course I am.”
Their eyes locked and held, and the tightening in his stomach intensified, radiating outward, desire gnawing at him with an urgency that was impossible to ignore.
“We’ll have to have the wedding soon. Before you start to show,” he said, his voice harsher than he’d intended.
She chewed her lip, her eyes betraying insecurity, fear, for the first time since he’d met her. Anger he’d seen, sadness, too, but never this bleak hopelessness. It made his chest ache as fiercely as the rest of his body.
“As I said, there are provisos to my agreement.”
“You did say. What you didn’t say was what those little stipulations were.”
“I don’t want our child in boarding school or anything like that. I want him or her to have as much of a normal upbringing as possible. No team of nannies, no catering to his every whim. I don’t want a spoiled child, either.”
“Do I seem like I was a spoiled child?”
“Yes.” She replied without missing a beat, and then continued. “I want to continue being active in advocating for children. Maybe organize a charity or something.”
“A wonderful idea. We have several organizations in place and having my princess closely involved would probably do wonders for them.”
“And I don’t … I want my own room.”
He inclined his head. “That is a common practice in royal marriages.”
“I don’t think you understand. I don’t want for us to … I don’t want to have a sexual relationship with you.”
Alison tried to clamp down the wild fluttering in her stomach. She knew Maximo wouldn’t be happy. Hadn’t he referenced their physical attraction as a reason for marriage? But this was what she needed in order to be able to accept his proposal, such as it was.
His kiss had decimated her control, had made her forget who she was, who he was, where she was. Going to bed with him … What would that do to her closely guarded self-control? The thought of surrendering herself like that, of stripping herself bare both physically and emotionally before another human being in that way, terrified her to her bones. Marriage she could deal with, but sexual intimacy was several steps beyond her.
She was attracted to him; unreasonably so. And that only made her more determined to maintain a healthy distance between them. If she didn’t want him like this, if being near him didn’t make her limbs weak and her pulse pound in her chest, at the apex of her thighs, if she didn’t get embarrassingly wet with wanting just from the brush of his mouth over hers, she might be able to simply deal with it. But it was the ease with which he robbed her of her common sense, her ability to think coherently, that had all of her internal alarms going off. He had too much power over her already, and throwing sex in with that big mess of emotions was a recipe for absolute disaster.
“That makes no sense. You can’t deny that we are extremely attracted to each other.”
“Maybe not. But I don’t feel like I can commit to that sort of relationship with you. Things are complicated enough. A marriage in a strictly legal sense I can handle. But I’ve only known you for twenty-four hours and I can’t even begin to consider a sexual relationship with you. And you’re a very attractive man. I’m sure there will always be lots of women who want to …”
“If you’re concerned about my fidelity, don’t be. I was married for seven years and never once did I look at another woman. It was not a hardship for me.”
Maybe not, but Maximo had been in love with his wife. They weren’t in love. Not that she cared. But if she were to sleep with him, she would need to know that he was being faithful to her. And that was just one more reason not to cross that line with him. Even imagining a hypothetical situation where they were intimately involved made her care about who he slept with. It made her feel things like jealousy and insecurity, and other emotions she had no business feeling. If she actually made love with him it would no doubt be multiplied by a hundred, and that was just one of the many things she was trying to avoid.
“I’m not concerned about that. But if we were sleeping together then yes, I would want you to be faithful. You would want the same from me. Emotions would become involved.”
“Not for me,” he said starkly. She knew he spoke the truth. But he probably had lots of sexual experience. Divorcing love from sex was probably second nature to him. For her … she knew instinctively that sex could have a seriously devastating emotional effect on her. She just wouldn’t be able to open herself up like that to someone without becoming involved. It was one of the reasons she’d avoided it for the past twenty-eight years.
The last thing she needed was for him to become a necessity to her, and she knew that if she let herself she could easily melt into Maximo, let his strength hold her up when things were hard. She could grow to depend on him, and she’d spent far too long learning to be independent, to be in control, to take that chance.
“Maybe not. But this is what I want.”
“And you wouldn’t mind if I were having sex with other women?” he asked, his words obviously chosen to elicit a response from her. One they most certainly got, but she wasn’t going to let him know that.
“I wouldn’t care either way. If we aren’t sleeping together then there isn’t a relationship to be faithful to.”
“You may feel differently once we speak our vows.”
“I can’t imagine that I will. What we have in common is the desire to do what’s right for our child. Nothing more. We didn’t even conceive in the way most couples do.”
“But we very easily could have.”
It wasn’t true—she knew it wasn’t—and yet it was far too easy to visualize the image, a picture of her meeting Maximo in a bar, a restaurant, on the street. Of them talking, smiling, laughing. Having dinner together. Going home together. Making love.
No. It was easy for him to assume that might have happened, because he figured her for a normal woman who dated, had casual relationships, had sex. She didn’t do any of those things. And she had never felt lacking in any way because of it. Until now. Now she felt at a disadvantage. How was she supposed to deal with a man like Maximo? A sophisticated, experienced man who probably knew a lot more about women and sex than the average male. And she knew far less about men and sex than the average female.
“Those are my terms, Max,” she said softly. “I can’t marry you if you won’t agree to them.”
“Then I agree to them. I don’t want a martyr in my bed. I’ve never had to coerce a woman into sex in my life and I don’t intend to start doing so with my own wife.”
It was the absolute truth. He wasn’t about to blackmail or beg to get a woman to have sex with him, not even one he desired as much as he did Alison. He hadn’t even begged Selena when she’d moved out of their room. No was no, even from his wife.
He was surprised that Alison was denying them both what they so obviously wanted, but not even a sexless marriage was new to him. He’d been there. He imagined it had been Selena’s way of punishing him for not giving her a baby, although the issue had been with her body and not his. It hadn’t mattered
