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CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘THEREHASN’TBEENanything new about us online today,’ Carrie mentioned, taking a bite from her meal as they ate dinner on the veranda, the sun setting behind them.
Bathed in the dying rays of light, her black hair shone and her eyes danced with colour, and Damon ached for the moment when he would lead her inside, tease her from her clothes and tumble her onto the bed.
‘I noticed. I told you they would move on.’
‘I guess that means we’ll be going home soon, then?’
Damon faltered at the question. He hadn’t given any thought to returning home. He’d been too busy enjoying Carrie and the intimate routine they’d established in their hideaway to give any consideration to leaving. And as her question rolled around his mind the thought of returning to reality was an uneasy one.
‘We could... Although I have another idea.’ He thought quickly, the plan taking shape in his mind with such ease that he couldn’t halt his smile. ‘Come to Paris with me.’
‘Paris?’
‘Yes. I have a few meetings arranged, but I don’t need to work the whole time, and there’s Jean-Pierre’s daughter’s wedding at the chateau. It could be fun to go back there together,’ he coaxed.
Carrie watched him, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. ‘You really want me to go with you?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he replied, realising as he gave the assurance just how badly he did want her company.
A happy blush rose in her cheeks. ‘I’ll call Marina and my grandmother, and if they’re happy to cover for me at the bakery for a little while longer, then, yes, I’ll come to Paris with you.’
Three days later they were back in the City of Light, and Damon felt an unexpected pleasure in returning to the city where his connection with Carrie had been forged and their child had been conceived.
With the combination of jet lag and her pregnancy fatigue Carrie was exhausted when they arrived, so Damon insisted that she remain at the penthouse and rest whilst he attended his meetings. She laughed at his overprotectiveness, then agreed, and he parted from her reluctantly with a long kiss. But his concern for her meant that more than once during his meetings his mind strayed to her.
He returned to the penthouse to check on her mid-afternoon, when he had a short break in business, and was relieved to see the colour had returned to her cheeks and the dark crescents beneath her eyes were fading. By the following morning Carrie was back to her bright, energetic self, and after an early breakfast meeting Damon happily devoted the rest of the day to her.
Life was different with Carrie at his side. It was fuller, brighter. It had never occurred to him that he was missing out on something extraordinary by not sharing his time and his space with someone, but she filled gaps in his life and within himself that he hadn’t known existed. With her, he saw a different way to be, a different way to live. He’d reconnected with his family because of her. He had faced those awful traumatic memories and felt their power over him lessen. She was light and air, breaking up the darkness that had surrounded him, and with her he focused on the good, dwelling less and less on the past and feeling less burdened because of it.
His feelings for Carrie had deepened and grown so substantially that increasingly Damon caught himself contemplating the future, looking ahead to when they would be joined by their little one with excitement running through his veins and a smile on his face.
But even as that sense of pleasure grew, a corresponding unease stacked in his stomach. The Caldwell deal winner would be announced any day, and Damon’s certainty that vengeance was the right—theonly—thing had slackened. He’d been unable to forget what he’d learned about Sterling Randolph. Those facts surfaced in his mind randomly, but always with the same prodding at his conscience, and then he’d look at Carrie and the stab would pierce even deeper.
He’d always looked towards the day of the Caldwell announcement as a day of triumph for him and a day of reckoning for Sterling, but Damon was starting to wonder if it would be his own day of reckoning instead...
As Carrie emerged from the bedroom Damon turned from his contemplation of the city below them and the look that filled his eyes threatened to unbalance her. No one had ever surveyed her with such unrestrained appreciation and appetite, and even though her first thought when she’d appraised herself in the mirror that morning had been that she looked beautiful, Carrie had attributed that to the hair and make-up experts who’d readied her for this exclusive wedding so she didn’t tire herself. But the way Damon was looking at her made her feel as though it was far more than that. That in some way she was essential to him.
‘You’re ravishing.’
He smiled with a wolfish curl of his lips, leaving her in no doubt that he was envisaging all the ways he would like to ravish her. Carrie made a mental note not to let him touch her before they were out through the door, because given how turned on she felt under his heated attention, and how sensational he looked in his tuxedo, it was unlikely she would be able to resist. It was also entirely possible she would be the one to drag him to the floor and set about tasting every inch of his body.
‘And you’re mine.’
‘All yours,’ she breathed, melting beneath his words and feeling in that moment how very much she did belong to him, how she ached for him to be unequivocally, officially hers.
When he surveyed her with so much delicacy and awe, and uttered sentiments like that, it made her believe that was what he wanted too. But the truth was she just didn’t know.
The future Damon saw for them, if any, was a mystery, and Carrie was too scared to ask. Her mind was alive with hopeful fantasies of the life they could share together—beautiful and blissful visions of family and love and laughter—but the memory of past disappointments was never far away. And although Damon had opened himself up to her, and given her reasons to believe in him, she found it a struggle to trust entirely. Especially when sometimes it felt as if he was still holding things back.
He’d unburdened himself about his father, but in certain moments he still seemed to carry leaden thoughts that cast his whole expression in anguish. When she asked him he’d tell her it was nothing, but Carrie was certain she could detect turmoil in him, and she was afraid it was about them...that even with the best of intentions the thought of a future with her—a Randolph—was too much to overcome.
Worries like that should, she knew, give her pause for thought, but it was hard not to want everything with Damon when their child’s heart beat in her body, and when every time she thought of their child, or looked into Damon’s burnished gaze, she was aware of how much of a capacity for love she had.
And those desires of her heart only grew larger in her mind later, as she watched the wedding at Chateau Margaux. As she watched the bride and groom clasp each other’s hands, stare lovingly into each other’s eyes and pledge their eternal and unfailing love to each other. With tears shining in her own eyes, Carrie knew she wanted exactly that. She’d always yearned for that kind of love, and ever since Damon had come into her life she’d longed for it with him.
It was all she could dwell on as they moved from the ceremony into the celebrations.
