“I… I should do the dishes.”
Slowly, I shook my head, stepped close and put my hand on her still flat belly. “They’ll keep. How are you feeling?”
Eve looked down, put her hand on top of mine. “Fine.”
“You shouldn’t be riled in your condition,” I said.
She arched a brow. “Then how did Piper make it through nine months? She isn’t the most placid woman.”
Knox grunted. “We’re worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” she repeated.
“Not good enough,” I countered, turning my hand so my fingertips pressed on the top of her mound. “Amazing would be better. Incredible. Delirious.”
The corner of her mouth tipped up, her hips shifting into me subtly. I doubted she knew of the movement, but I knew. I knew every nuance of her. “I don’t feel any of that from speaking with Marina and Tara.”
“No, but you can feel that from your husbands claiming you,” Knox countered. He looked to me and I nodded.
A little whimper escaped her lips and my cock turned rock hard from that single sound.
“It’s time to make you ours,” I said. We’d taken her virginity, taught her the pleasures of her own body, how she could please us. Passion. We’d fucked in so many different ways, in almost every room of the house. And the mine office. But we’d yet to take her together. “Yes?”
She looked between the two of us, reached out for Knox’s hand. “Yes.”
Knox didn’t delay. He scooped her up into his arms, holding her close and very, very carefully as he carried her upstairs to his room and sat down on the bed with her in his lap.
I knelt down before her.
“We need to know if you’re still shaken by Marina and Tara.”
“I don’t want to talk about them. I want you both to make me forget,” she murmured, placing her palm on my chest, right over my heart.
“We’ll make you forget, sweets. We’ll make you forget your own name,” Knox vowed. “But answer Jed first.”
She shook her head against Knox’s chest, messing up her bun. “At first, I felt just like I always had when they confronted me,” she admitted. “Small and weak. Then I realized I had everything they told me I’d never have. A husband, a family. That’s why I became a schoolteacher, because that was the one job a woman could have that was respectable and not allow her to marry. If I couldn’t have a husband because of my job, then I didn’t have to feel bad about not getting one.”
God, I wanted to be able to go back in time and just grab her and hold her. Her logic was completely ridiculous, but so were the ideas her stepsisters put in her head.
“You were protecting yourself. Good girl,” Knox said.
“I like being a teacher. I do, but the need for it isn’t there.” She was looking down at Knox’s arm about her waist, her fingers idly swirling over the smattering of hair on his arm below the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. “I like helping the men with their reading, but I like being your wife more.”
“What about Marina and Tara?” I pushed, needing to have her talk out how she felt.
“I’m free of them. When the others stepped in and you came, I felt empowered. They can annoy me, just as they would anyone else they encountered, but they can’t bother me anymore.”
I reached out, cupped her cheek. “That’s right.”
She pushed up her glasses, a sign she was in control once again. “Can we move onto more pleasant things?”
“Just pleasant?” I asked, quirking a brow.
“Delirious, then.”
“As you wish,” Knox said, lifting her up to stand between us. I remained on one knee before her, helping my brother strip her bare.
“I… I wondered when you were going to do this,” she said as Knox lifted her chemise up and over her head.