“Officially? A week.” The woman winced and shifted position uncomfortably. “But it feels like any minute to me.”
Sean shivered dramatically. “Don’t say that. At least wait until we get home again.”
Melinda patted his hand. “Sean’s practiced making the hospital drive from our house five times.”
“Smart,” Teresa said.
Rico snorted.
Sean sneered at him.
“The hospital is only ten minutes away,” Melinda said with an indulgent smile for her husband.
“There could be traffic,” he said, defending himself.
“On Tesoro?” Rico laughed and shook his head at his cousin. “The landmass is so small, if you were on the other side of the island it would still only take you twenty minutes to reach the hospital.”
“Fine, fine.” Sean poured his wife another glass of sparkling water, then topped off his own champagne. “Just wait until your wife is pregnant. Then we’ll see how funny you think this is.”
Silence dropped over the table with a thud of awkwardness. Teresa winced. Melinda slapped her husband’s arm again. Rico frowned and Sean took a deep drink of his champagne. “Going to be a long night.”
Five
Going to be a long night.
Sean King’s words echoed over and over again in Teresa’s mind as she waited in Rico’s bedroom hours later. He’d already promised that they would sleep in the same bed. But there was no way she could relax until he was here.
She figured she now knew how a sacrificial virgin must have felt just before being tied to an altar stone. Of course, she was no virgin—that ship had sailed long ago. But the nerves were there. The anxiety about what she should do. He’d said nothing would happen between them unless she initiated it. So. Should she?
In spite of the anxiousness holding her in its grip, Teresa was…aroused. And she’d thought that over the years she had managed to bury what she’d felt for Rico. She had never met another man who could stir up her insides with a single look. She had thought that Rico was her one chance at happiness and when she’d left him, she had accepted that she would never have him again.
Now she was here, and Teresa was forced to admit, at least to herself, that the thought of going to bed with Rico again had her body burning in anticipation.
It had been so long since he’d touched her. So long since she’d felt the intimate slide of his body into hers. The mental images crashing through her mind made her legs tremble so badly that she was forced to drop into the closest chair. Teresa took a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping for calm. Calm, though, was impossible to find.
She looked around his bedroom, noting that the space was done in shades of soothing white, from cream to ivory and every shade in between. There were splashes of color in the paintings on the walls and the jewel-toned pillows stacked on the bed wide enough to qualify as a soccer field. The bamboo floor gleamed like old honey in the soft lighting. The chair she sat in was one of two drawn up before a now cold fireplace of river stone. A table between the chairs held a carafe of lemon water, left there by one of Rico’s efficient yet nearly invisible staff.
She poured herself a glass of water and drank half of it down, hoping to ease her dry throat. But there was no help there, either. She wasn’t thirsty, she was needy.