I laughed. “You don’t ask much, do you?”
She smiled, then. “Only to change. They say people don’t change, but I think they can. I think I can learn to put my hand on you and tell you I need your time, I need your attention. And I think you can learn to give it to me. I think I can learn to tell you no, and that you can learn to win in a new way. I think we can both try, if it matters enough.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, my heart right there in my throat, “it matters enough.”
“Then,” she said, “maybe we should talk about where to go from here.”
Hope
I’d been expecting storms. I’d been expecting to be shut down. I’d been thinking we were at “do or die,” and part of me, the part that had never dared to believe my life could really work out this way, had whispered that it would be “die.” I couldn’t live under a man’s control, not even a man I loved as much as Hemi.
The thought that he could be flexible? Yes, you could say that was a new concept. But to help him become less rigid, I was going to have to become much stronger. I’d said we’d both have to change, and I’d meant it.
I was still turning it over in my mind when he said, “Let’s sit a bit, eh.” He led me over to our tree, the one where he’d given me my ring, and I looked at him suspiciously and said, “You planned this.”
That barely-there smile touched his mouth. “I plan most of what I do. Want to take back all those lovely things you said about me?”
“No. If I love you, I love all of you. Even when you frustrate me and make me crazy.”
He sat on a huge, twisting branch that ran perpendicular to the sand, pulling me gently down with him. Behind us was an urban area filled with stores and business and hospitals, with people and all their problems, but we were alone in a green and gray grotto, the gentle swish and roar of the waves our rhythmic background music, kilometers of empty beach spreading in each direction. Sheltered, and alone together, wrapped in the embrace of the sea.
“I reckon,” he said, “that means I love all of you, too. Even when you won’t go along with my perfectly reasonable plans.”
This time, I laughed, and he smiled for real, put his arm around me and pulled me closer, and said, “Did I mention I was over the moon about this baby of ours?”
“Mm.” He was right there, so I had to bury my face in his neck just to inhale his delicious scent, all spice and warm man. A touch of aftershave, and a whole lot of Hemi. I would’ve known his smell anywhere. I would’ve known it blindfolded.
That was when he did the thing that melted all my resistance. He put his hand gently over my lower belly and said, “You were the best thing that ever happened to me. Except now there’s this, too. Now there are both of you. When I start to think of it, sometimes I have to stop, because I can’t . . .”
“You’re overwhelmed,” I said. “Like me.”
“I am.” Surely his eyes were glistening a little, and his hand was so big, so warm and solid on my belly. As if he really could hold both of us under his protection, could keep us both safe there, and what a seductive idea that was, even after everything I’d just said.
“We conceived it here, you know,” I told him. “Probably at Koro’s. Could even have been the night you asked me to marry you.”
“Bloody hell.” He ran his hand slowly down my back and up again, leaving tingles in its wake in that way only he could. “I spanked a pregnant woman. I spanked my pregnant woman, and I spanked hard enough to hurt, or at least right up to the edge of the line, and more than once. Doesn’t make me too happy to remember that.”
“That isn’t the part that has the baby in it,” I had to tease. “And in case you couldn’t tell—I loved it.”
“Not doing it anymore,” he said. “Not while you’re pregnant, I’m not.”
“What if I’m really, really naughty?” I had a hand in his hair and was kissing his neck now, just because it was so brown and strong, and I hadn’t touched him in two weeks, and what was worse, he hadn’t touched me. Plus, there were those pregnancy hormones. For once, they weren’t making me sick. They were just making me . . . hormonal.
“Then I’ll have to find some other way to get you under control,” he said. “But I’m going to be careful, and I’m going to check in more. I’ll say everything you want to hear, but you’re not getting anything rough. I don’t want to hurt you, sweetheart.”
“Would that keeping-me-under-control thing be why you aren’t kissing me right now?” I asked. “Did I ever tell you how annoying that was to me? That first day, when you touched me on my arms, and then my shoulders, until I thought I was going to embarrass myself right there on my couch, and then you refused to kiss me? All that buildup, and not a bit of payoff for about two weeks? Then the first time you did kiss me, up against that wall in Paris . . . it felt like you were going to steal the soul right out of my body. And after that, how long did you torture me?”
“Things are always so much better if you have to wait for them.” He was caressing me now, not that much differently than he had that first time, his hand tracing lightly over the neckline of my scoop-necked T-shirt. He knew exactly how to make me tingle, and was he ever willing to take his time to do it. “And they’re even better if somebody else is making you do the waiting. At least so I hear. From my point of view, I’d say they’re better if I’m making you do the waiting. Nothing I love more than watching you squirm underneath me.” His mouth was at my ear now. “Except maybe hearing you beg,” he whispered, and just the touch of his lips on that sensitive spot made me shudder. “Now, that?” he said, sitting up again, way too much self-satisfaction in his eyes. “I’m willing to do that, pregnant or no, because there’s something about knowing you’re pregnant that’s making me want it even more, reprehensible fella that I am. There are some ways I do want to own you, no matter how much I’m meant to be letting you fly free otherwise, and I’m afraid that’s not going to change. But we’re talking about this baby of ours, not about your sweet little body and everything I’m going to be doing to it . . . tonight. It was really that long ago? You’re that far gone?”
“Nine weeks.” I tore my mind away with a major effort from the places he’d sent it. The man could talk dirty like nobody I’d ever imagined.
Tonight. I knew I was shuddering again, and knew he saw it, and that he knew exactly why. “It looks like a little person now, I guess,” I said, returning to the point under discussion. “A very tiny person.”
“And it’s made you sick. You’ve lost weight. Too thin here.” He ran a slow couple of fingers from my collarbones down to the edge of my neckline as if he didn’t know how sensitive that spot was. Liar.
“Also normal,” I said. “Though I guess I need to make a doctor’s appointment, now that I’m here. So what do you think?” I moved on, because we didn’t need to go back into Hemi Te Mana Protectiveness Mode at this moment, where he’d, what? Arrange for daily checkups? Hire a nutritionist and a chef? “Do you want a boy or a girl?”