He hadn’t said anything, well, she hadn’t left him much room to say anything after what she had said, she conceded wretchedly, but his silence on that score was somehow worse.
Sev was on a punch-drunk high as he had never experienced before, his body still roaring with endorphins and the recollection of pleasure he had not known existed until meeting Amy. Yes, he had missed her, nothing wrong with that. He was more concerned by an appallingly unfamiliar desire to make Amy’s life happy and perfect, a desire that shook him inside out. He wanted her, he wanted the baby. It was a sexual obsession, he labelled it with relief. What else could it be? A full-grown sexual obsession, sufficient to drive him in the direction of the kind of behaviour he had never entertained before.
‘That tree is a lovely shape,’ Amy mumbled.
Sev didn’t even glance at her; he followed the direction of her pointing hand. After all, Amy was blushing enough for both of them. If he didn’t watch out, he’d start blushing too. But... Dio...it had been amazing. Didn’t say a lot for his legendary lively womanising sex life that he had never enjoyed that much excitement before, did it? Madre di Dio, he wasn’t in love, was he? He remembered his half-sibling, Tor, at his wedding with his bride, Pixie, and almost shuddered at the recollection of Tor cheesily telling someone that Pixie lit up his world. He didn’t feel like that, did he? He didn’t do love, wasn’t ever planning to marry and yet...the thought of Amy doing those things with another man set him on fire with rage. He didn’t want to share her with anyone except their child. So, they would live together, he reasoned. His child would be illegitimate; it hadn’t done him any harm, had it?
Actually, it had, Sev conceded, thinking of all the times as a child that he had wished his mother had married his birth father. When he had got to know his father as an adult, he had done so at a very slow pace. Wary and cynical, he had kept Hallas Sarantos at a distance, refusing to credit that the older man could be as straightforward as he seemed, a happy family man, who had beaten himself up with guilt at the knowledge that he had a son out in the world who was a stranger to him. Over time, Sev’s reservations about Hallas had crumbled but, until Amy’s advent in his life, he had continued to keep everyone at a safe distance, telling himself that he was doing so to protect his birth father, because Hallas would be devastated if he knew how unhappy Sev had been as a child.
But who knew what lay in his future or Amy’s if he didn’t marry her? Marriage was a commitment, a binding promise of fidelity and stability. His father had it with his family. Tor had it with Pixie. If he was fair, there were examples amongst friends and family who had good relationships, unlike his mother’s side of the family tree. Sev tensed momentarily as he was wielding the axe. He was messing up his hands, and he knew it was because he wasn’t accustomed to physical work, but there was something oddly satisfying about using his muscles and hacking the hell out of the tree. It was a great deal easier than limping through an emotional wasteland where he had never been before and didn’t really want to linger. But if he was thinking about marriage, he had to be realistic and think of stuff he wasn’t accustomed to thinking about, label things like feelings that he had never explored before. And he absolutely hated doing it and took his raging frustration out on the tree.
Watching Sev chop the tree down was strangely sexy, Amy acknowledged, her face still hot because after what they had just shared she should not be even thinking along that line again, should she? She shouldn’t be thinking of the muscles flexing below that sweater, the taut, flat line of his stomach, the breadth of his chest, the tight neatness of his male hips in denim, the long, long straight legs. Oh, she might as well be honest—everything about Sev turned her on and made her react like a silly schoolgirl. She had no control over her eyes or her thoughts when Sev was around, but she had to get a handle on her responses if he was going to be