Chapter Ten #2
She moaned when he nipped her lower lip and his tongue swooped into her mouth.
The kiss intensified yet again, as if there was nothing but heated embers between them to be stoked into life at the barest contact.
Flaring hotter and higher with each day that passed, each layer of vulnerability that was ripped off.
His mouth came back for her—nipping, licking, demanding.
Demanding so much that Nush felt like she was nothing but a mass of sensations.
God, the man kissed like a hungry beast. As if only devouring her would do.
As if she was the only thing in the entire universe.
And still, this kiss was different from the other ones.
As if there were a million different flavors to be yet discovered between them.
He growled when she pulled away to whisper, “God, Caio. We could be together for seventy years and I’d think I’ll want you with this same desperate need.”
“Give me your vow, Nush. Give me what I want.”
Burying her face in his chest, she whispered, “I’m yours, Caio. And not just because those papers say so.”
He held her tightly then, with more affection than passion, she thought. Just like their kisses, this embrace was different from all others.
“How did you learn about the acquisition?” He asked then, and Nush felt the instant change in the tenor around them.
His arms around her stiffened. And his embrace went from warm Brazilian coast to Arctic frost in one second.
He didn’t push her away as much as he slowly untangled them and turned to face the spectacular view.
Was that all it took? Her word that she was in?
“The paperwork... I got cc’d on your email by accident.”
Nush watched him guzzle down his wine in the periphery of her vision.
She turned in her chair, playing with the edges of her napkin.
“I looked it up and noticed that it was your father’s company that you mentioned.
The small start-up he began at the same time as Thaata did with OneTech.
Then I called Peter Sr. and he was all too happy to enlighten me that Thaata was against the buyout too. ”
For a long time, he said nothing. Nerves stretched tight, Nush simply waited.
“He was,” he said, rubbing a hand over his face. The wet slosh of the wine as he refilled his glass felt like a boom around then. “Enough to block me from beyond the grave.”
“I thought you needed majority because you wanted to reign as king over those vultures on the board. But you needed the executive power to push through the purchase for a...problem-riddled company.”
A dark smile flashed at her. “I like being a king who lords it over them too.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me it was once your father’s company, Caio? I don’t care if Thaata thought it was a lost cause.”
“You’d have taken my side even if it were a complete loss,” he said as a statement, a little warmth coming back to his eyes.
“Yes. Do you know how happy I feel that our partnership has enabled you to buy your father’s company back?”
“Don’t be so eager to celebrate, Nush,” he said, with a sneer that didn’t seem to be directed at her. “It’s not the happy ending you always want.”
The unease in her gut solidified. But Nush refused to let him scare her off the topic. Push her off a subject that had shaped the man she’d married. “Tell me about the company. Please.”
He tapped her lips with his fingers. “What a tantalizing puzzle you are, minha esposa.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, cheeks heating up.
He leaned down, and took her mouth in a rough, animalistic kiss.
It was full of dominance and ego, full of technique and skill employed to leave her panting.
To assert his mastery over her senses. Knowing that, she still quivered, a telling dampness at her sex.
“Is handling me another one of your secret powers, Nush?”
“All I want is to know about the man who shaped you. About your family. About...”
“Do you really need to know, Princesa? Or are you using my reticence as a weapon against me to deny me what I want?”
“You know the answer to the question, Caio. I told you a real marriage is sacred to me. It means being real in the present. But it also means building a future, a future that encompasses so many things that we haven’t even touched.”
He rubbed the pad of a finger over her lower lip, setting her on fire. “Like what, querida?”
“Like kids, Caio. I want a big, boisterous family. I want my kids to be surrounded and loved by family. I want family vacations, school recitals, story times. I want my kids to know that they’re loved by their parents, unconditionally. I want them to have everything I didn’t as a kid.”
His gaze gleamed with emotion as he placed a tender kiss to her lips that made her emotional all over again. “That sounds like...a future I want to be a part of too, Nush.”
Nush exhaled roughly. “Right now, you’re no more than a stranger to me. A stranger who carefully filters out what information he’ll let me have. A stranger who demands I give everything without giving me anything back. That’s not the beginnings of a healthy relationship. That’s just a transaction.”
His mouth flattened as if her words were a direct hit. She wondered if she’d gone too far. With a rough groan, Caio rubbed his hand down his face. “What do you want to know, Nush?”
“Tell me what this acquisition means to you. This company...”
“My father poured his blood and sweat into it. At the height of his career, it was one of the most successful companies in Sao Paulo. And not just by its workforce or market worth either. It prized financial ethics and family values and had a community with shared values at its core. Papa was its beating heart.”
The pride and ache in his voice filled her throat with sudden tears. She took his fingers in hers, wanting to provide him with an anchor in the moment. Wanting to ground him here in the present even as he went away to visit some painful place in the past.
He didn’t return her clasp like he usually did, nor did the tension in him abate. But Nush held on. “He sounds like an amazing man. I’d have loved to meet him.”
He met her eyes then and she saw that he knew that she meant it with all her heart.
“He’d have loved to meet you too, Anushka.” He frowned, studying her as if she was an interesting equation he hadn’t seen clearly until that precise moment. “In fact, you’re both a lot alike.”
“How so?”
“Integrity. Generosity. A seemingly infinite well of quiet strength beneath it all.” He rattled them off in a matter-of-fact tone.
As if he had to distance himself from Nush too as he’d clearly distanced himself from the memories of the man he’d adored.
“A distinct lack of self-preservation or cunning required to survive in this cutthroat world.”
“Hey,” she said, swatting his arm in mock outrage.
“Just speaking the truth, querida.” And just like that, she understood the deeper significance of his protectiveness of her.
A long exhale made her chest rise and fall. “What happened to him?”
“He died of heart disease when I was thirteen.”
“Oh.” She didn’t utter any trite comforting words. It was clear that it had devastated him as a child. That it continued to wreck him even now. “Is that when the company fell apart?”
“No. It fell apart, year by year, one underhanded contract after another, one corrupt scheme after the other, once his partner took over. When he realized he didn’t have long left, Papa signed over the power of attorney to his partner Carlos.
My mother...” such stark anguish crossed his features that it froze Nush in acrid fear, “was a simple soul. She never cared about business or politics or wealth. Papa’s partner took advantage of her grief, of her loneliness, of her ignorance, married her within a year of Papa passing.
Then he proceeded to drive a wedge between her and me, until she asked me to give up my right to the company.
By the time I left to live with Rao, she and I. ..had become strangers to each other.”
The carefully dispassionate way he spoke of his mother...only made the truth that much clearer to Nush. It hid a well of unhealed, festering wounds made of nothing but hurt and pain.
She wanted to throw her arms around him then, to simply hold him. But there was a forbidding quality to him, a brittleness that threatened to shatter everything that was new and fragile between them if she so much as touched him.
“When did she die?”
“Two years after I left. I begged her to join me.” Such pure bitterness spewed from his words that Nush wouldn’t have been shocked to see them land like acid drops on the air. “But she kept saying her sons needed her.”
“Her sons?” She wasn’t able to keep her shock out of it.
“She has two sons with him. Twins. Jorge and Javier.”
Shock turned her words into a whisper. “Your brothers, you mean?”
Another shrug.
Her chest was so tight that she had to force herself to breathe. “You never saw her again?”
He shook his head and upended another glass of wine down his throat.
“I’m so sorry, Caio. I can’t imagine...not being able to say goodbye.”
“It is what it is, Princesa. Her priorities were different from mine.”
Nush wanted to argue, to say she didn’t agree with that.
She wanted to delve but was it for anything other than to satisfy her curiosity?
Was it for any reason other than to poke her finger into an unhealed wound and make it spill forth more poison?
But if he didn’t talk about this with her, if that hurt wasn’t purged. ..
He’s shared this much, Nush. Give it time. That voice distinctly sounded like Thaata and Nush pushed away the more intrusive questions.
“But you’ve bought the company now,” she said, infusing a lightness she didn’t feel into her words. “You can build it up bigger and better than before. Bring back all those principles your father valued. Make it a monument to his big heart and values.”