Chapter Nine
Leontina knew it was a mistake the moment she said it. A terrible mistake. It was as if he turned into a glacier beneath her.
He said nothing, but then, he didn’t need to speak. She could feel the change in the room. In him. It was like someone had thrown open a window in the dead of winter to let the cold rush in.
She opened her mouth to take it back. To laugh, and claim it was the orgasm going to her head, making her speak nonsense like it was truth, making her silly and foolish and whatever else she had to say to make the glacial expression he wore thaw—
But she didn’t.
She couldn’t.
Leontina felt as if she’d been waiting the whole of her life to say these things to him. As if the point of her life was not only to say what she’d said, but to feel it.
And she did feel it. She felt it everywhere, from the tiniest bones in her feet to the heart that was beating too hard in her chest. It didn’t matter that she knew he wouldn’t receive her love well. Giaco hadn’t needed to warn her—she’d already understood the situation she was in.
She didn’t have to have experience with half the world to read Pau. She had experience with him. Their relationship might not have been long, but it had been intense. On both sides of those three months.
Yet Leontina could not have kept those words inside if her life depended on it.
The girl who’d hidden all her life to avoid her father’s various schemes and rages, tantrums and vile friends, could not hide here.
Not in his man’s arms. Not when they were too many things to each other already.
Not when they would only become more entwined as this went on, this nine-month shift from a wild night to parenthood.
She tried her best to force the words out anyway, any words that might fix this, but she couldn’t.
Pau set her aside as he shifted, then rolled to the edge of the bed.
She thought for a moment that he might sit there the way he had the other night.
She remembered how lonely he’d looked, and wondered if things would have been different now if she’d reached out then.
If she might have built some kind of bridge there that would help her now.
He didn’t stay at the edge of the bed tonight. Pau barely paused. Instead, he stood immediately and stalked off to the bathroom.
She wanted to follow him. She was afraid to follow him.
But Leontina also couldn’t allow fear to dictate to her, not in this new iteration of her life. Not when she would shortly have to teach a child a better way to grow up than what she’d suffered through. Not when she had gone to the trouble to escape the life her father wanted for her.
So she forced herself to get up. To follow him into the bathroom on bare feet, and watch him as he splashed water on his face, then patted himself dry with a towel, all while going out of his way to keep from looking at her.
As if the very sight of her might wound him, somehow.
“You don’t have to say it back,” she said quietly. “I didn’t ask anything of you. I only told you how I felt. You could as easily have ignored it.”
Though she could not imagine that would have felt much better.
“I will not discuss this, Leontina,” he said, coldly. Still avoiding her gaze. He stalked to the lustrously tiled shower and turned on the hot water, so hot and immediately steamy that she considered warning him that he risked melting off his ice-cold exterior that way.
But somehow she doubted he would find that amusing.
“Pau—”
His dark eyes slammed into her, ringed with gold and shot through with what looked to her like outrage and pure betrayal.
“If you love me, I advise you to listen to me,” he bit out.
“I suggest you get some sleep. Your brother will be here in the morning and I expect he will provide enough emotion to go around.”
“Do you think he’ll take a swing at you again?”
“He will not.” Pau’s voice was as dark as his gaze now, and she could hear the betrayal in that, too. “I earned what happened tonight. But that will be the end of me simply sitting back and taking blows. I feel certain he knows this.”
“I’m sorry he hit you,” Leontina said quietly. “I would have hit him for you, but I doubted that would do much besides annoy him.”
“I do not require my wife and the mother of my child to engage in fisticuffs on my behalf, thank you,” Pau said icily. The words wife and mother had made her feel so connected to him before. It was a sad little marvel that he could use them now to create distance.
Gulfs upon gulfs of distance.
He stalked into the shower, and Leontina debated whether or not she should follow him in there. It was one thing for him to walk off out here, but there was nowhere to go in that stall. It was large and steamy and they had spent a great deal of time in there over the past weeks.
She found herself hesitating, and shook herself.
If she loved this man, surely that meant she didn’t have to contort herself around his moods or parse the look in his eyes for clues on how to act.
If she loved him that had to mean that she needed to behave in the exact opposite fashion than she would if she was back at the castle, where love was not a word she’d ever heard used. By anyone.
A life she would not accept for her son, but that was getting ahead of herself.
The question was, would she meekly wait for him like she was waiting out a storm? Or was she finished with that part of her life? If she had to take cover from the man she loved, she needed to do something about her heart’s terrible choices.
Leontina hoped she’d learned at least that much.
She blew out a breath, then followed him into the shower.
The steam billowed, but it wasn’t enough to disguise the glory that was Pau, naked, as he stood with his arms braced against the wall and let the stream of water pound into his back.
“I will not discuss it,” he gritted out as she came in and let the water wash over her.
She slicked her hair back from her face and decided that now was not the time to start a discussion about unilateral decrees in a marriage, which she did not recall agreeing to in that deeply civilized discussion they’d had when they’d decided to marry.
So calm. So quiet.
And she felt nothing like that now.
“Then let’s not discuss it,” she replied, and that made him turn from the shower wall, a frown all over his face.
“Leontina—” he began.
But this time she was the one not having the discussion.
Instead, she moved closer, and then sank down to her knees before him.
The water fell all over them, adding a different dimension to this act that he had taught her that first night.
Oh, she’d read about it. She’d studied the pictures she’d found and had watched some videos online that she rather wished she hadn’t. She’d thought she had the general idea.
Pau had tutored her in the reality of it. He’d taken such care then. He’d guided her head, murmured his approval, told her she was beautiful—though he hadn’t finished in her mouth.
Tonight he would, she vowed.
If she couldn’t have his love tonight, she would have the taste of him instead.
She swayed forward and slid her hands along his hair-roughened thighs, and could feel something like an electric current beneath his skin, making him almost seem to shake. She knelt up, and could see his hands at his sides, curling into fists.
But he didn’t set her away from him.
And by the time she got to his cock, it was jutting out proudly, hard and ready.
Making his determination to get away from her…silly, really.
Leontina did not need to belabor the point. It was already made. She wrapped both of her hands around his cock, one at the base and the next right on top of it, leaving her ample real estate to play with. She gripped him, then tilted her head back to find his gaze.
His dark eyes were glittering. Ferocious. His nostrils flared as he looked down the length of his own body to her kneeling there at his feet.
She kept her gaze fixed on him as she leaned forward and licked the tip of him, smiling when she felt a shudder go through him and the pulse she could feel in her hands kick into a higher gear.
Then she swirled her tongue around the thick head, like he was an ice cream cone, and sucked him into her mouth.
And then she did as she pleased.
She tasted him. She played with him. She moved her hands up and down his shaft as she worked the head, and was rewarded for this by the way he groaned and began to move his hips to meet her.
His hands ended up in her hair, guiding her as he slowly began to increase the speed of his thrusts.
She could watch him as she did this, as she took what she wanted from him and gave him so much pleasure in return.
Pau had his back against the slick shower wall, his head thrown back, and a look of such powerful intensity on his face that she could feel it between her own thighs.
In fact, the wilder his thrusts got, the more she felt it in her core, as if he was licking her himself.
And when he finally stiffened, then shouted out her name, he pumped himself into her mouth. Everything was salt and heat, and she drank him down greedily.
Then kissed him there, on that broad head, as she pulled away.
For a moment, they stayed like that. The water fell all over them. It made her hair seem darker, there against her skin. He was still holding a hand to her head, as if he hadn’t thought to let it drop. Or couldn’t quite make himself let go.
He still stood with his head thrown back, leaning against the wall. And Leontina found that watching this man when he couldn’t see her felt like a gift. He looked so much more approachable like this, sated and close, the bold lines of his face softer than when his eyes were open.