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She was the problem.
And even knowing that, she wanted him.
In any way she could have him.
“There are many kinds of torture,” she said, which was perhaps unwise. She made herself smile when his dark brows rose. “Look at where we sleep every night. It’s a wonder we can rest at all, with all the things that must have occurred within those walls. You do know they call it the Spanish Inquisition, do you not? That’s for a reason.”
He laughed, surprising her, when everything within her felt dire and fraught. “And here I thought you slept untroubled by anything. I blame myself. I must dedicate myself to tiring you out.”
Sex, she thought again.Always sex.
It was really almost funny. Amalia had spent all those years dreaming of things like this each night. And now that she had him a thousand ways a day, she wanted...something else. Something more.
Not because the sex wasn’t good. The trouble was that it was earth-shattering. Life-altering.
But he pretended it wasn’t. He pretended it meant nothing.
When she could still remember too well how it had felt when he had openly adored her. When she had been so heedlessly, so recklessly in love with him and he had treated her as if she was rare and precious to him.
And there had been a little too muchnothingin her life lately. Finding out she was nothing, for example. Then being treated like she was nothing by the entire world.
Now, this. More nothing.
Amalia wanted, more than anything, to be something. To besomeone.
It didn’t matter who. She just wanted to besomeone, at last. And important in some small way to someone else.
And when she let herself think that, it seemed to take hold of her. It seemed to roll through her, marking her, shifting things around inside her. It made her understand, for better or worse, that it might be the one thing she wanted more than him.
“You’re looking at me strangely,” Joaquin said, and she wondered how long she’d been sitting like this. Staring at him and wishing things could be different. “It is as I thought. We are not meant to sit about making conversation, you and I. We have better things to do.”
“What if I set you a challenge?” Amalia set her delicate coffee cup down, with a decisive click of the cup against its saucer. “Just a small challenge.”
“To what end?” he asked, because he was always the businessman. He was all about angles and inroads, and the best possible way to get the most while giving very little.
She supposed she had always known that, too.
“There’s no end, Joaquin.”
She paused a moment, because she felt as if she was poised on a precipice, and not because this patio sat on the top of a cliff. Not because she could hear the sea against the rocks down below. But because of him.
He might think the time they’d spent together was a physical release, nothing more. Weeks upon weeks of it.
But she knew him. In ways she had never known another human being.
And she understood the world in a different way now, too. All the things she’d watched, or read, or heard talked about. All the ways that people interacted with each other, where sex infused everything. Looking forward to having it, wishing they had it, missing when they’d had it before. The world spun around and around the axis of sex, and it was impossible to think about it at all without realizing how profoundly it affected everyone who partook.
And yet men like Joaquin wanted to stand about and claim it meant nothing. That it was like going to the gym and getting a sweat going, if that.
Amalia fully comprehended that this was little more than a distancing attempt on his part. She even understood why. She had hurt him. He wanted to hurt her, and even better, keep from feeling anything for her again.
But she was here. She was taking part in all of this meaningless physical release with him. Joaquin might have thought that he could hide himself there. He couldn’t.
The fact was, physical intimacy was intimacy whether he liked it or not.
Bodies couldn’t keep up this kind of sustained connection without forming other connections, too. She wasn’t as naive as she’d been when she was twenty, thanks to him. So she knew that just because it was intimacy—emotional as well as physical, after all this time—that didn’t mean he was going to admit that they were having the relationship they were having.
It also didn’t mean she was required to pretend they weren’t.
