She was the first to leave, anxious to get to her training session on time, she said, tilting her head over her phone as she left without looking back.
His mobile vibrated. He took his eyes off her and pulled out his phone to glance at the screen.
What was that? her text asked.
He grinned.
The first of three square meals, he thumbed into his keypad, inordinately pleased to flirt with her this way. I don’t want you going on strike.
Who can I expect at lunch?
Who do you want?
Her reply took a few minutes, then, Just you.
He began to breathe again.
Meet me in our suite.
* * *
“I feel so Parisian,” Natalie said as she put herself together, one eye on the clock ticking toward the end of her lunch hour. She was pretending her attack of insecurity this morning hadn’t happened, and he seemed to be going along. “Meeting a man in a hotel in the middle of the day is very French, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done it.”
“Met a man?” She laughed, pausing before applying her lip gloss to sit on the edge of the bed instead. “A woman, then.”
He came up on an elbow, the sheet tangled around his hips, his physique seeming sculpted by an old master. His kiss was lazy and lingering, but he searched her eyes, making her drop her gaze.
“Are you embarrassed to be doing this, Natalie? Ashamed?”
“No,” she said, but even she heard the not quite tagged on to the end. The clock was ticking. No time to search out the words to explain how she was betraying a part of herself. “Are we meeting here tonight?”
“Would you rather go out?”
She shook her head, feeling foolish for her stricken neediness this morning when she’d wished for a moment that she was the only woman he’d ever known. When she’d wished she was the type to expect the best and had every right to receive it. When she’d wanted to be someone he found hard to please but longed to anyway.
It had been a silly moment of conditioned anxiety for a man to complete her when really she knew that was the real fantasy. Her father hadn’t stuck around to help her mom. Her own husband had never really been there for her. If she sometimes yearned for someone to walk through life with her, to be there when Zoey was grown and spreading her own wings, well, maybe she’d look for that companion in twenty years.
Right now, this was enough. She had a gorgeous man showering attention on her, even if it was just physical. The here and now was pretty damned good. You had to embrace these things, even if they weren’t perfect. That was what she’d learned from her brother. Merely having a good day was a gift. Take it and run.
And Demitri made her day so good. When he rolled her beneath him late that night, she was still trembling and damp with having taken her fill of him, but she was glad it wasn’t over. He was still hard inside her, his body primed with tension.
“My turn,” he said, closing his arms into a tight cage around her. “But that was insanely hot, watching you lose it like that on top of me. I don’t have much control left. This might get rough.”
“Okay,” she said dreamily, hugging her quivering thighs to his hips, surrendering herself utterly to his control.
He groaned out a curse and clenched his hands on her shoulders. “Except I want to stay like this, so aroused I’m going to snap. What are you doing to me, Natalie?”
“Can’t last to take me with you?” she teased.
A feral light came into his eyes, and when he moved, he wasn’t rough, but he was deliberate and thorough, thrusting deep and driving her inexorably along the path he was taking. It was almost too intense to bear, but soon she was gasping, “Don’t stop. Please, I’m so close.”
“Now, damn it. Now.”
He did get rough at that point, and she encouraged him, eyes open but vision white as they shattered together, crying out with jagged ecstasy while they turned over and over in the abyss of pulsing pleasure. The waves of joy went on forever, holding them in a paralysis of tense and clinging rapture, only fading enough for their hold on each other to relax, but they were still locked tight, his weight upon her, both of them weak, breaths uneven, hearts still pounding hard against the other’s.
Dimly she grew aware that she wasn’t going to get her breath back as long as he stayed on top of her, but she didn’t care. He was sweaty and heavy, and her hip was cramping, but she didn’t want to move.
“I’m a little bit afraid you’re going to kill me, Demitri,” she finally whispered, only half joking. This intensity between them put her utterly at his mercy.
He snorted and shifted half off her, sliding a lazy hand up to cradle her breast. “I’ve been thinking the same thing about you since that first night.”
That made a funny bubble of optimism lift her heart, but she quickly ignored it. Turning her head, she kissed him once. More of a quick nip.
“Seriously. I have to eat. That croissant at lunch was not a meal,” she complained.
He groaned as he rolled away from her. “You are so demanding. If you recall, I offered to take you out to dinner this evening, but you chose to jump my bones.”
She had, and she didn’t feel like dressing to go out now. They wore hotel robes on the sofa and ate picnic-style food he’d ordered this afternoon: cheese and bread, pickles and caviar, wine and strawberries.
Tell him, she thought, feeling close enough to risk it, but tested the waters first by asking, “You have two nephews, don’t you? Do you spend much time with them?”
“And a niece.” He paused, gaze drifting into the distance while a darkly introspective look came over his face. “But that’s a long story. One I don’t even know how to tell. And no. I have as little as possible to do with them.”
Her heart dropped. “Really? You don’t like kids?”
“I don’t think they’re a scourge on the planet that needs to be wiped out. But I don’t...” He scowled again. “I honestly didn’t think any of us wanted kids. I knew Adara was trying, but I thought she was just buckling to pressure from our father. He wanted an heir. I didn’t think she genuinely wanted a baby. Realizing she did... And then Theo turning up with one. I was downright stunned. Worried even, because—”
He rubbed a hand down his face, stopping himself from continuing.
“Because?” she prompted, curious, especially when he revealed a flicker of conflict, something like remorse.
He shook it off. “Family skeletons. He’s turned out to be a better father than I could have imagined, but it’s been an adjustment for me. Suddenly I’m supposed to be this involved uncle and I have zero interest in the role. I will never be like them. Why? Are you dreaming of picket fences?”
There was a cool warning underlying his question that made her smile flatly. “I did at one time,” she admitted. “But my father left my mom and my ex...” She sighed with all the dispirit he’d left her with.
“Did he hurt you?” His tone shifted to something that was both warmly protective and chillingly dangerous.
“No,” she assured him. “Well, with his thoughtlessness. He’s pretty self-involved, but he’s actually...” A good dad. Not a great one. Discipline and structure weren’t in his vocabulary, but Zoey knew without a shred of doubt that she was loved to bits, and that counted for a lot when love for his daughter had failed to keep Natalie’s own father in the picture.
“My mother-in-law says we have to respect Heath’s energy. That we’re all on our own journey.” She rolled her eyes, but then grinned with affection as she thought of Heath’s mom. If she couldn’t have her own mother, at least she had the best possible surrogate. If she’d had to leave Zoey solely in Heath’s care for three weeks, she wouldn’t have come, but Zoey’s connection to her grandmother was special and deserved to be nurtured and reinforced. “He actually has a very nice family. I think that was what I was really marrying. His mother is a foster mom and takes in every stray orphan that happens by. I was in a pretty bad place, having just lost my brother when I started dating Heath. She was there for me after Mom died, too, so I can’t hate him when he’s the reason she’s in my life.”
“Very magnanimous.”
“I try. But in answer to your question, no. Remarriage is not something I’m aspiring to.” Especially with a man who had such low interest in children. “If you give someone the power to make you happy, you give them the power to make you unhappy. I don’t want to be unhappy. So you’re safe,” she said, swallowing disappointment that she couldn’t even talk about her daughter. She missed Zoey more and more each day.
Not that she’d be sidestepping that topic much longer. Tomorrow would be their last day—and night—together.
Except, unbelievably, it wasn’t.
* * *
“What are you doing?” Demitri asked, emerging from his shower to find Natalie dressed in sweatpants and a slouched hoodie with a maple leaf on the front.