next to Nico all night. After all, he hadn’t sprinted in the opposite direction after hearing about my shadowed past.
That’s because he doesn’t understand how damaged you really are yet.
But I sensed an inner pain in him, too. Maybe Nico was the first person actually capable of shouldering the weight of my baggage.
Breaking our intense eye contact, he slanted his mouth over mine in an all-consuming kiss that had me swaying in my heels. If I’d learned anything about Nico during our short-lived marriage, it was that he communicated more with his body than with his words. And because his physical language was so potent, I could usually interpret it with reasonable accuracy.
Now, I wanted the words.
I wanted to learn the inner workings of my husband’s mind. I wanted to hear those private thoughts he kept so close to the vest. What made him tick and how he reasoned through his decisions. How he problem solved, how he rationalized.
He gathered the material of my maxi dress up my legs until it bunched around my hips. He released a tormented groan when his hands dove underneath the chiffon and trailed over the flesh-colored teddy I wore. I guess to confirm that the garment was one piece, he pulled down the neckline of my dress just enough to expose the delicate lace bodice covering my breasts.
“All day,” he breathed, gaze focused on my chest. “All damn day this dress has been swishing and swaying around your body, driving me fucking crazy, making my hands shake with the need to have them on you. And that whole fucking time, you were hiding this underneath? You’re downright insidious, woman.”
Okay. Words? Check.
I pushed his tuxedo jacket off his shoulders, delighting in the erotic sound of it swooshing to the floor. “Or perhaps I’m just calculating. Perhaps I knew exactly what to wear in order to get exactly what I want.”
His upper lip curled as my fingers worked on the buttons of his shirt. “Which is?”
After popping open the final button, my fingers traveled lower until they were cupping his heavy bulge. “This ripping into me so hard and deep that I’ll be sore for at least the next two days.”
Hissing between his teeth, he yanked my face close enough that our lips brushed. “Then your calculations were spot on, legs.” He took my lower lip between his teeth and tugged. “But let’s make it three days.”
With that promise hanging in the thick, sexualized air of his bedroom, he dragged my dress over my head and tossed it across the room. His eyes crawled salaciously over the teddy as he shrugged his shirt off his shoulders.
“Damn you, Lexi,” he whispered. “Why do you have to get to me like this?”
The question might have been rhetorical, but I also felt it deserved an answer. It was a confession, of a sort. He was admitting that I’d burrowed under his skin in some fashion. He felt something for me, however minute it might be. Between that admission and his vow to chase away the demons from my past, I wanted to give him something that would put us back on equal ground.
“Because you got to me first.”
His eyes flew up to mine.
So much passed between us in those brief, simmering moments that tears stung the back of my eyes. I was so overwhelmed with too many emotions I couldn’t categorize, couldn’t name, that my body’s first reaction was to purge them like toxins.
But I didn’t want to rid myself of them.
I wanted to lock them down deep inside, nurture them, care for them, until those seedlings sprouted more feelings and more feelings, until they grew into something that could sustain life itself. Until they could sustain me.
Then his mouth was back on mine, and we were suddenly melded together.
As if our bodies had liquified, we melted onto the mattress. Unable to get close enough, our limbs tangled, our lower halves rolling against each other with smooth sensuality.
I made a whimpering noise when I noticed there was still too much clothing separating us. With one hand supporting himself over me, Nico used his other to shove his slacks down his legs, eventually toeing them off, all while his eyes remained on mine.
The curtains on his floor-to-ceiling windows were open, inviting enough of the lights from the city to pour into the room so that I could feast on his form looming powerfully above me.
My height had always prevented me from feeling small or delicate in a man’s arms. But