Then she broke away from his kisses, pressing her cheek tightly to his own, and her moans deepened as her nails dug painfully—but oh, so pleasurably—into his back. He felt her climax swell within her, thickening around him and then pulling him into the headiness of release. Of surrender.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JO’S EYES FLEW OPEN. Instant wakefulness.
The room was dusky, the early-morning sun making its first peeks through the heavy drapes. The only sound to be heard was the deep, heavy breathing of Theseus in sleep.
She’d awoken to the same sounds on Illya. To the same weight of his arm slung around her waist, the same body pressed into her back, encircling her almost protectively.
It had been nothing but an illusion. However protectively he’d behaved in his sleep he’d sailed away the next morning and never given her another thought...
Everything came back in a flood.
Theseus learning about Toby. His demands of marriage. Making love.
Oh, Lord, what had possessed her?
Where was her pride? Her self-control?
The only crumb of comfort she could take was that whatever mad fever she’d fallen into, Theseus had fallen into it as well.
Flames licked her cheeks as she remembered how willingly she had given herself to him. His caresses and kisses had lit the touch-paper to her desperate, emotion-ridden body.
A tear trickled down her cheek and landed on her pillow. Blinking furiously, she tried her hardest to stop any more from forming but they fell through her lashes, soaking the fabric.
Helpless to stop them, she let the tears fall, wishing with all her heart that she could turn the clock back a week and tell him about Toby the minute they’d been alone in his office for the first time. The outcome wouldn’t be any different—Theseus would still be insisting on marriage, of that she was certain—but they would be different. This loathing wouldn’t be there.
Making love wouldn’t have felt like waging war with their bodies.
She’d never imagined sex could be like that—angry, yet tender, with shining highlights of bliss that had taken her to a place she’d never known existed.
It had been beautiful.
But how could she do it? How could she spend her life with a man who despised her?
Lust was transient. When desire was spent, and without a deeper bond to glue them together, hate and resentment would fill the space, and there was already enough loathing between them to fill a room.
Her parents had once lusted after each other. Her brother Jonathan had been the result of their passion and the reason they had been forced to marry. A decade later, when Jo had been born, their marriage had deteriorated into a union as cold and barren as Siberia. It was a surprise they’d thawed enough to make her.
For Jo, having a father who spent his days in an alcoholic stupor and a mother who treated flea-ridden hedgehogs with more compassion than she extended to her husband or daughter had been normal.
As she’d grown up and seen how other families interacted she’d slowly realised it wasn’t normal.
And so she’d vowed never to be like them, to never treat her husband or any children she might have that way.
Her very worst nightmare was being trapped in a cold, loveless marriage like her parents.
She choked in a breath.
All her dreams were over. The nightmare had come to life.
She would never find love. And love would never find her.
Theseus would never love her. All he wanted was their son. She was the unwanted appendage that came with Toby.
She was trapped.
With fresh tears falling, she shuffled out from under Theseus’s arm and rooted around until she found her T-shirt, slipped it back on and stole into the bathroom. She blew her nose, trying desperately to get a grip on herself.
She couldn’t fall to pieces. All she could do was try and salvage something from this mess. If she could survive pregnancy and motherhood alone, she could survive anything.
When she stepped back into the bedroom her eyes were drawn straight to him. The dusky light solidified his sleeping form. A lock of black hair had fallen over his cheek. The lines that had etched his face since their return from the club had been smoothed away.
Her heart stuck in her throat. He looked so peaceful.
Hate was an alien emotion to her. Even throughout all the years of her mother’s cold indifference she’d never hated her. Neither had she hated her father for his weakness and failure to stand up for her, nor hated her brother for being treated as if he mattered.