He laughed and tousled the aforementioned hair. “It is sexy as sin and you know it. As for the color…how can you complain when it shines like liquid sand?”
“But I’m shaped like a pumpkin.”
He used one knee to part her legs so she draped across him in intimate disarray. His male hardness pressed against her. He thrust upward. “Does this feel like I think you are ugly?”
What was the question? She couldn’t remember; she was too busy melting into a puddle of desire on top of him. Silence reigned while he touched her in ways she’d forgotten and brought her body to the peak of pleasure over and over again. She didn’t have the energy to start another discussion when they were done. She found herself slipping into sleep cuddled against his side, feeling more at peace than she had since discovering her pregnancy.
Warm security surrounded Alexandra and she didn’t want to make the trip to full wakefulness. How many times had she had this dream since leaving Paris? She was back in Dimitri’s bed, his arms wrapped around her like protective bands, their lower limbs entwined to make them two parts of one whole. It seemed so real, but she knew if she allowed her mind to continue its journey toward complete lucidity, the fantasy would disappear, leaving cold reality behind.
He shifted against her, rubbing his hairy leg between her smooth limbs and she rocketed to complete wakefulness. She opened her eyes to black curling hair over a bronze, muscled chest. Dimitri. Along with her sensory impressions, memories of the night before blasted her conscious mind.
They had made love. Many times. He had been afraid of hurting the baby, asking her every time if it would be all right and she had reassured him. Again and again. Because she had wanted him. The last time, he’d woken her around dawn and seduced her with a sensitivity that had touched all the way to her soul.
It was incomprehensible that the man who had treated her so tenderly the night before could be the same one who had walked away from her without a backward glance.
Only according to him, he had looked back and found her gone. His grandfather had refused life-saving surgery until Dimitri had set a wedding date with Phoebe. While the knowledge her eviction from his life had not been voluntary soothed some of her still lacerated emotions, it did not soothe them all.
Would his grandfather have made such a demand if Dimitri had told the older man about Alexandra and implied she had an important place in his life? The problem was, she had not had that place at the time. She had been a temporary lover to Dimitri, a mistress to an unmarried man.
Last night had not felt like the joining of a man and his temporary lover or mistress, though. It had felt almost sacred.
Knowing about his grandfather put a new perspective on the events four months ago, but the older man wasn’t the reason Dimitri had denied paternity of their baby. As much as she didn’t want to, she had to take some of the blame for that one. By withholding part of her life from him, she had set up fertile ground for distrust to grow.#p#分页标题#e#
In some ways, Dimitri had done the same to her. He hadn’t told her about his grandfather’s heart attack and when she asked about his family, he had been reticent. She knew things about his brother and his grandfather, but he’d always changed the subject when his parents came up. They hadn’t died until he was ten, so it couldn’t be because he had no memories of them. He’d never taken her to meet his family, never invited his brother to the apartment for a meal when the younger man was in Paris.
Now he wanted her to marry him. She shifted restlessly, at once both loving and hating the sense of security his warmth provided. What had changed? The answer to that was obvious, she derided herself. One, she was pregnant with a baby he now accepted he had fathered. For a Petronides male, that would change a lot. Hadn’t she known that when she told him?
At the time she had hoped it would have the exact result it finally had: his desire to marry her. Now that desire felt like too little too late.
The second change was that his wife-to-be had married his brother. Dimitri had acted like the betrayal hadn’t mattered to him, but even if his emotions had not been involved…his pride would have been. A quick marriage of his own would assuage some of the wounds his pride had sustained, particularly if it was to a woman who had adored him like she once had done.
She’d recognized last night that she still loved him, but she didn’t adore him. Did that make her any less vulnerable?
“Have you figured it all out yet?” Dimitri asked from above her head.
She tilted back to look him in the face. “Figured what out?”