built inside her, coiling tighter and tighter. He changed the tempo, becoming more urgent as he sensed her growing need.
He slid a second finger inside her and his name hissed from her lips, escaping her tight control. Then she was lost, her body arching off the bed, one hand gripping Rhys’s shoulder, anchoring her. She forgot to breathe for long, long seconds, lost in the darkness behind her own eyelids, her world reduced to nothing but pleasure. Then her climax was over and he shifted, coming over her, sliding inside her still-throbbing body, and before she knew it, she was coming yet again, panting and calling out his name.
Afterward, he withdrew and made her roll to the side so he could pull the quilt from beneath them. Its warm weight settled over them and Rhys wrapped his body around hers and kissed her shoulder.
“Rest. You’re going to need it,” he murmured against her skin.
She smiled, so drugged by sex and satisfaction that she couldn’t keep a grip on all the reasons why this was never going to work. Warm and sated, wrapped in Rhys’s arms, she drifted into sleep.
She woke in darkness, Rhys’s body warming her side. He’d shifted in his sleep, withdrawing his arm but remaining on her side of the bed. She lay blinking in the dark, suddenly horribly aware of how much she’d risked by sleeping with him, by letting this happen. By letting down her guard.
Everything, really.
It had been bad before when she had loved him with no hope of ever having him, but now…
He’d offered her the dream—her fantasy—on a silver platter. The two of them together. A couple. Raising their child together. A family.
The fairy tale, essentially. The one she’d told Gina she didn’t believe in. The one she’d craved in her secret heart for more weeks than she cared to count.
Cold anxiety washed through her, constricting her belly, her chest, her throat. She swallowed, hugging her arms tight to her breasts, willing the feeling to go away. It didn’t, and after a few minutes she slipped from the bed and made her way into the living room. A blanket was folded over the edge of the couch and she wrapped it around herself and huddled in the corner of the sofa, knees pulled tightly to her chest.
She stared into the shadows, trying to calm her panicky thoughts and gain some perspective.
Rhys had made love to her with a single-minded intensity. He’d said all the right things—told her she was beautiful, that she drove him crazy, that he’d been thinking about her for weeks. He’d said that they were real, that he trusted them, that he wanted to see where this took them.
If she’d scripted it herself she couldn’t have done better. Yet here she was, shivering with an overdose of flight-or-fight anxiety.
Resting her forehead against her knees, she acknowledged at last that there was nothing Rhys could say to her that would make her fear go away. There was nothing anyone could say or do because it was her fear, as old as she was, born the moment her mother died and she was left with a father who had never truly been a father.
Talking to Gina earlier in the week, Charlie had started to see how profoundly that relationship had shaped her life and who she was. Her reserve and caution had been hard-earned thanks to necessity, and as she’d grown toward adulthood she’d held on to the incidents and memories that reinforced her view of the world and let go of the good things, the memories and moments that spoke of connection and love and her worthiness as a human being.
It was so much easier to believe the bad stuff when you’d been taught that believing the good stuff only set you up for failure and rejection. It was so much easier to believe the worst, full stop. She didn’t know why that was, she only knew it was true.
She wanted to hang on to the good things that had happened today. She wanted to remember the sweaty, sexy things Rhys had whispered against her skin while he was inside her. She wanted to hang on to the way he’d gripped her so tightly, as though she was as essential to his happiness as he was to hers. She wanted to preserve the safe, surrounded feeling she’d experienced when he’d pulled her body against his and soothed her to sleep.
She wanted to believe. She wanted to grab the fairy tale by