Marriage Without Love & More Than a Convenient Marriage?

But it wouldn’t be enough. He saw it in the way her lashes flicked to his expression and she read the direction of his thoughts. Rather than coloring in the pretty way he so enjoyed watching when he suggested a visit to her room, she paled a little and her lips trembled before she bit them together.

“You don’t...” Licking her lips, she looked to him with huge eyes that nearly brimmed with defensiveness. “You don’t expect me to fall into bed with you just because you’ve got a condom, do you?”

Expect it? The animal in him howled, Yes.

“It’s always been good, hasn’t it?” He bit out the words, perhaps a little too confrontational, but his confidence was unexpectedly deserting him.

She crossed her arms, shoulders so tight he thought she’d snap herself in half. “It’s always been fine.”

“Fine?” he charged, gutted by the faint praise.

She sent him a helpless look that made him feel like a bully.

“I can hardly deny that I’ve enjoyed it, can I?” she said, but the undertone of something like embarrassment or shame stole all the excitement he might have felt if she’d said it another way. “I just...”

“Don’t trust me.” He ground out the words with realization. It was an unexpectedly harsh blow. “Come on,” he said, holding out his hand before he lost what was left of his fraying self-control.

She stilled with guardedness. “What? Where?”

“Anywhere but this room or I’ll be all over you and you’re obviously not ready for that.”

A funny little frisson went through Adara as she took in the rugged, intimidating presence that was her husband. He held out a commanding hand, as imperious and inscrutable as ever, but his words had an undercurrent of...was it compassion?

Whatever it was, it did things to her, softening her, but it scared her at the same time. She was already too susceptible to him.

And his desire for her was a seduction in itself. Her insecurity as a woman had been ramped to maximum with everything that had happened, but things had shifted in the last twenty-four hours. She was looking at him, hearing him. His sexual hunger wasn’t an act. She knew the signs of interest and excitement in him. His chiseled features were tense with focus. A light flush stained his cheekbones—almost a flag of temper if not for the line of his mouth softened into a hungry, feral near smile.

Her body responded the way it always did, skin prickling with a yearning to be stroked, breasts tightening, loins clenching in longing for him.

Oh, God. If she stayed in this room, she’d beg him to be all over her, and where would that lead beyond a great orgasm? She didn’t know what sort of relationship she wanted with Gideon, but knew unequivocally she couldn’t go back to great sex and nothing else.

She moved to the door, not expecting him to fall in beside her and take her hand. A zing of excitement went through her as he enveloped her narrow fingers in his strong grasp. Stark defenselessness flared and she wanted to pull herself away. Why?

“It’s not that I distrust you,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as him while they walked down the stairs, her hand like a disembodied limb she was so aware of it in his. “I know you’d never hurt me. You can be stubborn and bossy, but you’re not cruel.” It still felt strange to speak her mind so openly, increasing her sense of vulnerability and risk. Her heart tremored.

“But you don’t trust me with who you are,” he goaded lightly.

Her hand betrayed her, wriggling self-consciously in his firm grip. He eyed her knowingly as he reached with his free hand to slide open the glass door on the back of the house.

An outdoor kitchen was tucked to the side of a lounge area. A free-form pool glittered a few steps away, half in the sun, the rest in the shadow of the house. The paving stones dwindled past it to a meandering path down the lawn to the beach. The grounds were bordered on one side by the vineyard and by an orange grove on the other.

“Swim?” he suggested as they stood at the edge of the pool staring into the hypnotic stillness of the turquoise water.

Working up her courage, she asked softly, “Do you trust me, Gideon?”

His hold on her loosened slightly and his mouth twitched with dismay. “I don’t wholly trust anyone,” he admitted gruffly. “It’s not because I don’t think you’re trustworthy. It’s me. The way I’m made.”

“The “it’s not you, it’s me” brush-off. There’s a firm foundation.” Disgruntled, she would have walked away, but he tightened his hold on her hand and followed her into the sunshine toward the orange grove.

“Would it help to know that I’ve been more open with you than I’ve been with anyone else in my life? Ever? Perhaps you learned to keep your feelings to yourself because you were afraid of how your father would react, but after my mother died, no one responded to what I wanted or needed. Even when she was alive, she was hardly there. Not her fault, but I’ve had to be completely self-sufficient most of my life. It shocks me every time you appear to genuinely care what I’m thinking or feeling.”

The sheer lonesomeness of what he was saying gouged a furrow into her heart. She might have a stilted relationship with her younger brothers, but they would be there if she absolutely needed them. She unconsciously tightened her hand on his and saw a subtle shift in his stony expression, as if her instinctive need to comfort him had the opposite effect, making him uncomfortable.

“You never talk about your mom. She was a single mother? Constantly working to make ends meet?”

His face became marble hard. “A child. I have a memory of asking her how old she was and she said twenty-one. That doesn’t penetrate when you’re young. It sounds ancient, but if I can remember it, I was probably five or six, which puts her pregnant at fifteen or sixteen. I suspect she was a runaway, but I’ve never tried to investigate. I don’t think I’d like any of the answers.”

She understood. At best, his mother might have been shunned by her family for a teen pregnancy, forcing her to leave her home; at worst, he could be the product of rape.