Chapter Eleven
IF SOMEONE HAD TOLD him he would spend his wedding night, much less his entire honeymoon weekend, without a single encounter of sex—
Whoever that was would’ve been incarcerated in an asylum.
For his own good, of course.
But as it was...
Paul gazed down at his wife of three days, sleeping next to him in bed, and his chest...it hadn’t stopped aching since the moment he slipped her wedding ring on her finger.
Early morning light filtered through the castle’s ancient windows, catching the dust motes that danced in the air like tiny golden spirits. Andie lay curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, her dark hair fanned across the pillow in waves he wanted to bury his fingers in.
She looked peaceful.
She looked like she belonged here, in his bed, in his life.
She looked like everything he’d never known he wanted.
His jaw clenched as he thought about the last seventy-two hours, of how not a single second of it had been anything less than unforgettable.
Because of her.
Talking to her. Listening to her. Laughing with her. And more often than not, laughing at her as well—every time she would struggle to smile even when he kept beating her at every game.
Scrabble. Crazy Eights. Even Snakes and Ladders.
Who knew someone could be so damn bad at games?
Vocabulary-wise, they were a pretty even match when they played Scrabble.
But it was the tiles that did her in, with Andromeda either getting mostly vowels or consonants, and rarely ever a good mix of both.
Crazy Eights, they had played seven rounds, and she won.
..not once. By the time she asked which boardgame they should play next, his wife’s expression had been adorably grouchy.
But when he had suggested they give it a rest, she had snarled at him for not giving her a chance to get even.
‘You choose then,’ he had offered.
And that was how they had ended up playing Snakes and Ladders, and although she was the one who by this time had prayed out loud for God to help her win—
He was the one who ended up rolling mostly sixes and landing on ladders while his wife, well...the snakes seemed to find her as adorable as he did, and when she had realized he had won by a wide, wide margin—
Paul pressed his lips together, but it was no use. The mere memory of how Andromeda had actually growled in frustrated defeat had him smiling, and when his mind then insisted on recalling other and much, much cuter memories, such as all the times they had enjoyed a meal together—
Too, too cute, dammit.
She would close her eyes to savor her first bite if she was trying something new, and most times, she would do this wriggly little dance in her seat, sometimes with her fork up, other times with her head also bobbing left and right like she was one of those battery-powered toys.
She was so damn easy to please.
So damn different from everyone else.
And that was why the last three days had been their own particular brand of torture.
Her period, as it turned out, came with a sensitivity to touch that bordered on painful.
The slightest brush of contact—his hand on her arm, her shoulder against his chest—would make her wince.
She’d tried to hide it at first, tried to push through, but he’d seen the way her face tightened when he pulled her close.
So he’d stopped.
Stopped reaching for her. Stopped pulling her into his arms. Stopped all the casual touches that had become as necessary to him as breathing.
It was driving him slowly insane.
What made it worse—infinitely, torturously worse—were her shy offers to pleasure him instead.
“I could...” She’d trailed off that first night, her cheeks flaming, her eyes fixed somewhere around his collarbone. “I mean, just because I can’t... doesn’t mean you have to...”
“No.”
“But—”
“I said no, Andromeda.”
He wasn’t going to be a boy who couldn’t control his hormones. Wasn’t going to use his wife like some kind of service while she lay there in pain. Wasn’t going to let her think for a single moment that he’d married her for her body alone.
Even if there were moments—many moments, constant moments—when he wanted her so badly his teeth ached with it.
Cold showers had become his closest companion.
He’d taken seven in the past three days.
Sometimes two in a single night.
And still, lying here next to her, watching the morning light paint gold across her sleeping face, he wanted nothing more than to wake her with his mouth on her skin.
But that wasn’t what haunted him most.
What haunted him was how many times she’d tried to tell him something—something about the money, he was almost certain—and how many times he’d changed the subject before she could finish.
“Paul, about the fifty-five thousand...”
“I was wondering if we could talk...”
“So, do you think...”
She had done her best to open up to him, but each time she did, he had stopped her by steering the conversation somewhere else—anywhere was fine, really.
Anything under the sun but that.
Because as much as it killed him still to admit this—
The truth was that he was a fucking coward when it came to his wife.
The billionaire who made everyone in Wall Street look the other way, not wanting to attract his attention to their companies and have them targeted for acquistions—
He had always been that kind of guy, but here he was, unable to handle even the possibility of hearing his wife confess that she was only with him for—
A slight movement caught his gaze, his wife stirring in her sleep. The welcomed distraction gave Paul the chance to mentally regroup. Refocus. And eventually extract himself from the bed as he came to a decision.
He needed to talk to someone who’d been where he was and survived.
Paul grabbed his phone from the nightstand and stepped out onto the balcony, the December mountain air sharp enough to make his lungs ache. The Rockies spread before him in snow-capped majesty, but he barely saw them.
He pulled up Wynd’s number and hit Call.
It rang three times before his friend answered, his voice rough with sleep. “If you’re calling me on your honeymoon, you’ve already messed things up...or you’re afraid of messing up.”
“The latter.”
“Which means you finally saw the forest for the trees.”
“Or I just lost my mind.”
“It will feel a lot like that on some days.” Something shifted on Wynd’s end—sheets rustling, a soft murmur that might have been Star asking who was calling. “But most other days... you’ll wish time would stop because everything feels impossibly good.”
Paul’s grip tightened on the phone. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Philippians—”
“Who’s that?” Paul genuinely didn’t know, and his puzzlement only grew when his friend chuckled.
“If you don’t want to mess this up, time to crack open your Bible, my friend. Philippians four-thirteen. Look it up.” Another rustle of sheets. “Now go back to your wife and let me get back to mine.”
The line went dead, and after several moments of struggling against something he couldn’t quite put into words—
Ah, let’s just fucking—I mean, let’s just see where this goes.
A Bible app was downloaded to his phone in moments, and he didn’t know how to feel when he realized that this Philippians book was actually a series of letters written by his namesake.
Paul.
But unlike him, this Paul probably had things figured out better than he did since four-thirteen...
Ah.
His jaw clenched.
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Paul read it again.
And again.
Is that so, Paul of the Bible?
He dropped his phone into one of the pockets of his sweat pants.
Fine then.
If You’re real, Jesus...
His jaw clenched as he stared out at the mountains, the snow-capped peaks catching the first rays of true morning sun.
Help me.
Give me the courage I need to let my wife speak...the next time she tries to tell me why she needed the money.
SIX THOUSAND MILES away, Joyce Bernard stood on the balcony of her Monte Carlo suite, a glass of champagne in one hand and her phone in the other.
The voice on the other end was bright with that particular sweetness that society women wielded like a blade.
“I just had to call and congratulate you, Joyce. I honestly didn’t think much of the girl, but I should have known. Blood’s thicker than water—”
“What exactly are you talking about?” Joyce cut in impatiently.
“Oh, please, there’s no need to pretend. The whole of San Antonio already knows. Your Dorothy of a niece has snagged the unsnaggable—”
Even though her neighbor had yet to finish speaking, her heart had already started to shrivel.
“I know you wanted to be his bride, darling,” the other woman said with a laught that was vicious even in its sweetness, “but it seems Paul would rather have you as an aunt.”