Never. Not from the first moment. The first heartbreaking night of their marriage when he had left her sitting alone, having just lost her virginity with nothing more than a warm bath for comfort.
“We only have two weeks, agape,” he said, not heeding her request that he refrain from endearments, “and if two weeks is all there is, then I will take every moment.”
* * *
For the second time in the space of less than twenty-four hours, Kairos watched Tabitha sleep. He found it fascinating. Yet another facet to his wife he hadn’t seen over the course of the past few years. Surely she must’ve dozed off on flights, long car rides. She must have.
But he couldn’t picture it. The only image he had in his head was that of Tabitha sitting with rigid posture, her hands folded in her lap. Did he truly take so little notice of her? Or was she simply so uncomfortable in his presence that she couldn’t do anything but sit as though her life depended on her balancing a book on her head.
She was thoroughly exhausted now. From what had transpired downstairs during dinner.
Erotic images flashed before his mind’s eye. Of her kneeling before him. Of him begging her not to.
It was an act he simply wasn’t comfortable with. He didn’t want someone serving him in that way. Giving him pleasure while he reciprocated nothing. And yet, the moment her tongue had touched him he had been lost. He had not been holding her hair to move her away from him, but rather to anchor himself to the ground.
He was lying next to her now, still naked, but not touching her. She was sleeping on her side, her elbow beneath her cheek, her knees drawn up slightly. She looked young. Vulnerable. Everything she was. Though she wore the facade of a stone wall, he knew she was soft beneath it. He just chose to ignore it when it suited him.
She stirred, rolling onto her back, stretching her arms up over her head, her breasts rising with the motion.
Kairos had never been one to gaze at art. He found it a pointless exercise. The world had enough to offer in terms of beauty without adding needless glitter to it. But she was art, there was no other word for it. She looked as though she was perfectly formed from marble, warm life breathed into her making her human, but still almost impossible in her loveliness. And he was turning into a fool, thinking in poetry, which was something he held in even lower esteem than art.
Her blue eyes opened slowly, confusion drifting through her expression. “Kairos?”
“Yes. Two weeks. The table.”
She blinked. “Oh. Yes. That happened.”
“Yes.”
“I’m hungry,” she said, pushing herself into a sitting position, causing her breasts to move in yet more interesting ways.
“I think I can help with that.”
CHAPTER NINE
TABITHA WAS BAREFOOT, wearing nothing but Kairos’s white dress shirt, the crisp fabric skimming the tops of her thighs. She was certain that her makeup had come off sometime between dinner, being ravished on the table and sleeping for at least three hours afterward.
She didn’t make it a habit of being so uncovered in front of him. He never saw her with messy hair, or mascara streaked down her cheeks. And she never saw him as he was now. Shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of black dress pants. His feet were bare too, and she found something strangely erotic about it.
This was the sort of thing she imagined most couples would take for granted after five years. Rummaging around for food late at night, barely dressed after an evening of sex on the dinner table.
Well, she imagined that sex on the dinner table wasn’t all that typical regardless of the type of relationship you had.
The memories made her face heat, made her body feel restless.
She didn’t know who she was. Not anymore. The thought should scare her, because she’d left normalcy and control, the things she had prized for so many years, shattered on the floor of the balcony.
But she was going to eat cookies with Kairos, after just getting a taste of the man she’d always suspected lurked somewhere beneath the starched shirts and perfectly straight ties.
It was hard to care about anything else.
“You promised cookies,” she said, backing against the kitchen counter, folding her hands in front of her reflexively. It was the position she often assumed around Kairos. It kept her posture straight, kept her from reaching out and touching him, or anything silly like that. It was more of a concern right now than it usually was.
It seemed silly. She should be satisfied, at least marginally. That was hands down the best sex they’d ever had. And what had happened between them a month ago had been pretty amazing. Still, this had nearly obliterated the memory of that.
Forget all the years that had come before it.
“I did,” he said, turning toward one of the cabinets and opening it.
She watched much closer than necessary as he reached up to grab a tin that was placed on the top shelf. The muscles in his back bunched and shifted as he moved. She felt a strange, reckless sensation wind its way through her body. Like a shot of adrenaline straight to the system.
“The cookies,” he said, turning to face her, the Americanized term sounding strange on his lips. “As promised. Because I keep my promises.”
“Do you intend to badger me constantly?” she asked, reaching out and taking the tin from his hands. “Make sure I keenly feel the depths of the wound left in you by my betrayal?”
“If badgering is what it takes,” he said, “then certainly.”
“I promised you two weeks. I don’t see the point in you haranguing me constantly.” She pried the lid off the tin and reached inside, pulling out a piece of shortbread and lifting it to her lips. She nibbled on it slowly, watching his expression to see if she might find any clues to what he was thinking. As usual, there were none.
“I’m not haranguing you,” he said. “I’m simply a man who knows what he wants.”
“Yes, you want me to keep on being your wife. For your continued convenience.”
“Yes, for my continued convenience. For the welfare of our child as well, if you have forgotten.”
Her stomach sank. The truth was, for a moment, she had forgotten. It was so easy to forget about the tiny life she carried inside her womb. After all, she had found out less than twenty-four hours ago. And in the time since then she had been extradited to a private island by her estranged husband, made love to enthusiastically on a table and had eaten cookies barefoot in a kitchen. All of it was a bit out of the ordinary.
It was difficult for her brain to decide which particular extraordinary detail to hold on to. She had a feeling it was protecting her from reality a bit, too. Preserving her from the stark truth that she was going to bring a child into a very unsettled situation.
“Of course I haven’t forgotten,” she said, because the alternative would most certainly break the spell that was momentarily cast over him. He would take a dim view to her forgetting that she was carrying his baby. The baby was the only reason he was attempting reconciliation with her, after all.
“Honesty, Tabitha,” he said, his tone chastising, “we have an agreement that we will strive for honesty over this two weeks.”
“Sex is easier,” she returned, ignoring the heat that assaulted her cheeks. “And more fun.”
A strange expression passed over his face. “You have no argument from me on that score.”
“Cars,” she said, looking at his handsome face, trying to do something to get a handle on the heat that was still thrumming through her veins.
“What about them?” he asked.
“Why do you like them? It’s strange. You’re a very practical man. Cars don’t seem especially practical.”
“I don’t suppose they are,” he said, leaning back against the counter, curling his fingers over the edge and gripping it tight. “But I...I never had hobbies. While my peers were out going to parties and...whatever else they did, I was studying. Not just to get through school, and then university, but studying everything my father did so that I could emulate him. I didn’t deviate from his lesson plan for my life. One of the very few normal things I learned was how to drive. It was a practical skill, after all, so he allowed one of his men to teach me. I learned quickly and...for me, that was my only bit of freedom. I would take drives across the country. Alone. Otherwise I was never alone. There was always security detail, or my father or one of his advisors. So that’s why I like cars. Freedom and solitude.”
She swallowed hard, an unexpected lump of emotion lodging itself in the center of her chest. She hadn’t expected anything so complete. So honest. “Your father didn’t teach you himself?”
“No,” he said. “He was very busy.”
She nodded. “Of course.”
She hadn’t known the king well. By the time they’d married, the old man’s health was declining and he hadn’t had the energy to take many visitors, much less a commoner daughter-in-law put into place because of his disappointing younger son’s scandalous behavior.
“I didn’t want him to teach me anyway,” he said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because I loved it. My father had a way of taking things I loved and turning them into something forbidden. Something I couldn’t have.” A muscle in his jaw ticked. “I didn’t want him to do that with the cars.”