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“You’re not the only person whose world ended today,” she threw at him. “In case you’ve forgotten, you didn’t discover this news at a garden party. That was my father’s funeral. And thank you for asking, but both of my parents, in fact, were less than thrilled about this. I had the distinct pleasure of telling them that I got pregnant from a tawdry one-night stand with a total stranger. That went over very well. My father called me a tart.”
“How can you possibly be a tart if the only man you’ve ever slept with is me?” Ares asked, and had no idea what that thing was that roared about in him. Almost as if he wanted to defend this woman against her own, dead father.
“I think it was the unmarried, pregnant, and no idea who the father was part that got to him,” Pia replied. “But then he died a few days later, so I didn’t get a chance to follow up on that.”
But Ares was still stuck on the fact that she had never touched another man.
Something kicked in him. Something that wasn’t the fact he had children coming, like it or not. Twins. Something that wasn’t all the ramifications of that he couldn’t quite face. Not quite yet.
Something that felt a good deal more primitive.
He moved toward her, watching the way her eyes widened. But better still was that little kick of awareness he could see flicker in all that solemn gray.
“No man but me,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, her voice shakier and much less calm than it had been a moment before. “That is correct.”
“You didn’t tell me that night.”
“Well. You know.” Her face was red. Even the tips of her ears were red. “It didn’t seem relevant.”
He prowled even closer.
“You went to an actual convent. Then a finishing school. And straight after that, you found me in an otherwise forgettable party in Manhattan.”
She looked as if she wanted to make a break for it, but stood fast. “That is the sum total of my life thus far, yes. Lucky me.”
“I remember you, Pia,” he said, his voice low and much too dark, and her eyes widened in response.
But he couldn’t seem to help that. Just as he couldn’t seem to help himself from reaching out and taking her chin in his hand.
As if she was his.
He expected her to jerk her face away from his hold, but she didn’t. And he watched, mesmerized—fascinated—as her pulse went wild in her neck.
Her breathing grew labored. But what intrigued Ares was that he could feel her, inside him. He could feel the kick. The heat. Like touching her was sticking his fingers into an electrical socket, sending sparks showering through him.
“I remember you,” he said again, intent and sure, and threaded through with all that electricity. “You flowed over me like water. No hesitation, no concern.”
“Perhaps I was significantly drunk,” she said, her voice tart, but he could see the softness in her gaze. The melting heat.
“No,” he said, remembering. “You were not.”
“Perhaps that’s what it’s always like. I assumed it was. All that...” Her cheeks pinkened even further. “Flowing.”
“No,” Ares said again, though he sounded too hot, too dark. “That is not what it’s like. Not normally.”
It had all seemed easy, to his recollection. As if they had been meant to meet like that, then come together in such a glorious, heedless rush. She had arched into his hands as if she’d done it a thousand times before. He’d found her mouth and the place where she was greediest, then tasted both. Her cries had broken over him as if it was a dance they’d practiced a hundred times. More. She had felt explosive in his hands. A glorious, greedy burst of light and sensation.
But more than that, he’d thought when he’d first surged deep inside her and she’d shaken all around him, familiar.
The word that had echoed in his head then was the reason he’d made no effort to seek her out afterward, no matter how often he’d thought of her since.
Home.
Ares, of course, had no home. He’d walked away from his kingdom and had no intention of assuming his throne. Any home he’d had, he’d buried with his mother.
Homes were for other men. Men who deserved them.
Men who were not poisoned with the blood of the Atilian royal family.
He ordered himself to drop his hand. To step back. To put more distance between him and this woman who had shaken him months ago, and here, now, might as well have been a full-scale tsunami.
But he didn’t let go the way he knew he should. And instead of stepping back, he moved forward.
“Perhaps we should test it,” he said.
“Test what?” She frowned at him. “The last time we tested something I ended up pregnant. With twins.”
