“We are going to be faced with a lot of acrimony for making the decision to be together but I know we can get through it. And on the other side of all those obstacles, is a future where we belong to each other and we can have whatever life we want together. Mon amour pour toi est aussi plus grand que le monde.”
My love for you is bigger than the world.
It was. Our love was something colossal, so heavy and uncompromising that it ground to dust everything that stood before it. It had its own gravitational force, wrote its own law of physics and code of morality. It was separate from anything that had ever existed before us and would ever exist after.
How could I ever have thought it possible to walk away from him?
I walked over to the wall and gently unpeeled the sticky note, folding it before putting it in my pocket. Sinclair watched me, his anxiety like static in the air. My Frenchman wasn’t used to giving up power and I loved that he was doing it for me.
My feet carried me back to him as if on a cloud. I placed my hand firmly over his heart, felt the quick patter of his pulse, and smiled up at him.
“Too much?” he asked with a wry twist of his lips.
I canted my hips against him, moved his arms around my waist so that he was holding me. “Never.”
“I want to move in immediately,” he warned but his hands clamped over my hips and pressed me closer against him.
“Yes,” I agreed, licking at the pulse that was beginning to throb in his neck.
He groaned. “Should we christen our new bedroom, my siren?”
“Isn’t Meagan downstairs?”
He leaned back to look at me with cold, demanding eyes. “Does that matter?”
I shivered in anticipation. “No, sir.”
“Good girl.”
I wanted to spend the night in our new apartment but we didn’t even have a bed yet so Sinclair convinced me to go back to the St. Regis but he promised me that we could move in the very next week as long as I was okay with his interior designer decorating the place for us to expedite things. I’d never had my own home before so I was eager to leave my stamp on things but I understood Sin’s desire to rush, having a permanent place of our own lent our precariously placed relationship a stability that we both desperately wanted. So, Sin sent me Emma Meyers email and we were already communicating about color schemes and designs. I took a liking to her immediately, especially as she was originally from London and understood my desire for a European style home.
I looked up from the screen of my phone, drawn by the feeling of Sin’s eyes on me. He stared at me from over the thin sheets of the New York Times, his eyes aglow with love and the morning light filtering in through the windows. Even though we were in the States again, we still tried to have a coffee together every morning before heading out separate ways.
“What are you staring at?” I asked, playfully annoyed.
“The love of my life.”
Heat suffused my cheeks. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re almost unbearably romantic?”
He reached across the little table and brought my hand to his lips. I gasped when he bit one of my knuckles and then gently laved it. “I am unbearably greedy. I have finally captured my siren and I have no desire to let her go.”
I laughed, my heavy heart lightening under the bright light of his attention. “Careful, or you will spoil me.”
“Count on it,” he said with a wink as I got up to rummage through my tote bag for my birth control.
He watched me intently as I popped one in my mouth and swallowed it. I narrowed my eyes at him in question but he only shrugged one shoulder before returning to the paper.
It wasn’t until I sat down again and plopped my feet in his lap that he asked, “You really like the apartment?”
“I love it. In fact, I’m going to spend the morning at the gallery and then head over to meet Emma this afternoon. Are you sure you want me to go full steam ahead on the decorating?”
“Absolutely. Carte blanche as well.”
‘Sin…”
“I won’t argue about this. It will be the home of our future children one day, yes? So, it must be perfect. I’ll leave my card on the counter and I insist you use it for everything. Later today I’ll arrange it so you can have a card in your name on the account.”
Something fluttered in my belly but I bit my lip to quell the questions that bubbled up inside me. I had been so certain Sin didn’t want kids. Wasn’t it one of the reasons he and Elena were so ill suited?