In a move I was beginning to recognize as his tell for whenever he was really agitated, he raked a hand through his hair. He sat forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and pinned me in his gaze.
“There won’t be any girlfriends,” he said. “There won’t be anyone else while I’m married to you.”
The air was sucked out of the room again. I really needed to take a look at the ventilation. “So the ‘no sex’ clause is actually like a ‘celibacy’ clause?”
He leaned back in his chair, none of the high-tension electricity leaving him. “You should go over it with your attorney.”
“I want to go over it with you.”
One of his fingers started a restless staccato beat against his thigh. “It clarifies that there’s no expectation of sex between us. It’s not a requirement to fulfill the contract.”
I mulled that over for a while. “So, then, it’s voluntary.”
He’d been looking at a print on the wall of a kitten hanging from the branch of a tree by one paw that read, HANG IN THERE! but his head snapped front and center, and he stared at me with such intensity I almost thought he was angry.
I said, “I mean, it’s not against the rules.”
I can’t describe his expression. It hovered somewhere between serial killer and starving animal.
He said softly, “Why, Future Mrs. Boudreaux, are you propositioning me?”
And here came the blood flow from my neck straight up to my hairline like my head was dipped in a bucket of red paint. I looked down at the contract, hiding.
“Sorry,” I said. “This is just all very strange. I suppose I’m nervous. Forget I even asked.”
“Oh, no. You’re not getting off that easily. Look at me.”
I peeked up at him from under my lashes.
He asked, “When was the last time you had sex?” and I swear I almost fainted.
“That’s none of your business,” I said primly, and sat up straighter in my chair.
He said, “The last time I had sex was more than four years ago.” His chuckle was wry. “I mean, with anyone other than myself.”
Wow. And I thought my dry spell was bad. “No! Really?”
“Really.”
“Are you a monk?”
He got that burning look again, the one I expected would ignite me. “Do you get the impression I’m a monk?”
Something unhealthy was happening to my heart. Being around him was causing a terrible arrhythmia that might eventually kill me. I decided to ignore his question and hazarded a tentative, “Did you . . . go through . . . um, a time when you weren’t sure . . .”
Jackson looked in aggravation at the ceiling. “I already told you I’m not gay, Bianca.”
I said, “So . . .”
He snapped, “I’m not bisexual, either, if that’s where you’re heading! I’m not confused about which sex I prefer, and I don’t have a disease I’m trying not to spread! I just haven’t had a girlfriend for a while, for Christ’s sake!”
I had to backtrack before he exploded into full Hulk mode and his clothes were ripped to shreds. “Okay, I hear you, you’re not confused, you’re not diseased, you’re just unusually . . . nonsexual.”
That was the wrong thing to say. I sensed the change in him the way you sense a change in the weather. The electricity that crackles dangerously in the air before a thunderstorm, the spike of pressure in the barometer. If his eyes had been black before, now they were the pitch of the deepest pit of hell.
He rose, stood over me, and lifted me to my feet with his hands under my armpits like I was a doll. He said, “Tell me if this feels nonsexual to you.”
Then he took my face in his hands and kissed me.
TWENTY-ONE
BIANCA
This time it was me who froze in shock when our lips came together. It took him several long moments of gentle coercion with his tongue before I finally opened my mouth. When I did, it was on a soft groan that he stole when he inhaled.
He was so big, and warm, and hard everywhere, except for his mouth, which was like cotton candy. I melted into it. He slid his thumb under my ear, and I shivered. His fingers pressed into my scalp. When he sank his teeth gently into my lower lip, lightning flashed through me.
I fisted my hand into the scruff of his neck and pulled him closer.
Suck, slide, nip, repeat, feel your pulse in all the hidden places in your body. This kiss was cashmere. It was luxuriant. It was decadent, unhurried, sweetly delicious, like stretching out on warm sand and drinking a mai tai. His scent was in my nose: pine and musk and something earthy and fresh, the way the woods smell after it rains.
He made that masculine sound deep in his throat that I found weirdly thrilling and pressed his hand into the small of my back. It brought our lower bodies together and provided me with impressive evidence that Jackson Boudreaux was anything but nonsexual.