“All right.”
“That’s it? Just all right?”
“It’ll be fine. We survived the birth. A baby all wrapped up in a pink blanket should be a welcome relief after that ordeal.”
“I guess. Peabody says we need to take a gift. A teddy bear or something.”
“That should be simple enough.”
“Good. You do that part. I don’t get the bear thing. Aren’t bears something people generally try to avoid so as not to be mauled?”
When he laughed, she glanced over. And just looking at him, seeing the laugh in his eyes when he looked at her, had everything inside her going warm.
She laid her hand over his as he drove through the gates of home. “Let’s try for that balance Nadine was asking about,” she said. “And for a while, no case, no work, no obligations. Just you. Just me.”
“My favorite combination.”
She made the move, wrapping her arms around him, rubbing her lips to his when they were out of the car. And the warmth that had bloomed inside her spread like spring. Every doubt, every hurt, every fear, every question drained away in it.
Just you, she thought again as they glided into the house. Just me.
By tacit agreement they made their way to the elevator. The stairs would take too long. Once inside, riding up, he nudged her coat off her shoulders, and she his. But the gestures weren’t hurried, weren’t frantic. Instead they were smooth and easy, with the knowledge they’d reclaimed something that had slipped, just for a moment, a finger’s span out of reach.
In the bedroom there was a glimmer of moonshine, soft and blue through the windows, through the skylight over the bed. They undressed each other, distracted each other with long, lingering kisses, long, lingering strokes.
Her heart felt as if it were back, exactly where it belonged, and beating fast and thickly against his.
“I missed you,” she said, holding tight. “I missed us.”
“A ghra,” he murmured, and thrilled her.
She was his again, completely his again. His strong, complicated, and endlessly fascinating wife. Close and his, with nothing between them. The taste of her filled him, the long, lean lines of her enticed him.
Here was the balance Nadine had questioned, and that no one who didn’t feel it, didn’t know it, didn’t have could ever fully understand. They simply fit, all the complex and ragged edges of both of them, simply fit. One to the other, to make each whole.
When they lay on the bed she wrapped around him, and she sighed again. A sound he knew meant they were home, at last. Needing to give, he used his lips, his hands, his body, until the sigh became a moan.
No one else, she thought, could ever reach her as he did. And, feeling him quiver at her touch, knew for him it was the same.
As she rolled over that first liquid crest, she cupped his face in her hands. She brought his lips to hers once more for a kiss of shattering tenderness.
“My love,” he repeated in Irish. My only. My heart. She heard his voice as he slipped inside her, saw his eyes as they moved together.
Slow and lovely and real. And every brutal thing that belonged to the world was separate from this. Then fingers twined, mouths meeting, they slipped away together.
Later, curled against him, content and drifting, she murmured, “Lucky us,” and she heard him chuckle in the dark before she slid into sleep.
12
HE WAS INCENSED. HE COULDN’T BELIEVE SHE was going to go through with it. Bluffing, he decided. She was bluffing.
Reed Williams cut through the water with hard, angry strokes. He’d tried sweet talk, he’d tried temper, he’d tried threats. But that damn Arnette was being hardnosed about this—the principal standing on principle.
Or professing to be. Hypocritical bitch.
Bluffing, he thought again as he kicked off the wall of the pool and streaked his way to another lap. He’d just do another five laps, let her stew a little.
He’d been sure she’d stand by him, or if she wavered, she’d value her own position enough to secure his.