I said the idea of one of them spooks seeing you naked makes me want to commit murder myself?”
“I don’t understand,” I burst out. “This is ridiculous. You told me I had to stay in my marriage to keep myself safe, and so I have, and now you’re telling me to leave, but—”
“I said you had to stay married to him, not stay with him,” Matthew snapped.
“So it’s my fault I stayed in my own home? Is that what you’re saying?”
“What? No. Fuck!” Again, his hand shoved through his hair, leaving it standing up slightly in the back. Disturbing his normally impeccable veneer. “Look, I can’t pretend it’s easy to send you back there. It kills me, and you know it! But this—all this—will get you out of it in the end. If—if that’s still what you want.”
“Of course it’s what I want!” I was practically shouting, now. “But I’m not the one making snide jealous comments, Matthew. And I’m not pretending there’s a happy ending for us at the end of this either.”
“Who’s pretending, huh? I never said anything like that.”
“I. Know,” I gritted out. “Believe me, I know. What do you want me to say here?”
Matthew’s jaw quivered. His deep eyes tracked up and down my body once, twice, maybe more. He opened and closed his mouth several times, like he was rehearsing arguments that bubbled to the surface only to be tamped down again.
“Seriously, doll,” he said, more softly now. “What do you want me to say?”
The air between us crackled. I had never wanted to touch him more, but at the same time, my chest was heavy with overwhelming sadness. This is how it would always be. No one would come out of this anything but alone.
He was doing his best.
That was all I could ask of him.
“Nothing,” I said as my heart broke all over again. “Nothing at all.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose. Then he opened his mouth to speak.
“Fine,” he said. “I won’t.”
And then he kissed me.
Chapter Twenty
Once again, I kissed him back. I’d always kiss him back; I knew that now. Kissing Matthew was as natural to me as breathing. I couldn’t touch him and not respond. Just like I couldn’t be around him and not love him.
Even so, this was different.
Yes, it had been two months since our meeting at the Grace. Close to a month before that, a similar rendezvous. But this—raw, urgent, unstoppable—in the middle of the woods, where no one would find us and at the same time, anyone could. Somehow, it was completely different.
“I can’t,” he said in between kisses as we stumbled through the dirt and into the solid trunk of my favorite old oak. “Goddammit, Nina, I can’t fucking stop.”
“I know. Oh, God, I know.” My words were whimpers in between starving lunges for his lips, his cheeks, any part of him I could find. It really did feel like, in this moment, I needed him to breathe.
“Wanting you. Loving you. Needing you.” His teeth scraped under my jaw like he was trying to consume me. “Do you understand? It’s ruining me.”
I winced, even as my fingers curled into the slightly damp thickets of his hair. Oh, I understood that too. True, I was ruined in too many ways to count long before I met him. But since that fateful night, I’d become utterly shattered. I didn’t recognize myself anymore.
I was no longer Nina Evelyn Astor de Vries Gardner. In his arms, I was a phantom being, somehow truer than anyone I had ever been, but at the same time, nameless.
I existed simply for this.
His hands slipped past the waistband of my breeches, taking harsh handfuls of flesh as he twisted us around and backed me up against the tree.
“Fuck,” he muttered as he yanked at the buttons and fly. “Get this off. Get everything off.”
“We shouldn’t,” I whispered even as I helped him, pulling hard enough that I feared I might rip the zipper.
“We must,” Matthew argued back with a groan as his hands found bare skin.
He sank to his knees there on the forest floor, bringing my pants with him until they were piled atop my riding boots. His palms slid up and down my thighs while he pressed his lips to the smooth skin of each and inhaled deeply. The cross and the saint hanging from the chain around his neck clinked lightly.
The first time he had ever done this to me, we were high above the city, protected