More than a Convenient Marriage?

His clamoring libido was a weakness that governed him where she was concerned. The sex had always been good, but not exactly a place where they met as equals. In the beginning he’d been favored with more experience. The leader. He wasn’t hampered by shyness or other emotions that women attached to intimacy. He’d tutored her and loved it.

Adara had maintained a certain reserve in the bedroom that she had never completely allowed to let slide away, however. While the sex had always been intense and satisfying, the power had subtly shifted over time into her favor. She decided when and how much and if.

Resentment churned in him, bringing on a scowl. He didn’t like that she was threatening him on so many levels. Yanking the rug on sex was bad enough. Now all that he’d built was on a shaky foundation.

Why? Did it have to do with her fear of her father? Did she fear him? Blame him? Apprehension kept him from asking.

And Adara gave no clue to her thoughts, acting preoccupied with reading the signage, ignoring him, aggravating him further.

She peered over the edge of the steep slope to where a rope was tied to the base of the wooden crosspiece and, without a word, looped the thin strap of her purse over her head and shoulder then maneuvered to the edge of the cliff. Taking up the rope, she clung to it as she began a very steep, backward descent.

Gideon was taken aback. “What the hell are you doing?”

She paused. Uncertainty made her bottom lip flinch before she firmed it. “Going swimming.”

“Like hell you are.” Who was this woman?

The anxiety that spasmed across her features transitioned through uncertainty before being overcome by quiet defiance. “I always did as I was told because I was scared my father would punish me. Unless you intend to take up controlling my behavior with violence, I’m doing what I want from now on.”

The pit of his belly was still a hard knot over her revelations about her childhood. He would never hurt her or threaten to and was now even more inclined to treat her with kid gloves. At the same time, everything in him clamored to exert control over her, get what he wanted and put an end to this nonsense. The conflicting feelings, too deep for comfort, left him standing there voicelessly glaring his frustration.

Despite her bold dare, there was something incredibly vulnerable in her stance of toughness though. An air of quiet desperation surrounded her as tangibly as the hardened determination she was trying to project.

She wanted to prove something. He didn’t know what it was, but bullying her into going back to the hotel wasn’t the way to find out. It wouldn’t earn him any points toward keeping their marriage intact either.

“It’s fine, Gideon. You can go,” she said in her self-possessed way. Papa doesn’t think the Paris upgrade is necessary. I’ll find my own way home after our meeting.

“And leave you to break your neck? No,” he said gruffly.

The way she angled a look up at him seemed to indicate suspicion. Maybe it was deserved. He was chivalrous, always picked up her heavy bags, but neither of them were demonstrative. Maybe he’d never acted so protective before, but she’d never tried to do anything so perilous.

“I won’t break my neck,” she dismissed and craned it to watch as she tentatively sought a step backward.

A completely foreign clench of terror squeezed his lungs. Did she not see how dangerous this was? He skimmed his hand over his sweat-dampened hair.

“Adara, I won’t hurt you, but I will get physical if you don’t stop right there and at least let me get behind you so I can catch you if you slip.”

She stared, mouth pursing in mutiny. “I don’t have to ask your permission to live my life, Gideon.” Not anymore, was the silent punctuation to that.

“Well, I won’t ask your permission to save it. Stay put until I get behind you.”

He sensed her wariness as he took his time inspecting the rope, approving its marine grade, noting it was fairly new and in good repair, as was the upright it was tied to. Assured they weren’t going to plunge to their deaths, he let his loose grip slide along the rope until his hand met Adara’s.

She stiffened as he brushed past her, making him clench his teeth. When had his touch become toxic?

Ask, he chided himself, but things were discordant enough. His assumptions about her were turned on their heads, her predictability completely blown out of the water. He didn’t know what to say or what to expect next, so he picked his way down the slope in grim silence, arriving safely on to the pocket of sand between monolithic gray boulders.

The tide was receding, but the cove was steep enough it was still a short beach into a deep pool. It was the type of place young lovers would tryst, and his mind immediately turned that way. Adara wasn’t even looking at him, though.

Adara shrugged against the sting of sweat and the disturbing persistence Gideon was showing. She thought they had an unspoken agreement to back off when things got personal, but even though she’d spilled way more of her family history than she’d ever meant to, he was sticking like humidity.

She didn’t know how to react to that. And should she thank him for his uncharacteristic show of consideration in accompanying her down here? Or tell him again to shove off? He was so hard to be around sometimes, so unsettling. He was shorting out a brain that was already melting in the heat. She desperately wanted to cool off so she could think straight again, but she hadn’t brought a bathing suit and—

Oh, to heck with it. She kicked off her flip-flops and began unbuttoning her shirt.

“Really?” he said, not hiding the startled uptick in his tone.

She didn’t let herself waver. Maybe this was out of character, but this was her new life. She was tossing off fear of reprisal, embracing the freedom to follow impulse.

“I miss Greece. My aunt let us run wild here. In Katarini, not this island, but we’d do exactly this: tramp along the beach until we got hot then we’d strip to our underthings and jump in.”

“Your aunt was a nudist?” he surmised.

“A free spirit. She never married, never had children—” Here Adara faltered briefly. “I intend to emulate her from now on.”

She shed her shorts and ran into the water in her bra and panties, feeling terribly exposed as she left her decision to never have children evaporating on the sizzling sand.

The clear, cool water rose to her waist within a few splashing steps. She fell forward and ducked under, arrowing deep into the silken blur filled with the muted cacophony of creaks and taps and swishing currents.

When her lungs were ready to burst, she shot up for air, blinking the water from her eyes and licking the salt from her lips, baptized into a new version of herself. The campy phrase the first day of the rest of your life came to her with a pang of wistful anticipation.

Gideon’s head appeared beside her, his broad shoulders flexing as he splayed out his arms to keep himself afloat. His dark lashes were matted and glinting, his thick hair sleeked back off his face, exposing his angular bone structure and taking her breath with his action-star handsomeness. The relief of being in the cool water relaxed his expression, while his innate confidence around the water—in any situation, really—made him incredibly compelling.

She would miss that sense of reliability, she acknowledged with a hitch of loss.

“I’ve never tried to curb your independence,” he asserted. “Marrying me gained you your freedom.”

They’d never spoken so bluntly about her motives. She’d only stated in the beginning that she’d like to keep working until they had a family, but he knew her better after her confession today. He was looking at her as though he could see right into her.

It made her uncomfortable.

“Marrying at all was a gamble,” she acknowledged with a tentative honesty that caused her veins to sting with apprehension. “But you’re right. I was fairly sure I’d have more control over my life living with you than I had with my father.”

She squinted against the glare off the water as she silently acknowledged that she’d learned to use Gideon to some extent, pitting him against her father when she wanted something for herself. Not often and not aggressively, just with a quiet comment that Gideon would prefer this or that.

“You had women working for you in high-level positions,” she noted, remembering all the minute details that had added up to a risk worth taking. “You were shocked that I didn’t know how to drive. You fired that man who was harassing your receptionist. I was reasonably certain my life with you would be better than it was with my father so I took a chance.” She glanced at him, wondering if he judged her harshly for advancing her interests through him.

“So what’s changed?” he challenged. “I taught you to drive. I put you in charge of the hotels. Do you want more responsibility? Less? Tell me. I’m not trying to hem you in.”

No, Gideon wasn’t a tyrant. He was ever so reasonable. She’d always liked that about him, but today that quality put her on edge. “Lexi—”

“—is a nonissue,” he stated curtly. “Nothing happened and do you know why? Because I thought you were having an affair and got myself on a plane and chased you down. I didn’t even think twice about it. Why didn’t you do that? Why didn’t you confront me? Why didn’t you ask me why I’d even consider letting another woman throw herself under me?”

“You don’t have to be so crude about it!” She instinctively propelled herself backward, pushing space between herself and the unbearable thought of him sleeping with another woman. She hadn’t been able to face it herself, let along confront him, not with everything else that had happened.

“You said we don’t talk,” he said with pointed aggression. “Let’s. You left me twisting with sexual frustration. Having an affair started to look like a viable option. If you didn’t want me going elsewhere, why weren’t you meeting my needs at home?”

“I did! I—”

“Going down isn’t good enough, Adara.”

His vulgarity was bad enough, but it almost sounded like a critique and she resented that. She tried hard to please him and could tell that he liked what she did, so why did he have to be so disparaging about it?

Unbearably hurt, she kicked toward shore, barely turning her head to defend, “I was pregnant. What else could I do?”

How he reacted to that news she didn’t care. She just wanted to be away from him, but as her toes found cold, thick sand, she halted. Leaving the water suddenly seemed a horribly exposing thing to do. How stupid to think she could become a new person by shedding a few stitches of clothing. She was the same old worthless Adara who couldn’t even keep a baby in her womb.

The sun seared across her shoulders. Her wet hair hung in her eyes and she kept her arms folded tightly across her chest, trying to hold in the agony.

She felt ridiculous, climbing down to this silly beach that was impossible to leave, revealing things that were intensely personal to her and wouldn’t matter at all to him.

“What did you say?” He was too close. She flinched, feeling the sharpness of his voice like the tip of a flicking whip.

“You heard me,” she managed to say even though her throat was clogging. She clenched her eyes shut, silently begging him to do what he always did. Say nothing and give her space. She didn’t want to do this. She never, ever wanted to do this again.

“You were pregnant?” His voice moved in front of her.

She turned her head to the side, hating him for cutting off her escape to the beach, hating herself for lacking the courage to take it when she’d had the chance.

Keeping her eyes tightly closed, she dug her fingers into her arms, her whole body aching with tension. “It doesn’t matter,” she insisted through her teeth. “It’s over and I just want a divorce.”

Gideon was distantly aware of the sea trying to pull him out with the tide. His entire being was numb enough that he had to concentrate on keeping his feet rooted as he stared at Adara. She was a knot of torment. For the first time he could see her suffering and it made his heart clench. When had she started to care about the miscarriages? The last one had been called into him from across the globe, his offer to come home dismissed as unnecessary.

“Tell me—”

“What is there to tell, Gideon?” Her eyes opening into pits of hopeless fury. Her face creased with sharp lines of grief. “It was the same as every other one. I did the test and held my breath, terrified to so much as bump my hip on the edge of my desk. And just when I let myself believe this time might be different, the backache started and the spotting appeared and then it was twenty-four hours of medieval torture until I was spat out in hell with nothing to show for it. At least I didn’t have the humiliation of being assaulted by the people in white coats this time.”

She took a step to the side, thinking to circle him and leave the water, but he shifted into her path, his hand reaching to stop her. His expression was appalled. “What do you mean about being assaulted?”

She cringed from his touch, her recoil like a knee into his belly. Gideon clenched his abdominal muscles and curled his fingers into his palm, forcing his hand to his side under the water even though he wanted to grip her with all his strength and squeeze the answers out of her. She couldn’t possibly be saying what he thought she was saying.

“What people in white coats?” he demanded, but the words sounded far away. “Are you telling me you didn’t go to the hospital?” Intense, fearful dread hollowed out his chest as he watched her mask fear and compunction with a defiant thrust of her chin.

“Do you know what they do to you after you’ve had a miscarriage? No, you don’t. But I do and I’m sick of it. So, no, I didn’t go,” she declared with bitter rebelliousness.

Horror washed through him in freezing waves.

“We need to get you to a doctor.” He flew his gaze to the cliff, terror tightening in him. What the hell had he been thinking, letting her descend to this impossible place?

“It was three weeks ago, Gideon. If it was going to kill me, it would have by now.”

“It could have,” he retorted, helplessness making him brutal. “You could have bled to death.”

She shrugged that off with false bravado, eyes glossy and red. “At the time that looked like a—what’s the expression you used? A viable option?”

It was a vicious slap that he deserved. While he’d been contemplating an affair, she’d been losing the battle to keep their baby. Again. And she’d been filled with such dejection she’d refused medical care and courted death.

The fact she’d let herself brush elbows with the Grim Reaper made him so agitated, he clipped out a string of foul Greek curses. “Don’t talk like that. Damn it, you should have told me.”

“Why?” she lashed out in uncharacteristic confrontation. “Do you think I enjoy telling you what a failure I am? It’s not like you care. You just go back to work while I sit there screaming inside.” She struck a fist onto the surface of the water. “I hate it. I can’t go on like this. I won’t. I want a divorce.”

She splashed clumsily from the surf, her wet underpants see-through, her staggered steps so uncoordinated and indicative of her distress it made him want to reach out for her, but he was rooted in the water, aghast.

He cared. Maybe he’d never told her, but each lost baby had scored his heart. This one, knowing he could have walked into the penthouse and found both of them dead, lanced him with such deep horror he could barely acknowledge it.

She was the one who had appeared not to care. The fact she’d been so distraught she hadn’t sought medical attention told him how far past the end of her rope she had been, but she’d never let him see any of that.

He followed her on heavy feet, pausing where they’d left their clothes.

She gave him a stark look, her gaze filling with apprehension as she took in that he was completely naked. Her fingers hurried to button her blouse.

Hell. He wasn’t trying to come on to her.

“Adara.” A throb of tender empathy caught in him like a barbed hook. He reached out to cup her neck, her hair a weight on his wrist.

She stiffened, but he didn’t let her pull away. He carefully took her shoulder in his opposite hand and made her face him, for once driven by a need deeper than sexual to touch her.

“I’m sorry,” he said with deep sincerity. “Sorry we lost another baby, sorry you felt you couldn’t tell me. I do care. You’ve always been stoic about it and I’ve followed your lead. How could I know it was devastating you like this if you didn’t say?”

She shivered despite the heat. Her blink released a single tear from the corner of her eye. Her plump mouth trembled with vulnerability, and a need to comfort overwhelmed him.

Gideon gathered her in. She seemed so delicate and breakable. He touched his mouth to hers, wanting to reassure, to console.

It wasn’t meant to be a pass, but she felt so good. The kiss was a soft press of a juicy fruit to the mouth of a starved man. He couldn’t help opening his lips on hers, sliding his tongue along the seam then pressing in for a deep lick of her personal flavor. Involuntarily, his arms tightened while greed swelled in him. Everything in him expanded in one hard kick. His erection pulled to attention in a rush of heat, fed by the erotically familiar scent of his wife.

The feathery touch of her hands whispered from his ribs to his shoulder blades. A needy sob emanated from her throat, encouraging him.

Here. Now. His brain shorted into the most basic thoughts as his carnal instincts took over. He skimmed his hand to the wet underpants covering her backside, starting to slide them down even as he deepened the kiss and began to ease them both to the sand.

Adara’s knees softened for one heartbeat, almost succumbing, then she broke away from their kiss with a ragged moan, stumbling backward a few steps as she shoved from him with near violence. Her flush of arousal dissolved into a bewildered glare of accusation and betrayal.

That wounded look bludgeoned him like a club.

Without speaking, face white, she gathered her things and moved to the bottom of the rope where she tried to force her wet legs into her denim shorts.

Gideon pinched the bridge of his nose, ears rushing with the blood still pumping hotly through his system, deeply aware that the distance had been closed until he’d forgotten that he was trying to comfort, not seduce. But the sexual attraction between them was something he couldn’t help. He wished he could. The fact that he couldn’t entirely control his hunger for her bothered him no end.

His thoughts were dark as they returned to the hotel, a fresh sweat on his salted skin as they came through the front doors, with not a word exchanged since the beach. The life he’d created with Adara, so easy on the surface, had grown choppy, teaming with undercurrents. She’d stirred up more emotion in him with this bolt to Greece than he’d suffered in years and he didn’t like it.

Part of him wanted to cut and run, but it was impossible now he understood what was driving her request for a divorce: grief. He understood that frame of mind better than she would suspect. He’d even bolted across the ocean in the very same way, more than once, but he was able to think more clearly this time. Losing the baby was heartrending, but he wasn’t left alone. He still had her. They needed to stick together. With careful navigation, they’d be back on course and sailing smoothly. When she came out the other side, she’d appreciate that he hadn’t let her do anything rash.

He hoped.

Adara blinked as they entered the artificial light of the hotel foyer. The temperature change hit her between the eyes like a blow. The boutique accommodation was the best the island offered, but nothing like the luxury service she took for granted in her thousand-room high-rise hotels. Still, she liked the coziness of this small, out-of-the-way place. She’d give serious thought to developing some hideaways like this herself, she decided.

Another time. Right now she felt like one giant blister, hot and raw, skin so thin she could be nicked open by the tiniest harsh word.

Desire had almost overwhelmed her on the beach. Gideon’s kiss had been an oasis in a desert of too many empty days and untouched nights. His heartfelt words, the way he’d enfolded her as if he could make the whole world right again, had filled her with hope and relief. For a few seconds she had felt cherished, even when his kiss had turned from tenderness to hunger. It had all been balm to her injured soul, right up until he’d begun to tilt them to the sand.

Then fear of pregnancy had undercut her arousal. Her next instinct had been to at least give him pleasure. She liked making him lose control, but then she’d remembered it wasn’t good enough.

It had all crashed into her as a busload of confusing emotions: shattered confidence, anger at her own weakness and a sense of being tricked and teased with a promise that would be broken. If she had had other men, perhaps she wouldn’t be so susceptible to him, but she was a neophyte where men were concerned, even after five years of marriage. She needed distance from him, to get her head straightened out and her heart put back together.

Gideon was given a room card at the same time she was.

As they departed the front desk for the elevators, she said in a ferocious undertone, “You did not get yourself added to my room.” They might share a suite, but never a room. She would die.

“I booked my own,” he said stiffly, the reserve in his voice making her feel as if she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t! Had she? Should she have been more open about the miscarriages?

She shook off guilt she didn’t want to feel. “Gideon—” she began to protest.

“What? You’re allowed a vacation, but I’m not?”

She tilted her head in disgruntlement. That was not what she was driving at. She wanted distance from him.

“Would you like to eat here tonight or try somewhere else?” he said in a continuation of assumptions that were making her crazy.

“It’s been a lot of travel getting here and already a long day. I’m going to shower and rest, possibly sleep through dinner,” she asserted, silently thinking, Go away. Her feelings toward him were infinitely easier to bear when half a globe separated them.

“I’ll email you when I get hungry then. If you’re up, you can join me. If not, I won’t disturb you.”

She eyed him, suspicious of yet another display of ultraconsideration, especially when he walked her to her room. At the last second, he turned to insert his card in the door across from hers.

Her heart gave a nervous jump. So close. Immediately, a jangle went through her system, eagerness and fretfulness tying her into knots. She locked herself into her room, worried that he’d badger her into spending time with him that would roll into rolling around with him. She couldn’t do it. She didn’t have it in her to risk pregnancy and go through another miscarriage.

Even though she ached rather desperately to feel his strong, naked body moving over and into hers.

Craving and humiliation tormented her through her shower and stayed with her when she crawled into bed. She wanted him so much. It made her bury her head under her pillow. She couldn’t live with a man she had no defenses against.

Steadfast to his word, Gideon didn’t disturb her. Adara woke to fading light beyond her closed curtains, startled she’d fallen asleep at all, head fuzzy from a hard four-hour nap.

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