I was too. “Tell me about your mother.”
He closed his eyes briefly to hide the flare of pain that turned them deep and soft as wet velvet. “My mother was an artist. It was how she met my father, Alain Sinclair. She was selling her paintings at a fair in the countryside outside of Nice. She left her family, her caravan, for him without ever looking back. I think they had known each other for only a few days when she took off with him.”
“Oh,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
It was a romantic story, a Frenchman falling in love with an exotic, artistic gypsy, but I knew it had a sad ending, one where Sinclair was orphaned at the age of seven. His mother’s abilities made it obvious where his love of art had come from so I wondered why he seemed to be so sensitive about her paintings.
Reading my thoughts, as he so often did, Sinclair explained, “My mother, Apolline, produced a lot of work, mostly nature inspired abstracts. When I had the means, I tracked down as many as I could. The one that hangs over the reception desk is the only one that I have real memories of. She painted it when she discovered she was pregnant. I remember her telling me that she had dreamt of permanency, of a home, a husband and a baby since she herself was a child but she always thought it was an impossible dream.”
“Hence the name, Dream Under Water,” I murmured, getting it.
He nodded.
I looked into his face, seeing the pain at the tight corners of his eyes and the strained press of his lips. Talking about this wasn’t easy for him, especially in front of others, but he wanted me to know him and he was making the effort to open up in a way I was sure he had never opened up before.
“Love you,” I whispered.
The tension in his muscles eased as he leaned forward to press a kiss into my hair.
“Toujours,” he whispered into my ear.
That night Sinclair told me we were too tired to play. I was definitely exhausted, from all the emotional upheaval, our two previous, rigorous rounds of sex, and jet lag. I also knew that I would never be too tired to play with Sinclair. I told him so, but he only smiled slightly before ordering me to get ready for bed.
“Have you seen my pill pack?” I asked, rummaging through my suitcase.
Candy had done an excellent job packing but of course she hadn’t included my back up pill packet and the one that I always kept in my purse had temporarily gone missing.
I looked up at Sin anxiously as he popped his head out of the bathroom to stare at me for a long moment before shaking his head.
“Putain,” I muttered under my breath, but he heard me.
“Is everything okay?”
“Yes, but if I can’t find it in the next day I need to find a clinic to get a refill. It’s dangerous to miss more than two days in a row.” I bit my lip. “If we want to be one hundred percent careful, we should probably use condoms until I can get this figured out.”
Sinclair frowned at me. “Do not be ridiculous, Giselle. You are mine now. What is the point if I can’t take you bare?”
I laughed, as he meant me to and decided that I would look again in the morning when I was less disorientated from a long flight and emotion exhaustion.
Happily, brushing my teeth beside my Frenchman, washing my face and moisturizing while he took a quick shower and then slipping into bed together in our pajamas was its own kind of distracting bliss. He wore charcoal grey drawstring pants that rode low on his narrow hips. They exposed those ridges of muscle that arrowed straight into his groin. I decided they were the best pants in existence and thought about asking him to wear them every day, all day. But then I thought of him in his three-piece suits and kept my mouth shut because those were incredibly sexy as well.
Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the fact that if I wanted to dictate his dress, I could because it was something women did when they had a man. They played dress up with him and for him. I was already planning my outfit for the next day when I would get a tour of the building site for the hotel they were constructing. I wanted to look good to the people we met with, because I was a reflection on Sinclair and I wanted them to be proud of me.
On that thought, I tipped my head up on Sin’s chest so that I could look at him. “I don’t really know much about you.”