Chapter 8
The words she’d been thinking for days breathed from her lips finally. “What’s in Paris?”
His fingers were tracing patterns down her back, teasing goosebumps over her pale skin.
Paris.
The city had taken on a new significance for him, one he had swiftly come to hate. For the next morning they would leave the island as a pair, and part at the airport as what they really were — two strangers going on separate journeys.
“MK?”
He startled. “A meeting.”
“I gathered. What’s it about?”
Would her husband make love to her when she returned? Would Saphire let him? What was their sex life like? Was she as wild with him? With Jordan? He frowned. She’d said that she’d never known it could be like this. That, at least, was something.
“A business I’m buying.”
“What business?”
He leaned forward and kissed her shoulder. “So many questions.”
“Yeah.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “I’m trying to distract myself.”
He understood that completely.
“It is not particularly interesting,” he ran his hands lower, to her perfect, round ass. He cupped it and felt himself harden immediately. She was so relaxed. So perfect. With him, she could be completely herself. He would never have stifled her as Jordan had.
Jordan. How he hated the man!
Saphire yawned. It was late, but neither of them wanted to sleep. To sleep on their last night would be a waste.
“My business will only take a day or two.” He reached for a nearby candle and trickled some of the wax onto his finger.
Beneath him, Saphire’s heart kicked up a gear. “And then?”
He shook his head. “Not London,” he responded instantly. “Nothing would please me more than to see you again. But I will not share you. Not with him, not with anyone.”
Her pulse fired like a torrent of volcanic lava. “I don’t want to be shared.” A single tear leaked from her eye and dribbled down her cheek. “I’m not cut out for this. I could never cheat. I hate it.”
“Do you?”
“Not being with you. I love … that.” It was the closest she could come to admitting her feelings; to go further would have been the ultimate indulgence, but it wouldn’t have been fair to Thaddeus or Jordan.
“I just feel so horrible. I thought this would atone for his sins. Instead, I’ve just created a heap of my own. ”
Thaddeus compressed his lips.
“I thought I’d be able to go back and throw this in his face. I don’t even know how I’ll look at him.”
He dragged his mouth over her shoulder. “You have other options.”
“Such as?” She whispered.
“Stay here.”
The words were just sinking in when she felt the first trickle of hot wax on her back.
It sent a spiral of beautiful discomfort into the pit of her stomach.
She jerked involuntarily and he smiled. But it was a sad smile; what she had become and what she had made him become … these were not good things.
He was moving the candle methodically, covering much of her back. After the first burst of heat, it felt perfect. Amazing. Sensual. She groaned and felt her insides clench.
“I need you.” She blinked her eyes rapidly. “I think I will always need you. Always want you.”
“Stay.” He said again, sitting up straighter to stare at the wax pattern on her pale skin.
“For how long?” She sighed heavily. “This situation is making you think you want something that you don’t. You’re not interested in me. Not really. You just can’t stand the fact that I’m leaving you for him.”
“You are damned right about that,” he snarled. He gripped her wrist and lifted his hips just high enough so that she could flip onto her back. “But I want you, too. If there was no Jordan, and only you, I would still want you here, Saphire.”
The words should have made her happy but they didn’t. What he was offering felt like a billion miles away from something she could grasp.
“I live in London.”
“With a husband you despise and who certainly doesn’t respect you, no job, friends who sleep with your husband, and parents who love you enough to visit you anywhere in the world as often as you’d like.”
Everything he said rung with truth but she whipped her head away, outraged and upset. Sometimes, the truth really did hurt.
“You don’t have to see him again to begin divorce proceedings. Send the letter. Have your parents move your stuff out. And start a new life.”
She lifted her hands to his chest. “That’s not the right way.” Her mind was heavy with thoughts. “You know it isn’t.”
“Who gives a flying f… who gives a crap about the ‘right’ way. Did he? When he was screwing Anita on your bed?”
“No,” she groaned. “But I do. I don’t know if I’ll be able to move on from this.
I just know that I owe it to what we used to be to try.
To at least talk to him. If I hadn’t met you, I would have flown back after a couple of days.
I would have faced him already, and who knows?
Maybe everything would have been fine by now. ”
His laugh was scathing. “You are kind of delusional, you know. It’s sweet, except that it is causing you to make the most fundamentally ludicrous decision of your life.”
“Stop.” She held up a hand. “I get it. You don’t agree with me. But I have to do this. I know myself. And I know that I won’t ever accept it’s over if I don’t go back to him and at least try to … to …”
“To what?” He demanded.
“To understand.”
“And us?” He said leaning down and kissing her with all the passion he felt. “You think you are not going to live with regrets over this decision? You don’t think leaving me will make you wake up in a cold sweat? When you reach for me in the middle of the night and find only him?”
Already the ache was spreading, killing off the sensual desire Thaddeus had awakened. “I can’t.” She ran her fingers up his chest. “I don’t deserve you. I never did.” She ran her thumb over his lips and he opened his mouth, nipping it between his teeth.
“Please, MK, please, just make love to me. Just hold me. I don’t want to fight on our last night.”
Their last night … and he was going to make sure it was one she never forgot.
He kissed her as though she was the salvation of his dying breath. His tongue pushed into her mouth and with his body he said the words he couldn’t utter. Don’t go. I need you.
His hands were firm on her softness as they ached to touch her everywhere; to commit to memory the nuances of her form. He made love to her slowly, gently, achingly soft, because all of him was weakened by the specter of her departure.
He held her tight, their breaths mingling and their chests moving in unison, until the sun crested and he took her again, imprinting himself on her and silently asking her to put aside her foolish, slavish devotion to convention and agree to stay.
But she did not.
When the sun shone brightly across the carpeted floor, Saphire eased herself out of the bed with a renewed sense of determination. She was shutting down on him. He could practically see her wrapping ribbons around her heart, tightening her resolve and removing what he had meant to her.
Her nakedness was spectacular. Her back, though, was scored with red marks from the candle wax. Remorse punched through him but he didn’t give it any room to move.
She had enjoyed it. She had been his equal and partner in every way.
And at least he had some insurance that she wouldn’t be jumping straight back into bed with her husband.
“Holy hell,” she murmured, as her eyes caught sight of the marks in the large mirrors. She angled herself so that she could see it properly and slowly, comprehension dawned. Her eyes moved from the clearly written initials ‘T K’ that he had inked in wax, to the artist who had marked her.
His expression was unapologetic.
“You wrote your initials on my back?”
His eyes flashed with a dark, heated emotion, but he didn’t answer.
“Why?” She reached around and ran her finger over the bottom of the K.
“Why do you think?”
Her stomach felt like it had been knifed. “I don’t know.” She looked like a fawn in the forest, completely helpless and confused. “Please tell me you didn’t mean to mark me in some way. To … put your name on me like a possession.”
Again, something seared through his face. “You do not think you are?”
“No!” She was appalled, and it radiated from her every pore.
“Of course you are. As I am yours. How do you not see that?” He hadn’t moved an inch, but she felt as though he was touching her. “I have slept with a lot of women.”
“Gee, great. Let’s talk more about that, please.”
His eyes narrowed. “You do not like to contemplate my past lovers? What if I told you that the woman who had a place in my bed before you is an Oscar winning actress? And before her, a famous singer? And before her, a supermodel. Before that, …”
“Stop.” She lifted a hand in the air; her fingers were shaking.
“Now imagine how I feel,” he said with an attempt at sounding reasonable.
“These women are in my past. They are nothing to you and me. You need not feel jealous of them; I did not know you when I was with them. You have been here with me, and felt what I feel, and still you are going back to him.” He dragged a hand through his hair; it spiked in odd angles that made her tummy flop with love and desire.
But she couldn’t soften. It was a crucial moment. “And so you branded me like cattle?”
Remorse slashed through him once more. “Thinking of him touching you is going to kill me.”
Her breath burned and her chest heaved. “I’m sorry,” she said finally, her voice shaking. “The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.”
“You are hurting us both with this decision.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
He stared at her; his emotions a tornado that was anchored by impotence.
“Do you love your husband?”
She sucked in a deep breath. Her expression was begging him to stop interrogating her. “I … I don’t know.” She said finally.
It wasn’t the denial he needed to hear, but nor was it an affirmative response.