Chapter 19
NINETEEN
SADIE
“Sadie!” Gideon bellowed as I hurried out the front door and down the long drive. Guests were still arriving, lining up outside the front of the huge estate, and I was sure I would be the hot topic of conversation in town for weeks to come.
I didn’t care. I’d be gone, and I’d never be back. Coming here had been a mistake. Thinking I’d end up married and in love had been naive. Settling for a quiet life and some sort of arranged companionship had been misguided and ridiculous.
An arm snatched me around the middle, and then I was flying through the air.
Gideon spun me around, planted me on the ground, and turned me so I was facing him.
My heels stabbed the soft earth and sank in an inch.
He kept his arm around my back, fusing the front of his body to mine.
His chest heaved with every breath, his eyes burning as he stared at me.
“Let go of me,” I demanded. Humiliatingly, I followed it up with a sniffle.
“No.”
“No?”
His lips flattened. “No.” He tightened his hold on me, and I pushed my palms against his chest. It was like shoving a brick wall. Gideon grunted, then said, “Not until you listen to me.”
“Why should I?” I sounded petulant, and I didn’t care.
He lowered his face so all I saw were his eyes. Furious, dark eyes, holding me in their unbreakable spell. “Because you are my wife.”
The words echoed through me, vibrating in my bones. My bottom lip trembled. “Am I?” I spat out. “Maybe you should tell that to your ex.”
“You want to do this?” He backed away an inch, and I could breathe. But he didn’t let go. “You want to do this right now?”
“Were you with her that night?” The question burst out of me before I could stop it. A hot tear rolled down my cheek. I was so embarrassed I wanted to die, but now that the question had been posed, I had to know the answer.
Gideon stared at me, not understanding. “What night?”
“Our wedding night!” I screamed. I dropped my voice again, knowing there were people all around. “Were you with your ex on our wedding night?”
“What? No! I haven’t seen her in five years.”
I scoffed. “Let go of me.”
“Sadie.” Something in his voice made me stop struggling against him. When I looked up at him, the fury in his eyes had faded, and there was an edge of panic. Fear. “I wasn’t with Lenore. I wasn’t with anyone. Not—not like that.”
“So where did you go?”
“Portland,” he said.
My shoulders dropped, and I clicked my tongue. “You went to freaking Oregon and were back by morning?” Did he think I was stupid?
His lips twitched. “Portland, Maine, babe.”
I blinked. “Oh.” Maybe I was stupid.
“I’ll prove it.”
He stroked my cheek, catching a tear, then shifted a step back while keeping his arm around me.
We walked toward his car, and he put me in the passenger seat before getting behind the wheel.
He turned on the car, but instead of driving off, he pressed the screen on the console until “recent trips” showed up.
He’d gone to the Maine Medical Center in Portland. A two-and-a-half-hour drive.
I frowned at the screen, then at him. “Okay? Did you have an appointment in the middle of the night?”
He rubbed his jaw, his other hand kneading the steering wheel.
“Sometimes, I…” He gulped. Kept his eyes on the beam of the headlights shining over the trees behind the garage.
He rubbed his hand over his mouth, stretching his jaw before he continued, like he had to push the stress out of his body with physical effort.
“Sometimes I go to the burn unit,” he said, his voice full of gravel.
“The nurses aren’t supposed to let me in, but they know me.
I…sit there. With the patients.” His hand kept moving over the steering wheel, clenching, releasing, shifting, over and over again.
His body was made of tension. “When I was getting treatment for my burns,” he said, “I couldn’t sleep.
The pain and the discomfort and the drugs…
there was so much time where I just sat in that bed feeling like I was in hell.
So sometimes I go there, and I try to make it easier for the people who are going through what I went through.
That night, when I thought I’d pressured you into…
I needed to feel like I wasn’t a piece of shit.
” He let out a breath. Turned to face me.
“If you don’t believe me, we can drive there now and the nurses will vouch for me. ”
A breath slipped past my lips, and I shook my head. I felt unsteady, like I was balancing on a high wire suspended over a gorge. One gust of wind would make me fall. Blinking at Gideon, I tried to make sense of what he’d just told me. What it meant for him, for me, for us.
“I wasn’t with my ex, Sadie,” he said, his voice a warm, low rumble. “I promise.”
“I believe you,” I croaked. A wave of shame washed over me, bitter and familiar and suffocating. I couldn’t look at him, so I leaned my elbow against the doorframe and put my head in my hand. “I’m sorry. I just saw you put your arms around her, and I felt… She said… I thought…”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Memories assaulted me, dragging me down into the darkness.
“She just went through a divorce, and she just—she was crying. When you walked out, I hugged her, but it didn’t mean anything. I swear.”
She was a damsel in distress, and Gideon had been the big strong protector. That was familiar. God, I was a fool.
A warm hand slid over my thigh. Gideon, anchoring me to the here and now. His touch felt so good I wanted to cry.
I owed him an explanation. I marshaled my thoughts and wrapped whatever courage I had around myself. Then I lifted my head from my hand and faced him.
“My ex cheated on me,” I said. “So I’m…sensitive.”
Gideon’s hand tightened on my thigh, as if he’d spasmed at hearing those words. Slowly, he released his grip, his thumb coasting along the outside of my leg. “I see,” he said.
“He wanted to have an open relationship,” I said, the words coming out in a rush. “When I refused, he did it anyway. Hooked up with a woman who worked with him. The one he’d wanted to open the relationship for. And he said… He made me feel like it was my fault.”
I could taste Gideon’s confusion in the air. “Why would it be your fault?”
I scoffed. Leaned my head back against the headrest. Closed my eyes.
Might as well rip off the band-aid. I’d already made a fool of myself and probably ruined things with Gideon tonight.
He was the kind of guy who made a five-hour round trip to sit with burn victims in the middle of the night.
And he’d done it because I hadn’t been honest about my condition.
He’d felt guilty about forcing himself on me when the whole debacle had been caused by me being a fucking coward.
He wouldn’t want to be with someone so petty, jealous, and defective as me.
If he wanted to call off the marriage after this, it would be exactly what I deserved.
“I have a condition called vaginismus,” I said into the heavy silence of the car.
“It causes my pelvic muscles to tighten involuntarily. Sex is… I wouldn’t say impossible, but it’s close.
It hurts, so I don’t usually want to do it.
Henry wanted to open the relationship so he could get what he needed elsewhere.
The things I couldn’t give him. Maybe I should’ve agreed.
” I let out a bitter snort. “Maybe it’s the only way… ”
“Sadie.”
I gulped, watching the way his hand looked against the black fabric of my dress. His thumb still made slow sweeps over my outer thigh, his fingers splayed in a strong grip. My body was trembling so much that it took me long moments to realize Gideon’s hand was shaking too.
“Sadie, I need to ask you something,” he said quietly, “and I need you to be honest with me.”
I inhaled, nodding. “Okay,” I croaked.
“The night of our wedding, did you feel…” When he paused for long moments, I found the courage to look at him. He chewed the inside of his cheek, his eyes circling my face. He looked completely, unbelievably devastated. “Did you feel like you had to hook up with me? Like you had no choice?”
I let out a bitter huff and shook my head.
“That’s the thing,” I said, letting my lips curl into a humorless smile.
“I still want sex. I just can’t have it.
There was nothing forced that night. I wanted to hook up with you.
I was so turned on, but then you started talking about—about penetration, and I kind of froze.
And then you put your finger inside me, and—”
“I hurt you.” His voice was strained. Tortured.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was, Sadie. I fucking hurt you because I was too focused on how much I wanted you to even notice that you wanted to stop.” He swore and took his hand away from my thigh, leaving cold in his wake. He rubbed both palms over his face.
It took me a minute to register what he’d said. I was too focused on how much I wanted you.
My heart began to hammer. I sucked in a breath and tried to push down the knot of hope and despair and desire that tightened in the middle of my chest.
“You…you wanted me?”
He gave me a look of confusion. Disbelief. “Could you not tell?”
“It’s just…” I licked my lips. It was hard to speak, to put into words my deepest fears. I’d never had a conversation go like this. Usually, when I mentioned the vaginismus, men would ask me if it was permanent. I could tell they were thinking about what they’d be losing by dating me.
Not Gideon. He was upset that he’d hurt me. Actually, “upset” didn’t touch the sides of it. He looked anguished. Tormented. Which made no sense.
I gulped. He’d wanted me that night, but…“What changed?”
“With what?”
His confusion seemed genuine, but how could it be? I dropped my shoulders and frowned at him. “You’ve been avoiding me. You recoil whenever we touch.”
“I recoil?”
“You find me repellent.”
“What—and I truly mean this—the fuck?”
“Oh, give me a break, Gideon.” I shook my head, scoffing.
“I know I’m not some sort of catch, okay?
Especially with this.” I gestured in the general area of my vagina.
“But I know when a guy is interested. They don’t jerk back whenever they touch me.
They don’t go out of their way to avoid me.
They don’t run the fuck away when I’m naked and spread-eagled on the bed beneath them.
You are obviously not interested in me. Not that way. ”
He blinked at me, staring into my face like he was worried I was having a stroke.
Then he exhaled and sat back, like he’d come to a decision.
His voice was a low rumble in the car, vibrating in my bones.
“Before I tell you all the things I’ve been wanting to do to you since the moment I laid my eyes on you, I need you to answer a couple of questions. ”
Oh. Oh. Oh, my God. I had misread this situation severely. My throat was suddenly dry. “What questions?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your desire for sex?”
The question from the application. The one where I’d lied. My face flamed, and I tore my gaze away from his to stare out through the windshield. “Is this designed to humiliate me?”
“This is designed to figure out where the fuck we went wrong, Sadie. Answer the question.”
My heart had started beating harder at some point over the past few minutes, and now it thumped against my ribcage like it was trying to escape. “Ten,” I said in a raspy voice.
Gideon let out a short grunt. When he spoke next, it was all gravel. “So, just to be clear, on our wedding night, you didn’t tell me to stop because you touched my scars?”
I blinked, jerking my head to look at him. “What?”
“Your hand touched my shoulder, and suddenly you wanted to stop,” he grated. “I thought—I left because I thought you found me disgusting. And then I figured I’d forced you to go that far, and…”
I fought for my next breath, frowning at him. “No,” I said, the word exploding out of me. “No, I never felt that.”
“You wanted me to touch you, but you were worried about your body.”
“That’s right.”
He exhaled, leaning his head on the headrest as he closed his eyes. Seconds rolled by, slow as molasses.
“Are you okay?” I finally asked.
“I’m processing.”
“Oh. Do you want me to leave?”
He laughed. “No, babe. I don’t want you to leave.”
Something in the way he said it made me think he wasn’t just talking about getting out of the car.
Then his eyes opened. He turned to face me and said, “We need to lay it all out. All our cards on the table. Are we together? Like a married couple is supposed to be?” He swallowed thickly, then continued in a voice that was a little more strained: “Do you want something different? A partnership, without intimacy, like you said the morning after? What do you want?”
I stared into his pale blue eyes. The eyes of a man who sat with burn victims because he didn’t want them to feel as alone as he’d felt.
A man who dropped everything to help a cousin-in-law who’d run out of gas.
A man who was wracked with guilt over feeling like he’d pressured me.
A man who hadn’t hesitated to run after me, to hold me until I was honest with him, to listen without judgment.
He hadn’t turned away when I told him about the vaginismus.
Hadn’t said anything about the fact that we couldn’t have penetrative sex.
Hadn’t lamented the fact that I couldn’t meet his needs.
No—his first thought hadn’t been about his own needs at all.
He’d thought about me. He’d been worried he’d hurt me.
There was only one possible answer to his question.
“You,” I whispered. “I want you.”
GIDEON
She trembled beside me, looking tender and afraid, and I wanted to flay the skin off of my own flesh for hurting her. Find her ex and annihilate him. Tear the world apart and put it back together in the shape she most desired.
Anything—I’d do anything for her.