being a man who can read a person within the first few seconds of meeting him. You are a constant surprise and that’s…unnerving. I don’t ever feel like I have a grasp on who you are.”
“It’s more than that, though. Isn’t it?”
“What you said in the pool, about the void—I didn’t like it. It struck a nerve because it was true.”
“So you left.”
“Aye.”
With a sigh, I admitted, “It did sting that you left without a word and didn’t contact me. But it reminded me of what we are. I’m a Rex girl and you’re the man who bought me for six months.”
He was silent for a moment as his gaze searched my face. “You won’t even concede that you were aloof?”
“What we did against the terrace wall…that was me aloof?” I asked with a roguish smile. When he didn’t grin at my teasing tone, I sobered. “While we’re attempting to hold each other accountable, will you concede that you fucked me against that wall as a form of punishment?”
“Punishment,” he said in surprise. “For what?”
“For me not sitting and pining for you while you were gone. For me not sending you text after text begging you to come back. For not acting like you expected me to.”
“Only if you concede that you were acting cool and flirtatious because you were trying to prove that you could play the true part of a Rex girl.”
“I concede,” I said easily. “What about you? Do you concede?”
He lifted his arm and I snuggled into him to rest my cheek against his chest. I waited for him to tell me he yielded, but I was waiting in vain.
He quelled the long silence when he said, “My mother died during childbirth.”
His hand drifted up and down my arm in a dreamy caress, and I cuddled deeper into his embrace.
“She was a teen runaway. Nothing out of the ordinary. I don’t know who my father is. When they filled out the birth certificate, she was already dead… Anyway, I was taken to St. Michael’s, an orphanage in Lerwick. The nuns there named all the male babies that came to them after Roman emperors. I don’t know why. Maybe they wanted to give us strong names since we’d come to them with nothing. Maybe they thought we’d have a chance at feeling powerful during the course of our lives.”
I lifted my face so I could rest my chin on his chest and stare at him. “And Rhys? Was that your mother’s last name?”
He nodded, his eyes meeting mine.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.
“Because you were honest with me this morning,” he said softly, his brogue rumbly and thick. “You didn’t have to be. You could’ve kept your guard up. Lord knows I would’ve understood why. I brought you here and then left you immediately.”
Something finally clicked into place, an understanding of the enigmatic man whose bed I was in and whose arms I found pleasure in.
Everything in Hadrian’s life, from his business dealings, to conversations with people…it was all transactional. Hadrian didn’t know how to trust someone unless they offered him something he perceived as valuable in return.
My honesty, as he called it, was worth something to him. And so he’d shared a part of himself with me.
I stroked my fingers up his chest to cup his raspy cheek and then sank into his strawberry blond hair.
In that moment, I realized who Hadrian truly was: an orphan who’d never had unconditional love. How could he have? He hadn’t known his own mother. She’d never gotten to watch him grow from boy to man. Whatever his course in life, he had done it without family.
“Eden?”
I met his bold stare and said simply, “Kiss me.”
There was nothing boyish about the way he made me quiver. There was nothing boyish about the way he rolled me over, using his brute strength to pleasure me. There was nothing boyish about the way he slid inside me, so deep I wondered if he was settling himself in my heart.
I wanted to unravel every part of his past, each new secret a treasure revealed. I wanted to keep him safe and give myself to the raw beauty that we created when we were together.
And when I tightened around him, climaxing, I let him see the tears that seeped from the corners of my eyes.
I let him see the part of me that really mattered.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The next few days were spent in a blissful, dreamy state of pleasure and companionship. We