“You’re very quiet all of a sudden,” Neil said, moving on to the other foot.
“I was just thinking about how I always think, ‘this is the calm before the storm,’ when we’ve got something big coming up.” I shrugged. “I feel like, once this gala is over, then everything settles back down. But it doesn’t.”
“Life is a bit like that, I’m afraid. Always running from one thing that needs to be done, to the next.” He dug his thumbs into the arch of my foot. Sweet Jesus, but the man could turn my feet into mush. In a good way.
“Maybe, after the center opens and everything is on its feet, we could run away somewhere where nobody would come looking for us,” I suggested.
“Tahiti?” Neil suggested.
I shook my head. “I was thinking Reykjavík.”
“In February?”
“Hear me out.” We’d both grown up in brutally cold climates, so the winter wasn’t about to scare me away. “We can go to the house, hole up with a bunch of food that’s terrible for us, and not answer our phones for a few days. We don’t even have to tell your brothers that we’re in the city.”
“And, when they find out because you can’t resist putting a picture on Facebook, you’ll deal with that fall out?” Neil asked, arching a brow.
“Fine. I’ll just post to Instagram.”
His expression didn’t change.
I sighed. “We’ll work in a visit to them, too.” I didn’t mind Neil’s brothers, and I really liked their wives. Probably because they had, like me, married ridiculously wealthy men while coming from modest backgrounds themselves. It was nice to be around people who seemed grounded, especially when I found myself becoming less and less grounded every day.
“You just want me all to yourself.” Neil gave me his half-smile, the one that still stopped my heart every time I saw it. That simple expression could take me back to the airport the day we’d met almost nine years ago.
“I’m not sure you fully understand how sexy you are,” I said, holding up my hands as though I was helpless to resist him.
And, really, I was.
He lunged up my body, and I squealed a laugh, spreading my thighs around him.
“I didn’t really mean to do this tonight,” Neil murmured against my neck. “Are you up for it?”
“Are you?” Spontaneous sex had gotten a little more difficult after Neil had gone through chemotherapy. He took erectile dysfunction drugs—he was pretty defensive about me calling them boner pills, so I’d stopped doing that—but we generally needed half an hour’s notice for them to work. Then again, sometimes we didn’t.
“Ah. Good point.” He tilted his hips, pressing his erection against me. “I think we may be all right. I did get optimistic and took a pill after dinner.”
“Hmm.” I pretended to consider, then reached down to the waistband of my panties. I grinned at him. He peeled the cotton up my bent thighs, over my knees and down the rest of the way. I kicked my feet to help him, with a flurry of movement that seemed clumsy but felt as easy as if we’d done it a million times. We’d had sex a lot, but not that much, I was sure.
We didn’t bother with foreplay. We were both ready, and he sank into me in one easy slide. I tipped my head back and moaned. There were times when sex was all about the game for us. But, most of the time, we had moments like this. Silliness that devolved into sex, sex that became communication.
He buried his face in my neck and sucked a line of kisses along my throat. Braced above me on one elbow, he held my hip in his hand and rocked me in slow rolls of achingly sweet pleasure.
“There isn’t a single place on this Earth that I would rather be than inside of you,” he whispered beside my ear.
It was a good thing for him that I felt exactly the same way.
CHAPTER THREE
When I’d married Neil, I’d taken on a responsibility that I’d never considered. Nothing much about our lives changed, except that, now, I was expected to be a billionaire’s wife in the eyes of rich people society. Which was, as I always had suspected, a real thing and not just something made up for television. Rich people just seemed to know each other.
I stood in front of the trifold mirror in the dressing room of our Fifth Avenue apartment. We’d discussed selling the place several times, but we’d never really had the heart to part with it. It was a sprawling apartment at the most prestigious address in Manhattan, and while it might not occupy two floors and include a staircase modeled after the one on the Titanic—we had a very eccentric neighbor who frequently showed off her home in magazines—it was pretty damn impressive. It was also the place where Neil and I started out. Well, kind of. Technically, that had been at the Crown Plaza at the LAX airport. But the spot I occupied was the very place I’d realized I loved Neil.
The person I’d been back then
seemed very far away, now. For one, she’d been skinnier. I grimaced at my triceps. “Am I getting bingo wings?”
Neil made an impatient noise. He looked up from fastening his cufflink. “Stop it. Whatever part of your body you’re complaining about, just stop.”