Rachel had teared up again, and Henry knew what she was talking about. Rachel wasn’t Rachel’s original name. She’d been Elizabeth Courtney once. “Our situations are not the same. You were hiding from a man who wanted to hurt you. I was hiding from an organization I willingly went into.”
“Oh, big bad Henry can’t make a mistake?” Rachel’s voice was soft, the question not unkindly.
At the time it hadn’t felt like a mistake. It had felt like a way out, a way to finally have some power for himself. “I knew what I was getting into.”
“Did you?” Rye asked. “Because I think there’s probably a big difference between the rah-rah recruitment videos and the real thing. I bet it’s not like a James Bond film.”
“No, it’s not,” Henry agreed. “But I take responsibility for what I did. Rachel had a reason to run.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s kind of similar. We both found ourselves in a situation we couldn’t live with anymore. We both made choices to change our lives. I became someone different, someone I like. I think you did, too, and you did it for a much nicer reason than I did. You changed for her,” Rachel mused. “That’s pretty romantic when you think about it.”
“I already tried that,” he admitted. “And then I was very unromantic and I didn’t think about her when…”
He felt himself flush. This is another place where he’d changed from the John Bishop he’d been. John Bishop never flubbed anything. He wouldn’t have blurted out that he’d gotten overly emotional and had fucked his wife from behind while she held on to the dining table.
For John Bishop, sex had been a perfunctory thing, a bodily function he had to deal with from time to time. Sex had been a way to clear his head.
For Henry, it was a way to express his soul, to bond with the love of his life.
“Are you talking about when you got all caveman nasty on her? Yeah, we knew what was going on in there.” A hint of a smile crossed Max’s lips. “Early pregnancy sex is pretty fun.”
Rachel’s hands went to her hips. “Hey, too much information.”
Max waved her off. “Nah. He needs to hear it. It’s the only reason he agreed to come out here this afternoon. He wanted to talk about how rough pregnancy is on a man.”
Rachel’s brows rose above her eyes. “Really? It’s so hard on you?”
Max’s hands came up as though warding off the inevitable attack. “It is because I love you so much, baby. I worried a lot during the first pregnancy because I didn’t know what to expect. And then I read that book and I did know what to expect and it did not help. That book was incredibly graphic.”
Rye grinned and patted his daughter’s back. “I would not recommend it. But I do understand where you are, Henry. What does Caleb say? Is Nell high risk?”
“He said she’s perfectly healthy. He’s run all the tests.” He’d heard it over and over again. Miscarriages happened for different reasons, and this pregnancy was moving along normally. “He said as long as we’re careful we should behave like everything is fine.”
“Because it is,” Rachel said quietly. “She needs you to be normal. She needs you to be her husband and not her doctor. Caleb knows what he’s doing. If he says it’s okay, it’s okay. Nell isn’t going to take any undue risks, but you have to love her enough to know that she’s still your wife. Sometimes when a woman is pregnant she ends up feeling like an incubator and not a woman. Remind her she’s still everything you want in life, and that includes sex. Max is right. Pregnancy sex can be hot and heavy if you’ve got the right hormones. It’s different for every woman.”
Nell hadn’t complained. She’d softened when he’d gotten into her space. She’d gone all submissive and warm for him.
Had she missed him as much as he’d missed her? Had she missed those nights when they’d done nothing but lie in bed and talk in between bouts of sex? Something had lit in her eyes when he’d commanded her.
“I don’t want to hurt her.”
Rachel’s expression went sympathetic. “That is an inevitability in a marriage. You can try to mitigate the damage, but when you’re as in love with a person as you are with Nell, when you share a life the way you do, you’re going to hurt each other. It’s in how you handle yourself afterward that decides whether a marriage will survive. I should know. I’m married to Max.”
Maybe Max did have something to teach him.
“Grovel, man.” Max nodded vigorously. “Sexual servitude works wonders, too. Couple of hours of me putting in the work and she’s purring again.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that, but groveling does work for Max,” Rachel agreed.
Rye shook his head. “Won’t work for Nell. I mean you are going to have to grovel, but I get the feeling you shouldn’t do it in the bedroom. I think Nell needs something different there.”
Max’s face screwed into a horrified expression. “Dude, she’s like our sister. She doesn’t do that stuff. She’s very staid and normal.”
That brought a smile to his face because Rye was right. “She’s a beautiful soul.”
With a filthy mind and a need for sexual submission, and he’d been denying her that. He couldn’t exactly walk back in and demand that she serve him, but he could work his way back to that relationship.
He could prove she could trust him again.
“I think if you explain yourself, she’ll
