“Not yet.”
“Knowing you, you will be.”
She couldn’t laugh or cry or even breathe comfortably, so she leaned her head back against the tower wall and closed her eyes.
He reached up to slip the straps of her dress off her shoulders, lowering the stretchy cotton bodice. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
Cupping one breast gently, he said, “Your nipples are darker.”
“Yes,” she agreed, thinking she might die if he stopped touching her.
“It’s barely noticeable, but now that I know…” He circled her swollen areola slowly. “Are you sensitive?”
“Yes.” The tips of her breasts were tight and aching, pouting for his attention. When he laved each one with his tongue, she gasped, thrusting her fingers into his hair.
Murmuring something unintelligible, he slid his hand up her inner thigh until he reached her panties. Stroking her through the fabric, he asked, “What about here?”
“Yes,” she moaned.
“I mean, are you sensitive here, too?”
“No more than usual.”
“So as long as I’m gentle, I can still touch you like this?” He slid his fingers into her panties, parting the damp petals of her sex and caressing her gingerly. “And like this?”
“If you don’t stop being gentle,” she panted, “I’m going to kill you.”
He stripped her panties away and released the buttons on his fly, freeing his erection. Straddling his thighs, she impaled herself on him, digging her fingernails into the fabric of his shirt and biting down on her lower lip to hold back her cry.
His breath was heavy on her neck, his hands hot on her bare bottom. Beneath her fingertips, his shoulders trembled. “You feel so-”
“Yes.” She arched up, pushing against the floor with her bare feet and sliding back down along the length of his shaft.
Groaning, he braced one hand behind her and lifted his hips, pressing her back against the wall, thrusting hard, driving deep.
“More,” she urged, tightening her legs around him. “More.”
Giving her what she wanted, what she needed, he drove into her harder, faster, deeper. He loved her fiercely and filled her completely, giving everything, holding nothing back. When he stiffened, she exploded in pleasure, throwing her head back and crying out his name as he buried himself in her one last time.
When she caught her breath a moment later, he was sprawled underneath her, their bodies entwined in a tangled heap on the whitewashed floor. Now that the blood was returning to his brain, he probably didn’t find her pregnancy half as sexy as before. In her limited experience, a man with a hard-on had a lot of stupid ideas.
Crawling off him, she righted her clothing in silence.
“My mother will be delighted,” he said finally.
“What about you? How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” he groaned, refastening his pants and straightening. “I never had any brothers or sisters. I’ve never been around a-” he swallowed “-baby.”
Her mood plummeted. “This sounds remarkably like your argument for disliking dogs.”
“I’m getting along with Blue now, aren’t I?”
He had adopted the dog, with an exaggerated display of reluctance. Sidney knew the pair had forged some kind of bond, even though Marc didn’t coddle him or really even pet him from what she could see. In return, Blue tolerated Marc with stoic apathy. It was a strange, if peaceful, coexistence.
God forbid she and Marc circle around each other the same way. “I don’t want you to ‘get along’ with it. I want you to want it.”
“I want you,” he said, giving her honesty instead of promises. He reached out to clasp her hand. “Marry me.”
She jerked away. “No.”
“No?”
“You heard me.”
He gaped at her incredulously. “Why?”
Instead of answering, she scrambled down the ladder, desperate to put some space between them before she fell apart. She jogged down the beach, her bare feet finding uneasy purchase on the shifting sand, tears blurring her vision.
“Why?” he repeated when he caught up with her. Wrapping his fingers around her upper arms, he asked again, his voice low with desperation. “Why?”
“I don’t want to be your burden,” she said, trying to stifle a sob.
“Your obligation.”
“You could never be that. I love you.”
“You only want to marry me so our child won’t be a b-” She stuttered over the ugly word, then blurted it out, “a bastard.”
He released her immediately, a cold glint in his eyes. “Then why do I have this?” From his pocket, he pulled out a black velvet box and shoved it at her. With that, he left her standing on the sand, her mouth hanging open in shock.
She opened the box with shaking hands. A square-cut diamond sparkled from an elegant setting on a simple platinum band.
“Oh,” she gasped, clapping it shut. “Oh, no.”
She ran after him, her heart threatening to burst from her chest.
“I’m sorry,” she said, biting her lip to keep from giggling. Nowadays especially, humor struck her at odd times. “But you said you wouldn’t stay, and I believed you.”
He stopped to look at her. “I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No,” he protested. “Even then, I knew I could never leave you, but I was afraid to let myself…need you.”
She put her arms around him, tears looming close behind her eyes once again. “I need you,” she whispered, stroking her fingers through his hair. “I love you,” she added, kissing his tense mouth. “And I would be honored to marry you.”
He took her hand in his. “Are you sure?”
She met his eyes, whiskey-brown in the light of the setting sun. “Are you?”
He placed her palm over the center of his chest. “You tell me.”
His heartbeat thumped beneath her hand, fast and strong and true. Any misgivings he had weren’t about her, or the baby, but himself.
“I can’t promise I’ll be good at this,” he warned. “I work all the time. I never had a family. I never really had a father.”
Love welled up inside her, washing away her hesitation. “Don’t promise anything,” she whispered. “Just stay.”
Falling to his knees before her, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pressed his face into her stomach. When he inhaled a shuddering breath, the tears she’d been fighting spilled over onto her cheeks, and she slid her hands into his hair, holding him to her.
He didn’t say he would love her forever, but she knew it by the way he brushed a reverent kiss against her belly, saw it in his trembling shoulders and felt it in the strength of his embrace.
In the end, the promise he made remained unspoken, but she heard it all the same.
Dear Reader,
