No Longer Forbidden(47)
It struck him that he’d taken advantage of her when he took her to bed. She’d been at a very weak moment in her life. This was why she’d given herself to him. She was losing the life she’d known and now faced even bigger changes.
“It’s okay,” he lied, brushing away her ineffectual hands, desperate to sop up his guilt. He never should have touched her. He smoothed her hair, releasing the scarf when he came to it. “You’re going to be okay, Ro.” His shoulders throbbed with remorse. He stripped her to her undies and eased her beneath the sheet, desperate to tuck her in and close this day for her.
Tomorrow they’d talk. What he needed now was time to come to terms with the injury he’d done her if he’d got her pregnant.
“Don’t leave, Nic, please,” she pleaded, pressing his fingers to her soaked cheek.
He wavered. She was an iceberg. He compromised by toeing off his shoes and dragging his belt free one-handed, remaining clothed as he moved under the covers. With a tight embrace he tried to keep her shuddering frame from falling apart.
“Just until I fall asleep,” she murmured. “Then you can go. I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said with deep anguish, and soothed the fresh tension that gathered in her. “Shh. Go to sleep. It’ll be okay,” he lied again, while the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy circled in his mind like a shark’s fin. “You’ll see.”
CHAPTER TEN
ROWAN stretched and the hot weight of blankets surrounding her moved.
When she opened her eyes Nic’s arresting blue eyes were right there, hooded and enigmatic, fixed on hers. His jaw was smudged with a night’s growth of bronze-gold stubble, his hair glinting in the morning sunlight pouring through the uncovered window.
Her breakdown last night came back to her in a rush. The day had been an endurance event of fielding enquiries about her leg and her future. She didn’t have any pat answers, and through it all Nic had loomed over her like a giant microscope, seeming to watch her every move.
The tension hadn’t let up, so it was understandable that after holding them back all day she had let her emotions get the better of her when she was finally alone. Letting Nic find her at such a low point and grasping at him like a lifeline, however, made her feel more raw and exposed than after the wicked things they’d done to each other in the throes of passion.
Flinching in vexation, she sat up to let her hair curtain her face while she tried to minimize how defenseless she felt. “Gosh, was that your virginity I just took? I can’t imagine you’ve spent many nights fully clothed in bed with a female without the precursor of sex. Be honest—not counting this one, how many?”
“She’s back,” he remarked under his breath, pushing away the covers and rolling to sit on the far edge of the bed. “As it happens, you’re not my first,” he stated flatly. “I used to let my baby sister snuggle up to me when she’d had a bad dream.”
Rowan stared at the wrinkled back of his shirt, barely able to process the information through her sleep-muddled brain. “You have a sister? But you said— On your mother’s side? Is she younger?”
“And two half-brothers, if you’re taking a tally.”
No surprise to learn he was the oldest, but the rest stunned her. “That’s a big family. Why do you never talk about them?”
His shoulders jerked, then he stood abruptly. Maybe she’d imagined his flinch.
“I don’t talk to them.” He stretched his arms toward the ceiling and his shirt came loose from his waistband while his joints cracked. “My aunt used to bring us together for a week in the summer when she lived in Katarini, but once she moved to America my mother’s husband put a stop to my seeing them. He didn’t like them coming home and talking about me.”
“That’s mean!” Rowan’s already peeled-thin heart was abraded further by his casual reference to what amounted to outright cruelty. “Your poor mother,” she couldn’t help adding, sitting in the pool of rumpled blankets and retrospective empathy.
“My poor mother?” Nic swung around with a harsh expression of astonishment, arms lowering.
“Well, yes.” Rowan shrugged, her hand imperceptibly tightening on the edge of the sheet. “Having to stay married to someone like that. He’s probably the reason she didn’t see you at school. He sounds controlling.”
“She didn’t ‘have to’ stay married to him. She chose to. She chose him over me.” His flash of rejection was quick and deep, so swiftly snatched back and hidden behind chilling detachment she could only guess how much practice he’d had at stifling it.