Desire swirled in her gut.
Skye ignored it.
This had been a bad idea. A stupid, stupid thought. She took a step backwards, moving towards the open door, needing to put all the distance she could between herself and her husband.
She didn’t want to speak to him. She couldn’t see any more of him. Was he wearing bathers? Or swimming naked, as they’d always done in the past?
A husk of breath caught in her throat and she spun, needing distance.
Splashing.
And then his voice, low and commanding. ‘Skye.’
She froze, her eyes shut, her lips parted.
Her pulse was a raging torrent of need. Damn it! Why did she feel this for him even when she hated him for what he’d done?
‘Turn around.’ The words were a command and she wanted to ignore them. She hardened her heart to the power he had over her, or tried to at least. She wanted to run. She wanted to ignore him, to pretend she hadn’t heard. But it was obvious she had, and the idea of seeming afraid of him in any way was anathema to Skye.
She turned slowly. She looked around with great care, as one might lift one’s eyes to study a solar eclipse, expecting at any moment to be burned by the sight of him.
Only it was less a solar eclipse and more a moonlit fairy tale. The beam of light bounced off him and wisped like a cloud between them, drawing her in, pulling at her as gravity might, if it were silvery and glittered.
She swallowed, taking a step forward without realising it.
He walked through the water in time with her own steps, so that he reached the edge nearest to her at the same time Skye’s toes met the grouting. His powerful body ripped him from the water with ease; the water droplets scattered over his flesh, pulling her gaze downward to the chaotic wetness that moved over his chest.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she explained, her eyes locked with his even when she knew she needed to look away. The air around them was thick, and it had more to do with their past, their present, than the heat of the balmy summer night.
No, it was the whisperings of their story that was wrapping around them, pulling them back in, and for Skye’s part all she could see was the never-ending nature of it all. The love she’d felt for him had turned to hate, but there was still so much love there too. For, having never loved before, not properly, she had given her love to Matteo with no expectation or hope of return.
She had given him her heart for life, and there was no way to take it back.
Despite what he’d done.
And now? A baby that would bind them for ever; the future yawned before her like a minefield of needs she would have to navigate.
She had to do it better.
She had to draw a line in the sand and keep him firmly on one side of it.
But she also needed him. His mouth, his hands, his body.
All of him.
Need was all she could hear, and it was tormenting her with the loudness of its demands and the insistence that she indulge it.
With the last shred of will-power she possessed, she smiled—a smile that was sense and reason in the midst of their moonshine madness. ‘Are you done?’ she asked, unknowingly caustic. ‘I thought I’d go for a swim.’
His fingers reached for her, and the second they connected with her she drew a sharp gasp of breath. It didn’t help.
‘In this?’ he asked, reaching for her cotton nightgown, the teasing smile on his lips sucking her further back into the vortex of their past, to a time when that smile had driven her wild. When it had made her feel connected to him and full of pleasure—not just sexual pleasure, but true pleasure at the place she had in his life, and the place he had in hers.
That smile was a dangerous lie. Listening to it would be foolish. And she was no longer foolish. At least, she was no longer so easy to fool.
‘No.’ A whisper.
‘May I?’ He held the fabric in his fingers—she held her breath in her lungs. His meaning was impossible to misinterpret.