Ares found he didn’t actually want to scour his memory, because he was terribly afraid that Pia really had haunted him. That he might not have touched another woman since that night in New York.
He didn’t want to consider that possibility, so he considered her instead.
His gaze traced the elegant line of Pia’s neck, and the little wisps of dark hair that had tumbled down from the knot at the top of her head. He leaned against the doorjamb, letting his gaze drift lower. Her breasts swelled against the loose top she wore and he remembered covering them with his hands in New York. Now he wondered if they would spill over from his palms, so generous had they become. His mouth watered.
And there was something about her lush, swollen belly that got to him, no matter how he tried to pretend otherwise.
There was something about the fact that she carried his babies, that she was big and round by his doing, that made something dark and primitive wind around and around inside him until he was tight like a coil.
He didn’t know how he felt about becoming a father, but that had nothing to do with his appreciation of what he had done to her body. Or how she seemed to take to it so easily, so naturally, like one of the ancient goddesses that the locals claimed had first lived here on the site where the palace stood.
He shook himself, bemused at the direction of his own thoughts.
“When did you become an advice columnist?” he asked her, unaware until he spoke that his voice had gone all...gravelly.
But he couldn’t worry about that when he had the distinct pleasure of watching Pia jolt in surprise. She whipped her head around, and then Ares’s pleasure turned to a deeper joy as her cheeks reddened.
The way they always did when she saw him.
As if she couldn’t keep herself from flushing pink and deeper red, which made him wonder if she was pink and red all over.
The possibilities made him ache.
“How do you...?” she began.
But her voice trailed off. She looked down at the laptop before her, and Ares braced himself for her temper. For the outburst that was almost surely coming.
He had to wonder if he’d asked the question specifically to provoke her.
If he’d lowered himself to such games.
But when Pia looked at Ares again, her gray gaze was resigned. “You’re monitoring this laptop. Of course you are. I don’t know why I didn’t assume you were from the start.”
Ares inclined his head slightly. “For security purposes, naturally. This is a royal palace.”
“And because you’re nosy.” Her gaze stayed steady. “You want to know things about me without having to ask.”
He could see that moment shimmer between them, Pia in her funeral dress on the side of that tub and him too close and much too open, and he was sure she could, too. But she didn’t say anything.
“You could be in league with the tabloid reporters who swarmed us in Yorkshire,” Ares said mildly instead. “You could have been planted by my enemies.”
“Do you actually have enemies?” Pia asked, her voice even more mild than his. It scraped at him. “Or is this a part of those many wars you appear to be waging, though no one is waging them back at you?”
Ares leaned one shoulder against the doorjamb, crossed his arms, and regarded her sternly. “I suppose you could say I am my own war.”
He certainly hadn’t meant to say that. He didn’t even know where the words had come from. Only that once they were out there, he couldn’t deny the stark truth of them.
Or the acrid taste they left behind in his mouth.
It was like the first night she’d been here and that bizarre urge he’d had to tend to her. Ares wasn’t certain he had tended to another person in the whole of his life, save his own mother in her final days. He hardly knew her. He knew the urge even less. It felt as if he’d been hit on the head and had only come to—and back into himself—when she’d reminded him of the fact that she was having sons.
His sons.
Every time he thought less of the sweet ripeness of her body and more about what that ripeness would result in, it hit him in the same way. Hard. Debilitating.
A full-on body blow.
“If you are your own war, you are lucky, Ares. That means you can call it off at any time.” She closed the laptop and set it aside, her gray gaze on him. “You can have an armistice whenever you like.”
“It is not quite that easy.”
But he sounded more uncertain of that than he should have.
“Why are you spying on me?” she asked him, direct and to the point, that gaze still firm on his.
And if her voice had been sharp, or accusing, Ares would have known what to do. He could have handled it with a dose of royal arrogance, or that edgy thing in him that was always too close to the surface when he was in Atilia. Or near her.