When the old man finally shows up, he sighs heavily. “She is pregnant not sick, you know.”
I like the old bastard’s attitude. It’s the only reason I pay him obscenely well to stay on my staff exclusively. “Do I look like I care?” I wave at Valentina. “Check her out anyway. I want to make sure she is good to go.”
The doctor settles beside her on the bed and takes her pulse while I watch, hating every second his hand is on her skin.
“I won’t do an exam, but from the naked eye and her vitals, she seems perfectly fine. The same as when I found her earlier.”
I wave at her. “Yeah, fine, but she keeps making demands and yelling at me.”
Valentina sucks in a breath. “Excuse me? That has nothing to do with the baby.”
The doctor considers and meets my eyes. “Hormones likely. They can sometimes make a woman do strange things.”
She sets her jaw and glares at us. “My standing up for myself has nothing to do with my hormones or this child. It has everything to do with you suddenly turning into an overly protective brute who refuses to touch me the way we both want to be touched.”
I wave the doctor out of the room. He doesn’t need to hear this conversation. When I take his place beside her on the bed, she looks like she might shove me off the edge. “I’ll touch you any way you like, Angel.”
She glares and folds her arms under her breasts. “No. I want you to touch me how you like…and not agonize over it afterward. How do you think that makes me feel?”
I reach out to take her hands, but she shifts her still folded arms away. “No. I don’t want to be touched right now. Not by the doctor, not by you, or by anyone. Please, if you won’t let me leave this place, then at least leave me alone so I can have a moment of quiet.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to snap back at her and give her a piece of my mind, then roll her to her back and fuck her senseless. Maybe then she’ll stop yelling at me every five seconds.
“Angel,” I begin, intent on trying to mend this fence I didn’t even see from my bulldozer.
“No.” She looks away toward the windows. “I don’t want to talk, and I don’t want you to touch me. In fact, no one will until I’ve seen Rose.”
50
VALENTINA
I sleep in a guest room and cry myself into exhaustion. Hell, part of me can’t believe he actually let me go. That he didn’t enter this room in the middle of the night to drag me back to his bed and pretend to be satisfied with soft caresses and making love.
And it’s not even about the sex. Or the fact that he doesn’t trust me to know my own mind and body. It’s that he won’t accept this part of him. There are graves out there, dirt hiding the bodies of men he’s killed, but he won’t accept that he likes a little pain with his sex and that I can give him that.
A part of him wants me to be the virginal virtuous wife he married, but that girl is gone. Hell, I’ve shed that skin completely. The woman I am now loves his sharp edges, but he won’t accept that part of me either. That he married a woman who can enjoy hurting him that way.
I toss and turn in the gray dawn light, his shirt still wrapped around me, now tangled up in the luxurious bedding. Every piece of me wants to go back to our bed, apologize for what I said, for hurting him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve never stood up for myself before, but it’s high time I started. Especially if he continues this pattern after our child is born.
Well, that’s what he thinks, at least. Hopefully, he’s starting to understand that we’ve both changed for the better.
It hurts me that he doesn’t realize that. If he doesn’t know that he’s changed, how can he see that I have?
I shift back into the pillows and try to get comfortable. No matter how this bed feels, it doesn’t feel perfect without his warm weight wrapped around me. But how can we keep going on like this? He’s stopped trusting himself and me. Neither of us can live like this. I don’t want the same kind of relationship as my parents or so many other high society families have.
The image of his hand wrapping around my neck comes back to me in a flash, and I close my eyes, savoring it. Who knows when I’ll get that again.
I check the clock, then consider rising to get dressed and find breakfast. To be honest, I’m surprised he let me sleep away from him all night. A tiny part of me is expecting to open my bedroom door and find him leaning against the frame. I don’t know. Maybe he realized he’d gone too far in his protection strategy. Knowing him, though, there likely isn’t such a thing as too far in his mind.