25. ARIES
25
ARIES
B y the end of the first day, I’m half-roasted and my pale skin is burnt. Apparently even factor 50 isn’t enough to protect me, and added to the fact I lost track of time playing with Lucie and Kate in the pool, my shoulders are an unhealthy shade of red. I’ve slathered myself in aloe vera.
I’m not sure how it will work out as the week goes on, but today I ate early with Lucie. The rest of the family, including Charlie, are having a later dinner.
It’s awkward, but I have to remember I’m not a guest on this boat; I’m a member of staff. They’re kind to me, Matt’s brothers and Kate, but I’m not really with them. Matt might have fucked me senseless, but the line between family and staff is heavily marked, and everything about this holiday makes me feel it intensely.
I’m lying on my bed reading. Lucie’s asleep. A knock on the door breaks the silence. I sit up and check the time. Eleven thirty.
“Aries?”
My heart hitches at the harsh whisper of my name. It sounds like Matt, but it can’t be. I consciously try to tamp down my excitement. The crushing blow when I found Charlie outside earlier isn’t something I want to repeat.
I get up and open the door.
Matt stands on the threshold, large and handsome in his navy shorts and casual white linen shirt. He leans against the open frame, dominating the space, looking me over.
The tension hits me like a wall.
“Hi,” I say, my voice already breathless.
His gaze, so heavy and lust-filled it strokes like a fingertip, drops to my mouth before he drags his eyes back to mine. “I made a mistake.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I can’t quit. I’m fucking addicted to you, and the withdrawal symptoms are killing me.”
My heart feels like it’s about to burst. I’ve never heard such wonderful words in my entire life. Matt rakes his teeth over his bottom lip, and all the blood in my body pulses to my pussy. He must know it because with one step he’s in my tiny room, his arms around me, shunting the door closed with his foot.
His kiss is desperate, and my own desperation rises to meet his, crashing against it with every harried brush of tongue against tongue, lip against lip.
Wetness floods from my core, soaking the gusset of my tiny shorts. My body is oh-so-ready for this man, like I’ve spent the last few days waiting for this moment. I can feel the hard length of him against my hip as his fingers tease at my pyjamas.
“I’ve missed these ridiculous shorts,” he says, sliding his fingers over my exposed arse cheeks, “but I’ve missed what’s underneath more.”
I should be questioning him, but I don’t. I want whatever he’s willing to give me too much to risk saying anything that might put him off.
I wriggle out of my shorts and no sooner than they’ve hit the floor are Matt’s fingers sliding into me, claiming me, thrusting hard.
“I want you naked,” he murmurs, and I slip off my top as he keeps his fingers inside me. Oh, God. I want him so much, but the unease lurking below my desire snakes its way to the surface. I need to know if he’s just here for sex. If that’s all this is.
“Wait… wait,” I gasp, and inside me his fingers stop moving. “What is this? What’s happening?”
“Everything. It’s everything,” he whispers back, and my heart does another crazy leap. Everything . His eyes lock onto mine as though he’s searching for an answer to a question he hasn’t asked, but a response pours from me anyway.
“Yes. Yes ,” I breathe.
“It’s you. You ,” he murmurs, as though I’m the eighth wonder of the world. “You’re all I want.”
I push him away, just a fraction, and his brow arches. “Would you want me in a different body?”
He splutters a laugh. “What?”
“Would you?”
Something seems to click, and he knows I’m serious. “Yes. God, yes. But I fucking love this one.” His hand tightens on me, then he pauses, watching for my reaction. “Is that okay?”
“Yes.”
He nods as though this explains everything either of us might ever need to say, and the look on his face is pure adoration.
“Fuck, Aries. What have you done to me?” he questions softly, and his gaze rakes over my flesh like he wants to bury himself inside it. His eyes are so greedy, so full of want and need that they stoke the fire in me. I hook my arms around his neck, jumping up to swing my legs around his hips. His fingers slide out of me to hold my thighs. His hands are so big, so warm. I didn’t realise just how much I missed him holding me like this until he was touching me.
Crack.
Matt’s back slams against a shelf as he manoeuvres us. “Ow. Fuck, this room is tiny.”
“It’s made for small people like me.”
He lies me on the bed, spread out for him like a dessert trolley, inspecting me just as greedily. He fists both his hands in his hair. “What the hell are we doing here?”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say ‘everything’ again, or to tell him there’s a damn good chance I’m falling in love with him, but instead I say, “You think too much. Shut up and fuck me.”
I sleep in Matt’s arms, both of us naked, entwined in my tiny bed. I never want to move. My muscles are plagued with a slight ache, but it’s a pleasant throbbing that reminds me how hard I worked last night. It was after four when we finally fell asleep.
My eyes are bleary when Matt kisses my temple. “Hey, beautiful,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
“For fucking my brains out last night?”
“No. For messing you around. Charlie coming back threw me off. I didn’t want to hurt you. I’d never want—”
“You’re allowed to prioritize your kids. That’s kinda the whole point of being a parent.”
He sighs. “I know. I kept thinking, what if he’d come home a few minutes earlier? Walked in on us? I can’t do that to him. It felt like too big a risk.”
“Okay… so why did you change your mind?”
He kisses my temple again, his lips lingering there longer. “Because I decided you’re worth the risk.” He peppers the side of my face with kisses, his lips dancing over my skin. “You’re worth every risk.”
My chest swells as though he’s pumped the words right inside me. “So… what now?” I whisper.
“We’ll have to be extra careful.”
“On a boat? With all your family around?”
“It’s a big boat.”
I laugh, then remember Seb’s comment. “You told your brothers, didn’t you? About us?”
Slowly, Matt nods. “How did you—”
“Seb made a joke about the boat compensating for the size of your dick. I contradicted him without thinking.”
Matt laughs. “Fuck. I can’t even say I’m sorry. Seb can be an arse, but most of the time, he’s a joker. Life’s a game to him.”
Matt leans over me to grab his watch from the nightstand. “Shit. We’ve got to get going. We’re headed to an exclusive beach today, but the boat can only take us if we’re there on time.”
I reach out and cup his balls. “So I can’t give you a little extra energy healing?”
He laughs and moves my hand. “Are you sure you’re really a nanny?”
“I’m a lot of things. My mum home-schooled me. We didn’t exactly stick to the regular syllabus.”
Matt rears off the bed. “You were home-schooled?”
“Is that so shocking?”
He relaxes back against the sheets as he straps his watch to his wrist. “Actually, no. That fits.” He rubs the back of two fingers over his mouth. “I want to meet this mother of yours. Anyone who could home-school you deserves a trophy. I bet you were an unruly kid.”
I laugh. “My mum was an unruly mother. But in the best way.” My voice catches in my throat and I clear it, but Matt’s gaze has turned wary, so he must have noticed the blip.
“You want to see her?” he asks. “Because we could do that.”
“We?”
He shrugs and looks away. “I don’t have to come. I thought you might want to spend time with her. I feel bad having you all to myself. If you want time off to go and visit, then please take it. But seriously”—he turns to look at me—“whoever raised you did a stellar job.” He kisses my cheek and even though it’s an innocent peck, my blood turns hot. “Did you like it? This homeschooling thing? My parents sent us all off to boarding school when we were eight.”
I catch a glimpse of little Matt in the grown man’s face and wonder if he minded that his parents sent him away from home. But then, he’s chosen it for his own son so he can’t have hated it. “Hmmm,” I say, drawing my focus back to his original question. “It was still learning, and some of that is always tedious. The bits you don’t want to do. But it did the job in the end. I got to uni.”
Matt’s body jerks like he’s brushed against something sharp, and I can tell he’s surprised by this information. I could be irritated by his reaction, but I’m not. I knew he must have an ‘idea’ of me—some jumbled bunch of assumptions he’d made. But until right now, I hadn’t considered what that idea might be, and it’s very apparent that going to uni was not part of it. “What did you study?”
“Social anthropology at St Andrews.”
He whistles. “Really? How did I not know this?” He props himself up on one elbow. “Shit, I’ve been sleeping with you for weeks and I didn’t know this. I’m a terrible human being.”
“No, you aren’t. We were somewhat preoccupied most of the time.”
“No excuse,” he mutters. “Christ, I thought you were this kooky energy healer’s kid, who wanted to work with children.”
“I am.” I narrow my eyes at him. “Didn’t you read my CV?”
He frowns. “Obviously not. I mean, I glanced at it. But Mrs Minter sorts all the house stuff out. I trust her. She normally picks nannies who are nannies . You know? Career nannies.” He scratches his forehead. “I thought that’s what you were. I assumed. Have I been duped here?”
The more he speaks, the more his surprise seems to escalate, which makes me laugh. “No. You haven’t been duped, stupid. I’ve worked as a nanny for years. I enjoy it. I like it more than anything else I’ve ever done. And don’t feel bad about not knowing. I have no idea what you studied or where you went.”
“Google didn’t tell you?”
I snort. “No. And I really don’t care. It makes no difference to me. It doesn’t change who you are.”
“God”—he drags a palm down his face—“I feel like such an arse right now.”
For a few moments, we hold eye contact, then I lean in, making a show of examining his face. “You’re looking at me differently.”
“What? No, I’m not.”
I wave my index finger in spiraling circles over his face. “Yeah, you are. I can see it. You think I’m different now, because you know I have a degree. You’re re-evaluating.”
He rolls onto his back and blows out a breath, fingers interlinked, hands resting on his broad chest.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” I ask him.
He glances sideways at me. “That’s a trick question. Whatever I say, you’re going to accuse me of judging you. But you know what? This is what humans do. We form judgments based on the little pieces of information we gather, and as we learn, our perception changes. So yeah, you do look different now.”
“Different, better?”
He smiles to himself. “I’m not answering that.”
“Okay. Fine. But I can tell you like it more than thinking I’m ‘just a nanny’.”
He sits up. “You aren’t ‘just a nanny’. No one is ‘just’ anything.”
I chuckle. “Wow. Such wisdom. You should print that on tea towels.”
One side of his mouth ticks up like he wants to smile but isn’t sure he’s allowed. “You think I’m an arse.”
“Maybe a little bit,” I say, smiling. But then my tone shifts. “There is one thing I do need to say…” He rolls his eyes in a plea that seems to say ‘ don’t make me feel worse than I already do’. “If you don’t want to be an arse, then you can’t mess me around. None of this ‘it’s over’, ‘it’s not over’, bullshit. You could have run with it being over if you hadn’t come in here last night and fucked me like the world was ending. But you did, and if you pull back a second time, then you are a shitty arsehole, no question.” I feel his gaze burning against the side of my face, and I know I’m blushing. “I should have said this before you kissed me, but… I didn’t want to stop you.”
He nods as though this is all perfectly acceptable. “I love how forthright you are. I’m very glad you didn’t stop me.” His gaze turns heavy. “I don’t want to mess you around, but the kids cannot find out. When I was a teenager, I walked in on my father screwing the housekeeper. It’s fucking seared on my retinas, even now.” He grimaces. “I won’t do that to my kids.” He stares into the distance for a moment, unfocused, and I’ve lost him to whatever thought is crossing his mind. He drags his gaze back to mine. “It was Oxford, by the way. PPE. Balliol College. In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t.”
His eyes narrow like he doesn’t believe me, but he smiles and glances at his wristwatch. “We need to get up.” He nuzzles his nose against my neck and presses a kiss to my throat. “Can you go check the kids? Make sure they’re up? Bring them to breakfast on deck. Charlie, especially. He has a tendency to fuck about. Waste time. You know what it was like trying to get him here.” He stares at the ceiling of the tiny room, probably recalling Charlie snoozing his alarm clock yesterday morning before we left, having only half-packed his suitcase. The kid wasn’t remotely prepared to head to the airport. It was like he was already in a different time zone. I thought Matt was going to lose his shit, but he didn’t.
“We’re on a tight schedule,” he says. “Boat’s leaving at half 9.”
“Yes, sir.”
He stands and pulls on his clothes from last night, having to bend to avoid the overhead beam. “I’m going to shower. And I’m moving you into a bigger room. This is fucking ridiculous.”
I run to the kids’ rooms, waking Lucie first. She bounds out of bed, hugs me and leaps to the floor, pushing the interconnecting door to Charlie’s room open. I’m right behind her when the door swings wide, revealing Charlie standing in the middle of the room, a towel wrapped about his waist.
His eyes flare with alarm when he sees me, but I’m sure mine are the same because Charlie’s torso is covered with livid bruises, some fading, some still dark.
“Get the fuck out of my room.” His tone is hard, angry, and it reminds me so much of his father that a sickening sensation crawls up my throat.
Lucie begins to cry and I scoop her up, carrying her back to her own room. Charlie slams the interconnecting door behind me, and I hear the lock fall into place.
My heart hammers as I stroke Lucie’s hair, soothing her hiccupping tears. I kiss the top of her head. “That was scary, wasn’t it?”
She nods against my chest.
“It’ll be all right. Charlie wanted some privacy. That’s all.”
I’m trying to be present with Lucie, to focus on her as she burrows against me, but I keep thinking of the bruises over Charlie’s chest. No wonder he didn’t take off his rash vest at the pool yesterday.
My mind spins with ideas about what might have happened to him. Rough sport? A beating? Is he being bullied? Did he get attacked and never tell his dad?
An unpleasant sensation settles in my gut. What the hell do I tell Matt about this?