a time limit to the number of times she would share a meal with them but tonight she’d observed everything like a distant spectator, the fear of doing something wrong, something less than perfect, gone.
In all the years of their marriage she’d always thought Raul lucky to have such a close family and had envied him. How had she never noticed the undercurrent of poison there, especially between Raul and his father? Polite, gracious poison for sure, but poison all the same.
Her stomach clenched when she thought of her own family, the half-brothers she so wished would accept her as one of their own. What would Raul say if he learned she’d bought them a home each too? He’d accuse her of trying to buy their love and he would be right because that was exactly what she’d done. Except, as with everything else she did, she’d failed. She was more like her father than she’d ever thought possible. But she didn’t want to be like him. She wanted to be like her mum, her sweet, naïve, hardworking mum who deserved everything good life had to offer.
She shut her eyes, trying to shake the direction of her thoughts and all the misery she’d thought she’d escaped when she’d married Raul, the man who’d made her feel like a princess even if only at the beginning...
A noise caught her attention and she heard the tread of his approach, followed by the creak of the bedroom door opening.
Squeezing her eyes together even more tightly, she concentrated on making her breathing deep and even. Hopefully he would assume she was asleep and leave her alone.
She heard him go into the bathroom, listened to the muffled sound of water running as he brushed his teeth. A slant of light came into the bedroom when he stepped back in, and she opened one eye a fraction. It took a few seconds for that eye to adjust to what it was seeing—Raul stripping off.
In the beat of a moment her mouth ran dry.
In no time at all he was down to his snug boxer shorts, his beautifully defined chest silhouetted against that tiny beam of light in all its glory; broad and hard, a smattering of dark hair running across his pecs and thickening the lower it ran...
Forget deep and even breathing. When his fingers hooked the sides of his boxers and tugged them off, pulling them past his strong thighs, all the air in her lungs went into hibernation.
His silhouette moved back to the bathroom and turned the light off, plunging the bedroom into darkness.
Too late she remembered her plan to feign sleep.
The bed dipped, the sheets rustled and a large, warm figure slid in beside her.
The dryness in her mouth became a memory as moisture filled it...and a lower part of her anatomy.
Immediately she pressed her thighs together in a futile attempt to counteract the heat filling between them and closed her eyes, anticipating the moment he reached out and pulled her to him.
Did she have the strength to even pretend lack of interest, when every part of her felt so heightened?
It felt as if she waited for ever for him to make his move, every passing minute dragging on to the next.
Nothing.
He lay on his side facing her, making her scold herself for not having faced the wall rather than the centre of the bed. She might have her eyes shut but she could feel his gaze upon her.
‘Well?’ she said, before she could stop her tongue from speaking. ‘Isn’t this the moment when you take your next payment?’
He shifted closer to her, his face near enough for her to feel the warmth of his minty breath.
‘My payment is your body, whenever and wherever I require,’ he said in a tone that washed through her skin like a caress, moving even closer so the tip of his nose pressed against hers.
Her lips parted in anticipation of his kiss.
‘But tonight I will put my payment on hiatus.’ Suddenly he twisted away and turned his back to her. ‘Unless you wish to make a payment to me of your own accord?’ he added, pulling the sheets over his shoulder and edging away from her.
‘That will never happen,’ she whispered, goosebumps covering her at the abrupt withdrawal of his warmth.
‘Never say never.’ He laughed quietly. ‘If you change your mind...’
‘Dream on.’
‘Oh, I will.’
Raul smiled into his pillow and closed his eyes. He could practically smell her frustration.
When he did make love to her, she would be desperate for his touch. All her defiance would be smothered by desire.
He let his mind run free, imagining all the ways he would take her and she would take him; imagined her tongue snaking its way down his chest...
But something else fought for space in his head, the same something that had been jarring in his throat since the journey back home.
Her words echoed within him, becoming louder the more he tried to push them away.
‘Nothing is allowed to be less than perfect—not even your own feelings.’
Was there some truth in it?
No. Of course there wasn’t. Charley was trying to needle him.
A memory flashed in his mind of one time he had allowed his emotions to get the better of him. It had been the night Charley told him she didn’t want his baby.
His anger had been bubbling at the surface, impossible to hide and, for the first time in his adult life, he’d given into it, lashing out verbally, cruelly. He’d called her a gold-digging bitch and told her to leave, not meaning it and never for a moment imagining she would.
It hadn’t been one-sided. The recriminations had flown both ways, Charley screaming back at him with furious tears streaming down her face that their marriage had no basis in reality, that he patronised her and treated her like a child, that he should find himself another wife, someone who could breed a dozen children for him, look perfect and run a multinational company and all in her sleep. That he was a cold, arrogant control freak.
By the time the anger had notched down to a simmer, both of them visibly calmer, her bags were packed.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he’d said. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
‘You told me to leave,’ she’d replied with a face so stony it was like looking at a statue.
‘That was in the heat of the moment and now I’m telling you to stay.’
‘But I don’t want to stay.’ She’d looked straight at him with eyes that were a red, raw mess, black streaks of make-up splotched down her cheeks. At that moment she had looked exactly as he’d felt. ‘I can’t live like this any more.’
And just like that, their marriage was over.
He almost laughed at the irony. The one time in his adulthood that he’d truly given into his feelings, his wife had walked out on him.
If
