Daniel stared back at him broodingly.
“Gone how?” he asked carefully.
Sax lifted his gaze, staring back at his friend coldly.
“However it takes.”
Chapter Twelve
Marey awoke slowly the next morning, her eyes fluttering open, the dark beams of Sax’s ceiling the first thing she saw. Sax slept deeply beside her, his arm lying over her hips, his head lying next to hers as he kept her tucked close to his body.
He had awakened her in the early morning hours for a hot shower, washing her carefully, gently, before drying her and tucking her back into bed before crawling in beside her.
He had taken care of her.
She frowned deeply up at the ceiling, wondering if there had ever been a time when anyone had taken such care of her. She couldn’t remember it if there had. Perhaps as a child her parents had, but if so, she had been so young that those memories had been lost over time.
She had cared for them since she was a teenager. First her mother, who had conceived her only child in middle-age then contracted cancer when Marey turned thirteen. She had fought it for ten years, but she had been weak. So weak that her heart had given out before the renewed cancer had taken her.
A year later, her father had a stroke that had left him bedridden.
She could have hired someone to care for him. She could have deposited him in a nice little nursing home and resumed her life. But she loved her father. With his gentle smile and soft voice and his remorse that her life had been spent caring for him and her mother rather than being the woman she should have been.
There had been no regrets. But there had been no time for relationships. She had known her father would be gone within a short time, and she hadn’t been willing to desert him, to leave him to strangers to care for him any more than she had to.
But she had found an escape. From the pain and the depression of watching her parents dying in front of her eyes, Marey had found an escape in the books she loved. First as a reader, then as an editor. She had worked the past six years as an editor for an erotic book publisher. The books were blistering, incredibly hot. And for a while they had eased the dark, sexual fantasies that haunted her. After her father’s death…
She breathed in deeply. What a fool she had been. She had married the first man to ask her no more than a few months after having met him. Within weeks the rages had started. Within six months he was hitting her. It had been a horrible blow to her confidence. Within weeks of the divorce, she had learned that Vince had no intentions of letting her go. If he even suspected she was interested in another man, accidents began to happen.
She didn’t know if she could live if something happened to Sax because of her. To this point, Vince had always struck at her, but she knew Vince had never felt truly threatened that she would find someone else to share her life, or her money with.
It was all about the money and the power he thought it would bring him.
“If you don’t stop thinking so hard, I’m going to have to f**k you again,” Sax mumbled at her ear, his deep voice rumbling in his chest with morning drowsiness.
A smile quirked her lips.
“You play dirty pool,” she told him quietly. “Sometimes I have to think, Sax. This is one of those times.”
He grunted mockingly. “I don’t like how you think sometimes, have I mentioned that?”
He pushed the sheet away from her body before his hand flattened against her belly, his lips smoothing over her shoulder. She stared down at the rich coffee tone of his skin contrasting so exotically with her pale skin.
“Now, I would have never guessed that,” she countered, allowing the amusement to weigh heavily in her voice. “You’ve surprised me, Sax.”
He chuckled, a low sexy sound that had her womb clenching in response.
“You’re a smart-ass first thing in the morning.” He stroked her stomach slowly, his fingertips lightly drawing over her flesh, sending soft, though destructive sensations washing over her nerve endings.
It wasn’t so much sexual as it was caring…loving. She tried to steer clear of that. She couldn’t let daydreams get mixed up with reality. She had made that mistake once before.
He cared. She was certain he cared for her. Sax was often a brutally honest person, he rarely pulled his punches with anyone. But for three years he had moved on the outer edges of her life, always there, always watching her. He had never, not at any time, unleashed his infamous biting sarcasm on her. He had never looked at her with the brutal icy-eyed gaze she had seen him give others. He had never done anything but treat her with the utmost consideration and heated hunger.
Yes. He cared. And perhaps he could have loved, if she was strong enough to be as brave as she had needed to be three years before.
“Yeah, Ella calls me a smart-ass often,” she finally answered, her gaze going back to the ceiling as she smiled fondly, thinking of her friend. “Actually, I think her favorite insult is bitch.”
“Not hardly.” His fingers strummed over her hip. “Smart-ass I’ll accept though. Now what has you so solemn this morning?”