very strange turn of events for her.
He brought the food upstairs just as Wren was sitting up, scrubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands, the covers fallen down around her waist, exposing her perfect, gorgeous breasts.
“Happy wedding night,” he said, holding up his offerings as he made his way toward the bed.
Her eyes took a leisurely tour of his body, and he could tell she enjoyed the view.
That she had ever thought the two of them could keep their hands off each other was almost funny.
Almost.
The problem was, he didn’t find much funny about the way he wanted her. It flew in the face of everything that he was. Everything he knew about himself.
Everything he knew about keeping himself separate.
All the decisions that he’d made about his life eighteen years ago seemed... They didn’t seem quite so clear when he was staring at Wren. The woman carrying his child.
The woman who was now his wife.
“Well, this is nice,” she said.
“I can be nice.”
She chuckled, and pushed herself up so she was sitting a little taller. The covers fell down even farther, and he set the food and drink down on the nightstand next to her, then yanked them off the rest of the way.
“Hey,” she said.
But he was too busy admiring her thighs, and that sweet spot between them, to care.
“It’s my payment,” he said.
“I retract what I said about you being nice.”
“If you keep showing me all this glory, I might go ahead and drop dead. And then you can do a little dance on my grave. I really would like to see you dance.”
She smirked, then shook her hips slightly as she got up onto her knees, leaning over and taking a piece of cheese off the tray.
“Honestly, I would have married you a lot sooner if I’d known you came with room service.”
“Room service and multiple orgasms,” he said.
“You know, if you have to be the one to say it...”
“You know you’re sleeping with a woman who has more pride than sense?”
“Nothing wrong with that,” she said. “A little bit of pride never hurt anybody.”
“Neither did a little bit of submission.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “It hurts unless you want to give it.”
“You say that as an expert?”
She shook her head. “Definitely not. Being totally honest, I’ve had a few very underwhelming boyfriends. And none of them have enticed me to do the kinds of things that you entice me to do. So there you have it.”
“I haven’t had girlfriends. None.” He got into bed with her and stretched out alongside her, running his knuckles along the line of her waist. “I hook up. It’s never about any one woman in particular so much as about my desire to get laid. That’s actually vastly unsatisfying.”
“Tell me more.” She narrowed her eyes. “And this better end in a way that compliments me and makes me feel singular, magical and like a sex goddess.”
“I can’t keep my hands off you,” he growled. “More to the point, I can’t keep my mind off you. When I’m not with you, I want to be with you. And when you said you didn’t want our relationship to be physical... I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. I think about you, and I burn, Wren. Even if we weren’t having the baby, even if we weren’t together tonight because it was our wedding night, I think we would still be in my bed.”
The frown on her face made his chest feel strange.
“We don’t like each other,” she said.
“I think we’re both going to have to let go of that idea. Because obviously it’s more complicated than that.”
“We don’t mesh,” she said.
“We seem to mesh pretty well.”
She poured herself a glass of the sparkling cider and took another slice of cheese, leaning back against the headboard, sighing heavily. “My parents’ marriage has always mystified me. They don’t really talk. It was very civil, but very distant, and I think I always imagined that’s what marriage was. I tried to find a similar thing with the men I dated. This kind of external compatibility. We never fought. And anytime I ever broke up with someone... It just sort of fizzled out. Like I would notice it had been a while since we’d seen each other and I didn’t really care. Or we were still going to events together, but not even bothering to have sex after. Or worse, we did have sex and I basically spent the whole