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Hearing the edge in her voice, Aristo felt something unspool inside his chest. She looked uncertain. Teddie—who could stand in front of an audience and pluck the right card out of a deck without so much as blinking. He hated knowing that she had felt like that, that she still did.
When he was sure his voice was under control he said carefully, ‘Why do you feel like that?’
It seemed irrational: to him, Teddie seemed such a loving, devoted mother.
She shrugged. ‘My mom struggled. And my dad was...’
She hesitated and he waited, watching her decide whether to continue, praying that she would.
Finally, she cleared her throat. ‘My dad was always away on business.’ The euphemism slipped off her tongue effortlessly, before she was even aware that she was using it. ‘And my mom couldn’t really cope on her own. She started drinking, and then she had an accident. She fell down a staircase and smashed two of her vertebrae. She was in a lot of pain and they put her on medication. She got addicted to it, and that’s when she really went downhill.’
Even to her—someone who was familiar with the whole squalid mess that had been her childhood—it sounded appalling. Not just tragic, but pitiful.
Breathing out unsteadily, she gave him a tiny twist of a smile. ‘After that she really couldn’t cope at all—not with her job, or the apartment, or me...with anything, really.’
He frowned, trying to follow the thread of her logic, aching to go over and put his arms around her and hold her close. ‘And you thought you would be like her?’ he asked, careful to phrase it as a question, not a statement of fact.
She pulled a face. ‘Not just her—it runs in the family. My mum was brought up by foster parents because her mother couldn’t cope with her.’ Her lips tightened.
‘But you do cope,’ he said gently and, reaching out, he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘With everything. You run your own business. You have a lovely apartment and you’re a wonderful mother.’
Abruptly she pulled her hand away. ‘You don’t have to say those things,’ she said crossly, trying her hardest to ignore the way her pulse was darting crazily beneath her skin like a startled fish. ‘You can’t flatter me into marrying you, Aristo.’
Dark eyes gleaming, he leaned forward and pulled her reluctantly onto the bed beside him.
‘Apparently not. And I know I don’t have to say those things,’ he added, his thumbs moving in slow, gentle strokes over her skin. ‘I said them because I should have said them before and I didn’t. I’m saying them because they’re true.’
Releasing her, he reached up, his palms sliding through her hair, his fingers caressing then tightening, capturing her, his touch both firm and tender.
‘So could I please just be allowed to say them? To you? Here? Now?’
Teddie blinked and, lifting her hand, touched his face, unable to resist stroking the smooth curving contour of his chin and cheekbone. She felt her fingertips tingling as they trailed over the graze of stubble already darkening his jawline.
Somewhere in the deepest part of her mind a drum had started to throb. She wanted to pull away from him—only not nearly as much as she wanted to feel his skin against hers, to lean into his solid shoulder.
‘I suppose so.’
His thumb was stroking her cheek now. It was tracing the line of her lips and she could feel her brain slowing in time to her pulse.
‘Aristo...’ she said softly. The nearness of his drowsy, dark gaze nearly overwhelmed her.
‘Yes, Teddie?’
‘I don’t think we should be doing this.’
The corners of his mouth—his beautiful mouth that was so temptingly close to hers—curved up into a tiny smile. ‘We’re not doing this because we should,’ he said softly. ‘We’re doing this because we want to do it.’
Her stomach flipped over and she stilled, too scared to move, for she knew what would happen if she did. She knew exactly how her body would melt into his and just how intensely, blissfully good it would be.
But if she gave in and followed that beating drum of desire where
would it lead? She might consider herself to be sexually carefree and independent, and maybe with any other man she could be that woman. But not with Aristo. Sharing her body with him would be fierce and intimate and all-consuming. She knew she would feel something—and that would make her vulnerable, and she couldn’t be vulnerable around this man. Or at least not any more vulnerable than she already was.
And, whatever Aristo might argue to the contrary, when he talked about wanting to marry her again she knew deep down that what he was really thinking about was sex. Only, no matter how sublime it was, there was more to a relationship than sex—as their previous marriage had already painfully proved. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—go there again.
Yes, she wanted to touch him, and she wanted him to hold her, and she was fighting herself, torn between wanting to believe that they could try again and knowing it was an impossibility. Maybe in another life, if the timing had been different...
But Aristo was already her first love, her ex-husband and the father of her child. Did she really need to add another layer of complication to what was already a complex and conflicted relationship? And besides, she should be looking forward, not back, and that meant keeping the past where it belonged.
