“Yours?” I asked.
She licked her lips, nodding. “They belong to me.” Her voice huskier. Raspier.
“Yeah, little wife.” I pressed my lips to her neck. “All yours. Only yours.”
Her arms wrapped around my neck, dragging me closer.
“Josephine told me my father died doing what we’re trying to do,” I continued. “It was always in the back of my mind that my grandfather could have killed my father. It felt more like a story than the truth, though. My grandfather wouldn’t really kill his own son. Now…”
“Now?” Story’s words wobbled.
“I can’t see anything but that reality. It makes the most sense.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I looked away. From her probing stare, digging into the rocks and crevices of my soul. “It’s just confirming what I already knew.”
“No…it’s like you had a reoccurring nightmare and woke up to find out it’s real.”
Jaw clenched, I looked back. “Josephine looked like she wanted to talk to me for weeks, but she could only do it without punishment on this night.”
“Why didn’t you talk to her?”
“I don’t talk to her.”
“Ever?”
“She wasn’t my mother. She wasn’t anything. I feel nothing.”
“Liar.”
Fuck. I loved that word slipping from Story’s lips in the shadowy light—calling me out. Only she ever called me out.
I pressed my hands on either side of her pillow, pressing down until my lips were a thread away. “I won’t mourn her.”
It was as much a statement as a taunt, begging my Snitch to contradict me.
“No.” Her breath heated mine. “But you’ll grieve her.”
I raked my gaze down her body, her chest rising and falling, legs slipping open for me.
Her honesty was the rawest aphrodisiac.
Heating and twisting me up until I was rock-hard. Curling the satin pillowcase beside her face into knots so I didn’t jackhammer my pregnant wife into the fucking bed.
“My mother died before I could make any happy memories,” she said, voice a raspy siren’s call, and my gaze ripped from her open legs, back to her hazel eyes. “It’s so fucking painful when somebody dies before you have a chance to make it stop hurting. It just…keeps hurting. My uncle died, but I have fond memories of him, and it’s almost a sweet ache. My mother…it’s bad. Our relationship in life was bruised and rotten and she died that way, and so it just always feels bruised and rotten.”
She was right, she’s always right.
I dragged my hand along her rounded belly and she arched into the touch, slamming her hands over mine, forcing my touch deeper into her stomach.
I have wicked thoughts. Wrong thoughts. My wife is pregnant and she deserved gentle, but I want to give her rough.
Hard.
I want her covered in my bruises, her swollen stomach marked with me. For a brief second, I gave in. I dug my nails into her skin and her eyes fluttered closed. A twisted, needy moan slipped from her lips into mine.
“Wait!” Her eyes popped open. “We still have so much more to talk about. I need to tell you. Like what Jo—” She broke off on a breath, my knee pressing into her cunt. “What Josephine told me earlier today. What do you think that means?”