CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER TEN

A FTER THAT I couldn’t sleep. He did. And deeply. Which struck me as the most infuriatingly male thing that had ever occurred.

I loved him, though.

And I found myself sitting up by the window, gazing thoughtlessly out into the darkness at what I knew was the vast expanse of wilderness below.

Hades was like that wilderness. I had been looking at the trees and not beyond. Into the darkness. At the vastness contained there.

This revelation made me rethink everything. From that very first moment. Because if I evaluated the things that I had done through a lens of feeling, rather than simple lust, I saw him differently.

If I took the things that he had just told me, and I mixed them with the realization that had just come from my own heart, then I saw things differently.

That first time. When I had invited him to the hotel room. What had he been thinking? Had he been worried about the consequences if his father were to find out that we met? Did he think that I had been about to ask him corporate secrets? Or had he known from the beginning that we were going to...

I had never asked him. We needed to talk. That was one of the very simple truths that I stumbled upon over the course of the night.

We had to stop defaulting to sex, because that was easy for us.

I had convinced myself that we had no intimacy. That wasn’t true. But we had gaps in our intimacy.

Like knowing each other’s room service order, but not what we like to have at a regular dinner.

I knew a strange, vacation version of him, as he did of me.

And we needed to build a home together. That was the way that we were going to find the parts of each other we hadn’t seen before. That was the only way that I was going to get to know the man behind the mask.

He was so determined to make rules. I didn’t agree with that. I didn’t agree with the concept. I wanted something that felt more real.

But he was the way that he was. Which meant we weren’t going to fall into that. Not accidentally. I was going to have to do something.

I had started this.

I was going to have to keep pushing to change it.

I finally slept, for a couple of fitful hours, though I didn’t sleep beside him. I opted to curl up on the chaise by the window. Mostly because I didn’t trust myself. Mostly because I knew if given half the chance, I would make love to him again. Because I wanted to. Because I loved him.

The sex last night had been different. Maybe because I knew I loved him.

Maybe because we were married.

I considered that as I brooded over a cup of coffee far too early.

He came out for a moment, shirtless, stunning.

“Thank you for the coffee,” he said. As he poured some from the coffee maker.

“It was a byproduct of my own need for caffeine.”

I smiled. He looked surprised by my expression.

“What?” I asked.

“I thought you were mad at me.”

I shook my head. “No. I’m not. I was thinking, though. About our first time together.”

He cleared his throat and leaned against the counter. The muscles in his torso shifted, and I found myself powerless to look away.

“One of my favorite memories,” he said.

This felt like the sort of bubble we often found ourselves in after long nights in hotels. Where we were too tired, too satisfied to keep our guard up. When he would smile like it didn’t hurt him to do it. And I would tell him a story about my friends. When he’d tell me about his time at university—the one moment when he hadn’t always been serious—and he’d done fantastically dangerous stunts like leaping from yachts with his friends. And for a moment, we would be like this. Just us. No businesses, no shields. I wondered what it would take to get us here all the time.

Because this was what I was in love with. These moments. The spaces.

Liar. You love him when he’s intense too.

Well. That was true. I couldn’t actually separate all the different versions of him that I knew. I couldn’t say that I loved one and not the other. He was complicated. And I was beginning to realize I loved him even in his complication. Perhaps because of it.

“Is it?”

“Yes. I thought all my dreams had come true.”

Those words felt fragile. Like if I moved too quickly, spoke too quickly, they would evaporate. And there would be no evidence that they had ever been there.

“I was curious what you thought initially. When I sent you the note. When I asked you to meet me.”

“I... Of course, being a man, I thought perhaps you wanted me. But then I thought perhaps it was also wishful thinking.”

I looked at him, avidly. Hungrily. I wanted to know what he was thinking now. What he’d been thinking then. Sometimes I felt like I wanted to slip beneath his skin and inhabit him entirely. So that I could finally know him.

Would I ever know him?

“Wishful thinking, what do you mean by that?” I asked.

He lifted a brow. “You’re not naive, Florence. Come on now.”

“Maybe I’m not naive, not in general. But there are things about you that I have never been able to figure out, Hades. So maybe I just need you to tell me.”

He looked mystified. A crease forming on his forehead. I wanted to smooth it, but I also wanted to analyze his every muscle movement to try and glean more information. So I didn’t smooth any of it away.

“You must know that I wanted you for...” He shook his head. “An inappropriately long time. I met you, and there had never been anybody like you. You infuriated me. You are so opinionated. My father hated your father, and that made you...”

“Forbidden,” I whispered.

He nodded slowly. “Yes.”

“I thought that. That perhaps I wanted you so badly because you were the one thing I really couldn’t have.”

He leaned just a bit closer. “And what was your conclusion?”

I shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter why. Because it’s real either way and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Fatalistic.” He moved away slightly, some of our tension broken.

“I think both of us are entirely fatalistic in the approach to our affair, don’t you?”

“Perhaps. But yes. I think you were sixteen the first time I noticed that you were beautiful. But I set you at a distance for obvious reasons. I was too old for you.”

“And my birthday magically fixed that?”

He paused for a moment, as if considering. Thinking.

“No. It didn’t. When you were eighteen you were still too young for me. But you made plain what had been secret before, and once you told me you wanted me I wasn’t going to turn you away.”

“So you hoped that I was going to try to seduce you?”

“Yes,” he bit out. “Because I never would have seduced you. I would never have touched you, for so many reasons. It was the wrong thing to do, even with you being insistent it was what you wanted. It was the wrong thing to do. I knew it. But the attraction that burned between us was uncommon. Then and always.”

“Yes. It was.”

I couldn’t help but smile. He wanted me. It had felt inevitable to him, as it did to me. Or we had been lying to ourselves because we want it so badly. Whatever the answer was, whether it was fate, or a lack of desire to resist, it didn’t matter to me. Because it boiled down to the fact that I wasn’t alone.

That it hadn’t only been me burning.

“Afterward, what did you think?”

He laughed. Hard and bitter. “When we left the resort, I was determined that I would never touch you again. After that weekend, when I made you mine in every way possible. I was... I should not have treated you that way.”

“What way? Like a woman who wanted some incredibly hot sex and got it?”

“I should not have treated you like a woman with experience.”

“I certainly walked away from that weekend a woman with experience,” I said, smiling softly.

“You were a virgin. And I gave no quarter for that.”

“You certainly ruined me. In the sense that I could never have wanted anything more mundane afterward.” I was quiet for a moment. “Why did you come for me again? The second time? If you were determined not to...”

“I will never be able to say. Why you test my control when it is something I have always otherwise found so easy to keep hold of. Why... It was like you fundamentally changed something in me. Before you, I had never set a foot out of line. Before you, I had never defied my father because of the sword he had dangling over my head. The safety of my mother. I was angry. I was... Well, you saw. Everything that you saw in me as a young man, that was my simmering rage at my father. But I never let it out. Not around him. I never let anything off leash. And then there was you. You touched me, and you kissed me. And I was powerless to do anything but take what you had on offer. To show you exactly what our bodies could do together. And then in Switzerland...”

I realized then that we were in Switzerland. What a funny thing. Our second time together had been in Geneva. At that glorious hotel with all the high-gloss marble. He had me in the bathroom.

I looked up at him, and I knew that we were in the middle of a shared memory. His eyes burned.

And in that fire I saw so much.

This was so much of him, a look behind a normally locked door. I didn’t want him to close it, I felt panicky at the thought. I was hungry for him. More of him. All of him I could have.

“Geneva,” I said.

He pushed away from the counter and walked out of the kitchen. I followed him. He was standing there with his back to me, facing the vast wilderness below. “Geneva is just there,” he said, pointing to lights that I could only just barely see beyond the fabric of the mountains. “When I looked down there, I always think of that. Of us. In Geneva. Of the moment that you walked in, wearing some lovely, floral dress. Nothing like what you are now. It was very soft. And you looked impossibly beautiful. I had been drowning in my need for you for those months. I wished... So much, that I could find a woman and ease the ache inside of me, but I could not force myself to want anybody else. I went out. I had drinks. I couldn’t force myself to lose control when you weren’t there. And then the minute you were there... It was like the fabric that made up the core of my being torn apart. Six months without sex, Florence. And I grabbed hold of your hand and took you into a bathroom and... I behaved like an animal.”

I was trying to process all of this. The revelation that he hadn’t been with anybody in those months between our first time and our second.

“I love that,” I said. “I thought it was the most glorious... Romantic...”

“Taking you on the bathroom counter was hardly romantic.”

“It was to me. Because I had done nothing but think about you. I made myself ill with it, Hades. I had tried to tell myself that you would have forgotten me thirty times over by the time we ever saw one another again, and that we were never going to touch, let alone kiss, let alone make love. And then I saw you and the fire was just as hot as it ever was. We never have been able to put it out. I can’t even express what a relief it was when you kissed me. When you locked me in that room. When you stripped me naked. When your skin was on mine. I had never wanted anything quite so badly as I wanted that. Hades, I wanted it. More than you’ll ever know.”

He looked away from me, and I studied his profile. There were so many things I did not understand about this man. But I knew that we were in a house in Switzerland with a view of Geneva, and he thought of me when he looked out that window. I knew that I loved him.

That he was my husband, that we were having a baby.

That this was forever, and would not be the scattered, passionate encounters that had fueled us for so long.

Things had changed, and we could not behave the same.

“I have to work,” he said. “We need to get press releases ready. I have paperwork to review from my lawyer.”

“I’ll need to look at it too,” I said.

“Florence, let me. Let me start this. You rest. You’re pregnant,” he said.

Hearing him acknowledge it, in a way that wasn’t just him railing about me having his baby, but about my actual condition and his concern for it, made me feel something warm.

“All right,” I said. Because at some point I was going to have to let my guard down. At some point I was going to have to trust him. I cared so much about the company. And yet, it wasn’t the sole source of my identity. That had never been clearer. I was having a baby. I had married Hades. Making it the sole source of my identity was half my problem. It had made it so that I couldn’t fully see myself. Hades had been right. I didn’t know my own heart.

I loved him.

I loved fighting with him in the business arena because I loved having his attention. Because I loved having him look at me. Because I liked showing him that I was good at my job.

Because I wanted him to think so too.

I wanted him to respect me.

My father was gone. The only other person in the whole world whose opinion mattered even half so much was Hades.

I wasn’t going to examine that too closely, but I was determined to make changes.

To fill in our gaps. I made some phone calls, and arranged for Christmas decorations to be brought to the chalet. Along with an extremely elaborate dinner.

I was going to make this a home. Because we needed to become a family. We were something. We had been from the beginning. I understood now that for me it was love.

I couldn’t say what it was for him. Powerful, certainly. He made it sound like an illness, and in fairness, I had often felt like that’s what it was.

But maybe that was how love unnamed felt. Love without boundaries and security. Unspoken. Uncertain.

Now suddenly that I found a place for it, something to call it, now that I was his wife, it felt less like a sickness and much more like peace.

I had no real idea how our marriage was going to unfold or what kind of husband he was going to be. But I knew that for the six months between our first and second encounter he hadn’t been with another woman.

He had said that I wouldn’t want him to be faithful to me because I wouldn’t want to be the focus of all of his desire, and yet... It seemed that even when I wasn’t with him, ten years ago, I had been the sole focus of his desire.

That he couldn’t manufacture it for somebody else. And he hadn’t slept with Jessica.

It was a question I didn’t really want to ask, because it felt unrealistic to assume...

But perhaps I was not the only one who couldn’t find it in them to take another lover. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who would rather be celibate than with somebody I wanted less.

By the time Hades was done with his meeting, I had the entire house bedecked. It glittered with decorations of champagne and gold. It went with the minimalistic Norwegian design all around, but added glitter. Sparkle.

Maybe this would begin to show him what I wanted. What I felt.

He looked around, completely stunned.

“What is this?”

“Christmas,” I said. “Because we are going to be a family.”

He looked at me, and the expression on his face was like shock. “And why would Christmas matter?”

He’d said that Christmas had been used as a weapon against him.

“Because we get to choose who we’ll be,” I said. “I spent Christmas split between houses. It wasn’t a weapon in the way your dad used it, but it often felt fraught to me. I don’t want our child to have that experience. Our family will be different.”

“Family?”

“Yes. We’re having a baby. And... I understand why that scares you. I understand why you think we need nannies and psychologists, and I’m not opposed to any of those things if you think that it would help. But I think that we can find family between the two of us. Because there is so much between us, Hades, and I truly believe that we can spin it into something lovely. We are not our families. We are making a new one.”

This felt like a gambit. The kind of risk I normally took in the boardroom, not in my personal life. But nothing mattered more than this. If I couldn’t make this work, if I couldn’t find my way with him, what future was there?

This wasn’t a contract. No merger or business deal.

It was only our whole lives.

“Florence...”

“I made dinner. I mean, I called and had dinner delivered.”

I took his hand and led him into the dining room. It was not set with a massive spread that would allow us to have distance between each other. Just one corner of the table, with bread and meats and cheeses. The chairs pushed up together. “Talk to me,” I said.

“I have been talking all day,” he said. “Making sure that we do this legally is complicated.”

“Tell me about it. All of it. Because we are no longer hiding our business dealings from one another.”

So he did. And I felt myself falling in love with him all over again, because what was sexier than listening to this man talk about business? Businesses we both cared about, things that we both loved.

“I really would love to be involved in the super ship,” I said.

“You really like the cruise ships?”

“I love them,” I said. “The ocean just feels so free to me. I love the idea of being able to feel at home while you travel. And I just loved the adventure of it.”

“You are secretly quite intrepid.”

I looked down. “I suppose I am. I always tried to shut the wilder parts of myself down, because they reminded my father of my mother. And... You know how he felt about her.”

“It was unfair of him to say all those things to you.”

“I agree,” I said. “But I think it made me a better CEO. Except... I don’t know. In the end I got pregnant with your baby, so maybe it didn’t. Maybe it had to find other ways to leak out. In my love of the ocean and my love of jumping on you whenever I had a spare moment.”

Humor gleamed in his eyes, and I felt proud of that. “You’re brilliant, you know,” I said.

A crease appeared between his brows, and something that looked like a smile stretched his lips. It was the oddest expression. “Thank you?”

“I’m serious. You know, I have often thought that I enjoyed fighting with you so much because nobody else really feels a challenge. I really appreciate the fact that sometimes you’re better than me. Not always. But sometimes. It’s nice to know that I can lose.”

“I suppose I like that about you too,” he said slowly. “I don’t like to lose.”

“But have you ever lost anyone else?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted to ask him if he had ever... Since us... But those words stuck in my throat, because I felt vulnerable about the whole thing. About what my answer would be.

But then... What was the point of holding back? I was sitting there surrounded by Christmas decorations I had procured, having dinner with the father of my baby. A man who knew my body better than I did. And I was embarrassed to tell him that he was my only lover?

Or maybe I was just afraid of finding out that it had never been as special to him as it was to me.

“There’s never been anyone else,” I said. Because I decided to lead with my own vulnerability. As much as I hated it.

Because that wasn’t something either my mother or father ever would’ve done. They were so committed to their roles. To the characters that they played. My mother to her daft socialite persona, which kept everybody from getting too close to her. My father to his steely businessman facade. Neither could admit that they were wrong. Neither could open a vein, not even if they chose to. So my mother was forever creating arterial spray that would do Hollywood proud. It was a facade. A ruse. I wasn’t going to continue on that pattern.

We had to break our patterns.

For all the reasons that I had just said to him, we could be a family in a different way.

I was going to have to lead by example.

“What?” He looked fierce suddenly.

“You know that I’ve never touched another man. Never kissed one. I wanted you, from the first moment that I ever saw you, and I told myself... When I planned on maybe marrying someone else, I had hoped that perhaps I could find somebody that I felt half of what I felt for you. A man who made me burn only half as bright, I thought that seemed reasonable. But I couldn’t even find that. I dreamed of you in between.”

He looked past me, at the wall.

“There’ve been no other women, Florence. Not since we were together the first time. I might not have been a virgin the first time we came together, but I have not touched anyone since.”

It was so huge an admission I almost couldn’t take it on board. It made me want to weep. So I sidestepped. I wasn’t proud, but it was easier to focus on something that had wounded me than on whatever this deep emotion in me was.

“You were going to,” I said, accusing.

“I felt I had no other choice. I wanted... I lied to you. On the plane. I told you that I thought you would simply not be able to resist me. I did think that you would. I thought you would be so angry with me, so disgusted that I was married, that you would never touch me again. I thought that it would set us both free, Florence, and that was what I wanted.”

I felt like I’d been stabbed. He had wanted me to go away. He had wanted to end this.

“Then why didn’t you just end it?”

“If I was strong enough to end it...”

I knew the answer. I already did. Because it was the answer that we both always came back to. If we could stop, we could stop. If we could be finished, we would be finished.

If we could save ourselves from this, we would.

So he had hoped that he had put up a wall so tall that I wouldn’t want to scale it.

“You are one of the most moral and upright people I know,” he said. “There is nothing shadowy about you. I knew you would never touch a married man.”

“And then I had the bad luck of getting pregnant.” Tears filled my eyes. “Hades, I wish that I could tell you your plan would’ve worked. I have never been quite so—” I avoided the word heartbroken . “When I found out about the engagement I was sick. Because I imagined you sleeping with her just after you left me. I imagined you touching her just before you came to me. But it was jealousy. It wasn’t moral outrage in the way that I wished it could be. I tried to fashion it into moral outrage. I tried to tell myself I was hurt for her. Because she didn’t know what you were.

“But I was hurt for me. And when I went into your office to yell at you, I didn’t even consider resisting you. I am afraid that it would’ve continued that way.”

Something in his expression was tortured then. But in a breath it was gone, and it had been so singular that I couldn’t quite remember it as it was. Couldn’t sit there and pull it apart and try to put names to each and every flicker of emotion that had crossed his face then. I felt robbed. Robbed of the moment when I could have tried to understand him. Just a little more. Just a little better.

“The pregnancy made the decision for us. This is not something...” He shook his head. “I did not want to trap you in this.”

“The merger?”

He looked at me. “Yes. The merger. But now... Now here we are.”

“You will be faithful to me,” I said.

Because now it was clear that he would be, because he always had been.

“If you ever wish it to be different, just say so. If you ever regret any of this...”

How can I regret it? I had never wanted another man the way that I wanted him.

I loved him. And I wanted to spend this time we had away showing him.

“Hades, do you know what we’ve never done?”

“What is that?”

“We’ve never been on a date.”