His eyes were glazed as she knelt down beside him.
“You need to sleep, Nik.”
“I can’t.”
Her chest tightened at the haunted look on his face. She took his hands in hers. “I know you consider this your responsibility. I know you are angry at yourself for letting Idas make a fool of you. But you negotiated the release of those men. You sent them home to their families, Nik. Now you need to get some rest so you can deal with this tomorrow.”
“Five men died today,” he rasped. “More will follow if I don’t handle this correctly.”
“Many more will follow if you don’t get some rest and get your head on straight.” She shook her head. “I know it’s painful to lose those men. But this is what you do. You make the tough decisions so the rest of us don’t have to. But you can’t do that if you’re beating yourself up over a mistake, if you’re too tired to think.”
He turned his gaze back to the floodlit gardens. She knew what he wanted, but she wasn’t leaving him alone.
She slid onto his lap. His face tightened. “Sofi´a—” She pressed her fingers to his mouth, took his hand and guided it to her stomach. To what had woken her. She thought maybe the baby had gone back to sleep when there was no movement beneath their fingers for a good five seconds. Then the kick came, fast and powerful.
Nik’s eyes widened. The baby kicked again.
“This,” she said to him, “is what you are doing this for. For your child. So that he or she will know the freedom your great-grandfather fought for. Stay the course, Nik.”
His gaze lost its glassy look, dark emotion filtering through it as another kick came. “Sofi´a—”
She cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. Deep and slow and soulfully to banish the demons. He lifted a palm to cup the back of her head, returning the kiss with a hot fervor that told her she’d broken through.
She kissed him until they were all each other could see. Then he picked her up, wrapped her legs around him and carried her inside.
He laid her on their bed, stripped off his boxers and followed her down. Her heart pounded as he positioned himself between her legs, his heavy thighs parting hers. She closed her eyes, bracing herself for the explosive power of him because she was ready for him, always ready for him. Instead he worked his way down her body, lingering over the tiny swell of her stomach, waiting for another kick to come. Absorbing it with a reverent press of his lips, he moved farther down, between the heat of her thighs. His mouth found her most sensitive skin, laved her, licked her until she was crying out his name, begging for him.
Covering her with his heavy body, he sheathed himself inside of her in one powerful movement that stole her breath. The need to forget, the need to cleanse himself of what had happened chased their coupling. She wrapped her thighs around him and brought his mouth down to hers with fingers that cupped his head. He murmured her name hoarsely into her mouth as he plunged inside her again and again until there was only them, as deeply connected as two human beings could be.
Nik clasped her hips in his hands, angled himself deeper and took her hard and fast until his big body tensed and he came in a violent explosion of pleasure that rocked them both, Sofi´a’s release coming quick on its heels.
Cradling her to his chest, Nik rolled onto his side, his palm on her belly. She curled into the heat of his body. Then there was only the sound of his deep, even breathing.
I need you to remember that when things get crazy. When it feels like we are surrounded by a force far greater than us. We can do this.
The promise Nik had made to her in Evangelina filled her head. They were in the center of the storm now, just as he’d predicted. Now they had to find their way out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NIK ROSE EARLY the next morning, his meetings with the Executive Council on the Carnelian situation slated to start at eight and go late into the day. In the dim light slanting its way through the windows, he pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt.
His head throbbed from the whiskey he’d consumed; his body ached from far too little sleep. He’d hoped by shutting his eyes for a few hours, the images of the five dead crewmen being carried off the rescued ship would stop torturing him, but they had been burned into his brain. He might be only the figurehead leader of the military, but he had done the training, knew the classic tenet that had been drilled into their heads as soldiers: sacrifice for the greater good. But the thought of returning those men home to their families in a box wasn’t an emotion he’d been trained to process.