“Night, Luc,” Felicity called.
“Night,” I heard Marco say.
And from Natalie, I got nothing. Which was probably for the best. Because I had no idea what I was going to do with my wife.
Which made me feel like absolute shit, because more and more, I was thinking it would have been better if she’d left me that night in Italy and never come back.
After our conversation the other day about kids, that had become glaringly clear to me. I could go on fooling myself that I wasn’t ruining her life, but I couldn’t avoid the cold, hard truth.
I was ruining her life. Every day she had to sacrifice something else for me. And I was sick over that fact.
Sick and disgusted, because short of murdering everyone in my fucking House, I had no idea how to make any of this better.
I was wide awake when Natalie came to bed sometime later.
I wasn’t sure how long she stayed downstairs with Fee and Marco, but I didn’t dare look at the clock. I just lay still on my side and tried to feign sleep while she moved around the room in the dark.
Maybe it was cowardly, but I wasn’t in the mood to rehash any of what Marco had hit me with earlier. And the last few days I’d been so on edge, I didn’t trust myself to look at Natalie, much less touch her.
She moved into the bathroom and closed the door. Breathing slowly, I shut my eyes and imagined my island. The rolling waves against the shore. The swish of the water over the sand. The swaying palms in the breeze.
Usually, it was enough to get me to relax. But tonight, all it did was make me remember Natalie reclining on that lounge chair by the pool the last day we’d been there together—decked out in a skimpy pink bikini and a wide-brimmed straw hat, with her toes painted a soft shade of purple and her skin golden from the sun.
Heat rolled through me. A familiar heat I did not need right now. The bathroom door opened and closed. The light flipped off. Then Natalie’s soft footsteps echoed through the room as she moved around the bed.
The covers moved, and the mattress dipped as she got settled. Then everything stilled and grew quiet.
As the silence stretched, I imagined her closing her eyes and falling asleep, and I drew a deep breath that did shit to cool me down, because this close, I could smell her intoxicating scent of grapefruit and honey that only pushed me closer to the edge and made me realize there was no way I was getting any sleep tonight.
Fuck it. Maybe I should just move into another room. Or give up altogether and head out to the beach for a run. I didn’t care that it was the middle of the night and only forty degrees outside. I was a mass of coiled energy that couldn’t seem to settle down, and no matter what I’d done the last few days, it was only getting worse.
The mattress dipped again, then Natalie’s hand closed over my arm, and she gently pushed me to my back.
I opened my eyes in the dark. “What are you doing?”
“How does your back feel?”
“Fine.”
“Good.” She straddled me, grasped my arms, and pushed them above my head, then closed something soft around my left wrist.
“What the heck?” I tried to move my arm only to realize it was hooked to the iron headboard behind me. As I twisted to see what she’d done, she snapped something furry and soft around my other wrist and hooked that to the headboard as well.
My eyes grew wide when I realized they were handcuffs. Fur-lined handcuffs I was pretty sure were pink.
All that heat I’d been fighting amped up a notch, but I fought it back and leveled her with a look to let her know I didn’t think this was funny. “Take these off me right now.”
“Uh-uh.”
Holy hell, she was challenging me. In my current mood, that was not a good thing.
“Natalie.” I exhaled slowly and worked like hell to keep my temper in check. “I’m not kidding. I’m not in the mood for—”
“I don’t care what you’re in the mood for.”
She shifted so her weight was perched just above my lap, and, motherfucker, she felt good there. Too damn good. And too close to where I really wanted her.
Bracing her hands on my arms so I wouldn’t try to pull them out of the cuffs, she said, “I’m sure you already realized these are novelty cuffs and that if you pull hard enough, you’ll snap the chains, so I’m not all that worried about you getting upset about me restraining you. But you won’t snap those chains, because after the last few days, you owe me a few minutes of your time, and we both know it. So you’re going to lie there and listen to me, and you’re not going to interrupt until I’m done. Are we clear?”
My heart hammered against my ribs as I stared at her in the dark. There was no sweetness in her features, no comfort or even kindness. She was dead serious as she looked down at me. Serious and take-charge and all business.
And that twisted part of me I’d been denying the last few weeks fucking loved it. Loved it and couldn’t wait to see where this went next.
“Do you have anything to say?” she asked, her icy blue-eyes locked on mine.
“At the moment, I think it’s safest for me to stay quiet.”
“Smart man.” She let go of my arms and sat up, balancing her weight right over my hips.
She was wearing one of my T-shirts—a gray one I’d worn yesterday that smelled like me—and silk panties that were making me all kinds of hot where her pussy pressed against my lower abs, distracting me from everything but the thought of tearing them off her so I could feel her naked flesh.
“I’m not stupid, Luc. I know what you’re doing. And I’m here to tell you it won’t work.”
I blinked up at her, unsure what she was getting at, but unwilling to ask.
“You’ve been keeping your distance from me ever since you dropped that little bombshell on me in the middle of the night, and I’m not putting up with it anymore. I get that you’re feeling guilty that kitten might end up pregnant from what they did to you, but that doesn’t give you the right to—”
“Whoa. Back up. Pregnant?”
“I realize you don’t want to talk about what happ—”
“No one’s pregnant, Natalie. At least not from me. I can’t have kids.”
“What?”
Shit. This was not how I planned to tell her. “I’m sterile.”
Her brows drew together. “How? Since when?”
“Since I left Italy twelve years ago. I had a vasectomy.”
“You did? Why?”
“Because I never wanted my family to use any kid of mine the way they plan to use me. I’m not a person to them, as they made pretty obvious recently. I’m just a way to cement their legacy.”
She stared at me in silence, and as she did, all that guilt I’d been feeling the last few days steamrolled right back over me, killing whatever arousal her little bondage scene here had stirred inside me.
“Cazzo.” I looked up at the ceiling. “I should have told you before but everything was complicated, and...”
Shit. I gathered my courage. “Then I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to give you a reason to leave when things were finally starting to work out. It was selfish and it was wrong, and I should have realized what a big deal it would be to you. That’s why I asked you the other day if it was a deal breaker for you, because if it is, we can still get Fee to—”