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Not some giddy, heedless, selfish emotion.
A steady, abiding, rock-solid feeling of caring. For this woman. For everything she’d given him. Shown him.
What did it mean? Now that he’d broken all of his rules, what had he become?
What would they become... together?
Chapter 28
She awoke from a dream of having his arms around her, to find that his arms were around her, blanketing her, keeping her warm from the night air.
They’d left the balcony door open.
She rolled out from under his heavy arm. Shivering, she walked across the room on bare feet and closed the door. She went to the washroom and relieved herself. Washed away the soreness between her legs.
She tried not to disturb him as she lifted his arm and nestled back into his chest, but he started awake, his heart beating beneath her ear.
“Are you awake?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Moonlight slanted across the bed. They hadn’t pulled the curtains because there was nothing but the wide sea beyond the balcony doors.
He tucked her head into the hollow of his shoulder, stroking her hair. “How do you feel? Not too sore?”
“A bit.”
Her heart hurt a little bit as well. Because reality was beginning to intrude again. She’d given her body to him, and he’d stolen her heart in the bargain.
This wasn’t going to end well.
“I can feel your thoughts going to a dark place,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” She smiled up at him.
“Would you like me to tell you a story?” he asked.
“That would be nice.”
She expected him to say something funny, a story about P.L. rabbit. Something to make her smile. She gathered her strength to oblige him. To laugh and make a joke and pretend everything was wonderful and there would be no tomorrow.
No reckoning.
“My father was a drunkard,” he began. “And by that I mean he drank nearly a half bottle of whiskey or brandy every single day. He was a pleasant enough man during the daytime, until the poison saturated his gut. Every night he transformed into a monster.”
This wasn’t the story she’d expected. Mari held still in his arms, hardly daring to breathe.
He kept stroking her hair, his voice growing deeper, rougher, more jagged with emotion.
“When he was deep in his cups, he hit my mother. He hit me. He never hit India, thank God.”
“Oh Edgar,” she whispered against his neck. “Why do people do such terrible things?”
“It was the drink... and this great sadness and emptiness inside of him, that he couldn’t escape, no matter how much whiskey he drank.”
She listened to his heart beating, to the words he wasn’t saying.I was scared. I was scarred.
“We lived in fear, by his whims, his great rollicking highs and his evil, mean lows. That’s why it hurt so much when you accused me of being the same way. That everyone in my household lived by my whims.”
