gen. Show me how much....”
