Chapter Twelve
The next morning Heather had the feeling she might be staring down wrath and retribution.
So it was a shock to wake up to find a tray of coffee and pastries on her nightstand. She was surprised that he didn’t look angry. Standing there, gazing down at her, half dressed and gorgeous. Last night had been intense. And given the way things often were between them, that was saying something.
“Get dressed. We’re leaving.”
And here it was. The other shoe was about to drop. He was going to distance himself again. Become her forbidding stepbrother, rather than her passionate husband.
“I’m taking you on a honeymoon,” he said.
She sat up quickly, letting her blankets fall away. “Excuse me?”
“I am taking you on a honeymoon. I did not stutter.”
“You didn’t. But that’s not anything that we talked about.”
“No. But things have changed.”
“I have an ultrasound appointment next week.”
“I’m aware. We discussed it. But we’re going to go to the Bahamas for a few days. I have a private island there.”
“Of course you do. Is that where you take other women?”
The look he gave her was long-suffering. “It is where other people often schedule luxury vacations, but it is mine, and I wish to use it, so I will.”
Of course, luxury vacationing was literally his industry. And her first conclusion had been one that let her rest on jealousy. Because it was comfortable, honestly.
“When I think about you with other women it makes me feral,” she said, slightly annoyed with herself that she had given him that much. But they were married now. Why should she be embarrassed? Why should she feel insecure? He was hers. The end.
“You’re like me,” he said, his tone grim.
“In what sense?”
“You already know.”
She marinated on that while eating, and on the drive to the airfield.
Then further on the plane. She was in love with him.
She knew that. She didn’t think that he did.
Nor did she think that he returned the feelings.
For as much as they felt in sync when it came to sex, when she talked to him she still felt like there was a wall up between them.
So whatever commonality he was assuming, she wasn’t going to make the same assumption. Not when she could still feel that distance.
“What made you decide on this?” She decided to ask that rather than continuing to push at something he didn’t seem to want to discuss.
“Things have changed. And you and I need to come to a firm agreement on how everything is going to work. When we’re back in our lives at the estate, I imagine that will be the time. We have months before the baby is born.”
“Are you taking me on a sex vacation?”
His dark eyes sharpened, a muscle in his square jaw leafing upward. “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not at all. I just thought I would make sure of what my expectations were. You don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight.”
“No indeed.” He was silent for a moment.
“I hope you’re prepared to do this. You’re the one who put us in this situation.”
“Oh, because I seduced you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You folded like a house of cards. Your resistance was futile, and hollow, I might add. No wonder you had to stay away from me.”
“We cannot be like this. Because here we are yet again, bringing knives and guns. When we should be endeavoring not to fight,” he said.
“I’m actually not trying to fight you. But I am pointing out that if you want to cast blame, you’re going to have to have a little bit of honesty. You didn’t want to resist this.”
“No. But I’m well aware of the potential cost,” he said.
“You don’t think that we’re going to have so much sex this week that we can burn it out of our systems?”
“No. But perhaps it will be less…knife-like.”
“What are you afraid of?” she asked.
He raised a dark brow. “I’m not afraid of anything. But I am wary. You and I have been adversaries far longer than we’ve been lovers. Somehow, we have to find a different way to be.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. It wasn’t all about the baby anymore. It was about them. Their relationship mattered. For the sake of it. Not simply for the sake of somebody else.
“What if we were happy?” she said. “What if we had a lovely relationship, and great sex?”
He laughed, dry. “What a lofty and valiant goal. That is what I would like. But look at the state of the world.”
“You’re very cynical for a man born into money.”
“Only because I know that money doesn’t fix every problem. Because I know how toxic people can be with one another regardless.”
When they touched down on his island, the first thing that captured her imagination was the blue.
The ocean was so clear, so vivid. Even in the deepest parts, as they were descending she could see flying fish as they rose to the surface and glided up out of the water, and then as they moved over the shallows, she could see stingrays floating like underwater birds, slow and peaceful.
The sand was bright white and smooth, the nature pristine and undisturbed.
“The house is stocked for our arrival. All of our meals are prepared. No one will disturb us here.”
“Oh.”
She got off the plane, and he gestured to a waiting car.
He drove them both away from the airfield, and to the center of the island, to the place with the highest elevation, which wasn’t much on the relatively flat plain.
But they could see over the trees, down to the beach.
The house itself was all glass and stone, letting all the beauty of the island in, with no need for privacy, since they were the only inhabitants.
The high ceilings had skylights, letting in the warmth from the sun, and probably offering fantastic views of the stars at night.
She drifted from the entryway into the kitchen, which had black stone slab countertops, with a large platter set in the center, filled with sliced and gloriously arranged tropical fruits. “There’s no one here?”
“No.” He turned and looked behind him, and they could both see the jet they had come in on taking off.
“We are the only people on the entire island.”
She nodded, and dropped her purse down to the floor. Then she took off her shirt, her skirt and everything else.
“We don’t need clothes then, I guess.”
She knew she had him then.
His smile turned wolfish, and whatever reserve he’d been trying to keep was gone entirely now.
“I don’t suppose we do.”
The days passed in the loveliest haze. Time, status, reality had no meaning.
There was no discussion about the future.
No attempts at reasoning out what they had between them.
They didn’t talk about the past. They didn’t talk about the future.
They were in something like an eternal present, which was definitely different. And lovely in its way.
It also gave her even more of a chance to know him.
Just as he was. Not just the difficult things in their past, the way that it related to her.
Not the ways in which they had hurt each other and the why.
But what he was interested in now. Though she found herself feeling curious about other things.
She should let sleeping dogs lie. The sleeping dogs being his past physical relationships.
But she felt raw about them. And this felt like a safe space.
It wasn’t the estate, where so many memories, so many unkind words that had been exchanged between them hung in the air.
It wasn’t his turf in London, or hers in New York.
This was a liminal space where everything seemed just a little bit kinder.
They were Adam and Eve here. Unburdened and unashamed.
She was lying out in the white sand, and he was walking out of the crystal clear water, naked.
The water glistened on his body, his muscular chest, his thighs—thick and defined, and so sexy she was developing a new fetish.
She wouldn’t have said that she was into men’s thighs. But now she was quite corrected.
“What kinds of relationships have you had?” she asked, staring at him from her lounging place in the sand.
He looked down at her and pushed dark hair off of his forehead, water droplets flowing down his forearm, through the valleys created by his muscles.
“I don’t live in your head, Heather. You are going to have to give me some context.”
“I was a virgin,” she said. “And yes, some of it was that every time I considered having sex with a man, I imagined you bursting through the door and pulling him off of me. But then at a certain point I just imagined you. It kept me from ever having a sexual relationship. I feel slightly wounded that I didn’t have the same impact on you. ”
He made a dismissive noise, and she bristled.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I have no desire to fight with you. By the time I noticed you as a woman, I was no virgin. I was seventeen. And so, I already had experience. Also, I determined that I was never going to touch you.”
“You did a bad job at that.”
“Yes, thank you. I am aware of that.”
“What were your relationships like? Have you ever been in love? It’s easy for you to know my history. But I don’t know yours. That seems stunningly unfair.”
“I’m sorry that it seems unjust to you.” He was silent for a moment.
And then he sat down beside her in the sand, his proximity taking away some of her irritation.
Some of her anger. It was funny how it used to be the opposite.
But now that she could touch him when she wanted to, she didn’t feel quite so much negative energy around him.
She felt close to him. Which was unexpected.
“I knew that I was never going to fall in love,” he said.
“And I was always very up-front with my lovers about that. I can have any woman I wanted. Except for you. And I think that might’ve tempered some of my activity.
I might’ve been a monster otherwise. But there was always tension.
The knowledge that there was a woman out there that I wanted more than the one that I was with. ”
Her stomach went tight. “But you knew you would never fall in love?”
“No. I know that I can’t.”
“Why not?” Her mouth was dry, her heart sore.
Because she loved him. She did. She had.
And he was telling her that he couldn’t.
This man who had captured so much of her for so many years was telling her he had always known he couldn’t love.
He wanted her. But just a bit more than all those other women.
And she supposed that she should be thankful for that?
That she should be flattered? But that wasn’t the word. No.
Flattered was not the word. “Because I know how it looked on my mother. And I know… It has the capacity to be such a toxic thing. It simply isn’t something I would ever willingly subject myself to. Or anyone else. I made a decision a long time ago that I was never going to put anyone through that.”
“So they were meaningless to you.”
He nodded. “Yes. They were.” He looked at her directly. “You don’t need to be jealous of women that I’ve already forgotten.”
“How would you feel if I had a long list of ex-lovers?”
He practically bared his teeth. “I would want to hunt them down and kill them because they had seen you naked.”
“Then don’t begrudge me my own feelings of being feral over the women that have seen you.”
“But no one has shared a bed with me all night. And no one has stayed on a private island with me. And certainly no one else has ever had my baby.”
“I’m your wife,” she said. Because she couldn’t say that she loved him. She just knew she couldn’t. Not after this. But she could remind him that she was his wife. That she mattered to him. That what they had was special. Unique. Not like what he had shared with anyone else.
“You are my wife. And it is not enough for us to satisfy each other for an evening. We have to make this work for a lifetime.”
Yes. Forever. She didn’t need to worry about it.
She didn’t need to push him. They had forever.
He was right. And one thing that she knew about herself and Romeo was that they could hang onto something for more years than most. They had already had this obsession for years.
Surely they could continue defeat it. Cultivate it.
School it into something better, nicer. “Yes,” she said. “We have forever.”
They had already made it this far. There was no telling how much further they would be able to make it.
But only if she gave him the time that he needed.