Contract Bride Read online

  Instead of crossing to the bed or lounging against the door frame, he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. “Thank you.”

  Seemed like the answer was yes—he did understand that certain things didn’t come easily to her. This was the part where she had to get over herself and start paying attention to what he needed. “What did you want to talk about?”

  That’s when he took a seat. Not on the bed but in the lone chair situated in the corner near the reading lamp. Crossing his legs at the ankle, he looked at the ceiling and blew out a breath. “I hated that you couldn’t sleep with me last night. I... God, this is hard.”

  “What, Warren?” She moved across the carpet and knelt by his side. “You can tell me.”

  “Can I?” He flashed her a brief smile. “While we’re discussing the things that you run away from, we should have a chat about my problems in the relationship department. I’m not very good at telling a woman how I feel, apparently.”

  How he felt? As in feelings? As in, what? He was falling for her?

  Her mouth worked but no sound came out. This was a disaster. He couldn’t fall for her. That’s when everything had shattered with Bryan, the moment he started talking about how much she meant to him; that’s when his controlling tendencies showed up.

  But at the same time...oh, how she longed for a bit of normality, where she could tell Warren she was falling for him, too.

  “Let’s start with the basics,” she said shakily. “Is this a conversation about how you’ve got expectations now about our personal life?”

  “What? No! Absolutely not. I...” Warren swallowed and there was the longest pause. “I should tell you about Marcus.”

  Instead of confessing something she was not ready to hear, Warren spun a tragic story about his college roommate and how the poor guy had gotten a fatal case of broken heart. Somewhere along the way, their fingers intertwined and she listened while holding his hand, though she couldn’t have said who reached for whom or which of them needed the comfort more. He had awfulness in his past, and she had a lump in her throat by the time he wrapped it up.

  “He died, and I swore I’d never go out that way,” he said, his gaze dark with memories and pain. “Love isn’t in the cards for me and it’s been shockingly easy to avoid that, given that I’m usually accused of being married to Flying Squirrel.”

  That was...not what she’d expected to hear. But, oddly, it was exactly what she’d needed to hear. It loosened the tight clutch of emotion inside her. “Yet here you are. Married to me.”

  “By default. It’s not supposed to matter.”

  “But it does.” Their gazes caught and the very air shifted as the hugeness of the moment blossomed.

  He nodded once without hesitation. “It does. Because I can’t go back to just working together, but neither can I promise you anything. I hate that we’re at this place—”

  “But that’s okay,” she said in a rush, almost laughing with relief. “I don’t want promises. I want to feel like there’s no pressure. Like we’re going to be okay no matter what. Working together isn’t affected, the green card isn’t in jeopardy and we can just float along wherever the whims of the moment take us. I’m totally fine with that.”

  She was. It was freeing in a way. She could have secret feelings and he didn’t expect her to share them. Once again, he had some kind of sixth sense about what worked for her and it was awesome in every sense of the word.

  “But you left last night,” he said quietly. “I convinced myself it was because you were sorry that we’d taken that step.”

  Her heart fell open and she had to clamp it shut.

  There was the emotion she’d seen when she first opened the door. She’d fled from his bed last night, then refused to talk to him about it. Of course he’d misinterpreted her angst.

  “Not sorry.” She shook her head so hard that several strands fell out of her bun. That thing needed to go. Reaching up, she pulled out the pins and let her hair rain down. “See how far I’ve come already? This is not something I would do with just anyone. Our secret.”

  His smile grew a wicked edge. “That’s not something I want you to do with anyone else.”

  Feeling bold, she hiked up her skirt and crawled astride his lap, settling on it with surprising ease, given the hard length jutting into her core. “That’s all it takes to get you hot? Me taking my hair down?”

  His hands clamped down on her waist, holding her in place, but it was thrilling. Because he wanted her with simple, uncomplicated desire. It was in his gaze, the heat of his expression. This, she understood. He was always so careful with her, so gentle.

  “All it takes is you walking into a room,” he muttered and flexed his hips in a little friction dance that nearly set her on fire. “And I’m wholly unprepared to have a sexy woman in my lap.”

  “Feels like you’ve got all the right equipment to me.” She wiggled, pushing him deeper into the thin barrier of her panties. He felt so good, and she loved that they could be honest with each other about what was going on inside, whether it was desire or pain.

  In response, he stood, boosted her up with both hands on her bare buttocks and strode toward the bathroom. She wrapped her legs around him and went to work exploring his neck with her mouth, nibbling on anything she came across. Warren tasted delicious, like heat in flesh form.

  The cool marble of the vanity stung her thighs as he set her on it and, giving her a quick kiss, he rifled through a drawer until he came up with condoms. Holding them up to show her, he then tossed them on the counter and stepped back between her legs.

  “Where were we?” he murmured.

  “I was playing out another fantasy of mine,” she informed him, saucily. Warren did bring out her vixen side with shocking ease. “Where you come into the bathroom and take me apart.”

  His mouth curved. “I have that fantasy, too. Let’s see how they compare.”

  Slowly, he raised his fingers to the buttons on her blouse and undid the top one. Then he moved on to the next one, watching her with careful, heated intent.

  “Not even close. Try this.” She grabbed both sides of her blouse and ripped them apart, revealing the white lace bra she’d been wearing the other night. “Not slow this time. Fast.”

  His mouth was already on hers, sucking her into him as he kissed her. Their tongues clashed, writhing together in search of more sensation. His hands were everywhere, in her hair, shrugging off her jacket and ruined shirt, sliding along her thigh as he fingered aside her panties.

  White lightning forked through her center as he thumbed her. She gasped and let her head fall back, thrusting her breasts against his chest. He bent and took one nipple into his mouth through her bra.

  “Now,” she commanded hoarsely. “Don’t make me wait.”

  He complied instantly, dropping his pants and shouldering off his shirt. She circled her hips, desperate for him to hurry. An eternity later, he was back in place, pushing aside her panties instead of removing them, and the urgency of it thrilled her. There was nothing slow or easy about the way he pushed into her. It was all raw need and power, and she reveled in it because she’d asked for it.

  He groaned as she took him. She urged him on with her heels, hands at his waist as he powered her to a dense, heavy release that broke over her without warning. He drew it out with hard, fast thrusts that built on the sensation until she was gasping and sobbing nonsense. His own release triggered and he held her tight to his chest as he came.

  That was her favorite part. He was so dominant everywhere but in her arms; with her, he let himself be vulnerable, pulling back a little to catch her in a long sweet kiss as their torsos heaved with the expulsion of passion.

  She kept waiting for him to be something other than perfect, but it hadn’t happened. He liked it when she was wanton, liked her sexy underwear, liked her. It was...everything.
/>   “Warren,” she murmured against his mouth. “I want to sleep with you.”

  “Tilda.” She felt his lips curve up against hers. “It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Hold that thought and we’ll pick it up again in about twelve hours. Now, about those meetings next week...”

  Nine

  That night, after thoroughly pleasuring himself on the sound of Tilda’s moans, Warren finally let her go to sleep sometime after midnight. But he couldn’t do the same. What if she had a nightmare? Or needed a drink of water? He had to be alert and ready to handle whatever happened.

  He didn’t want her to leave this time.

  Nothing happened. She slept through the night or, at least, that was what he assumed was the case. He’d fallen asleep, after all, only to wake with her watching him, one arm under her head and a smile that could mean a thousand things stretching across her beautiful face.

  “Good morning,” she said simply.

  And he couldn’t help but reach for her. She came willingly, eagerly snuggling against his body, and she felt so good that he couldn’t do anything but wrap his arms around her. What had started out as a bone-deep need to kiss her melted into something else entirely.

  She was still here. In his bed. The enormity of it soaked through his body and he tried really hard to push it away, but he couldn’t help the tenderness that filled that moment. They should be celebrating the fact that she’d taken huge steps to overcome difficult emotional landmines. Instead, he was fighting the realization that he’d been missing out on this kind of intimacy for the whole of his life.

  He liked her in his bed. He shouldn’t. But there was no going back now. The baby steps they’d been taking in deference to her triggers had worked on him, too, but for a far different reason. She’d slowly seeped into his consciousness until he didn’t know if he’d be able to untangle her from his arms, let alone from his insides.

  Thank God they had already decided on a divorce. Once she got her green card, everything would go back to normal. She could move out and he could...what? Go back to being lonely?

  That was crap. He had Flying Squirrel. He didn’t need anything else to make his life perfect.

  But as they finally dragged themselves from the bed and crossed the finish line by having breakfast together, he couldn’t sell that lie, even to himself. Before Tilda, his life had been something, all right—empty. What else could he call it when the word to describe how it felt now was full?

  Fine. He could roll with it for the time being.

  They didn’t work at all on Sunday in favor of spending the day together. She’d posed it as a way to practice for the green-card interview but the conversations always veered into something that no one from the immigration department would ever ask because the content was X-rated, at best. It seemed they’d both had a lot of fantasies to work through, which lasted the whole of the week, as it turned out. So far, taking her from behind on his desk in the CEO’s office at Flying Squirrel was his favorite with a capital F.

  The campaign for increasing Flying Squirrel’s market share in Australia was going well. He got some numbers from Thomas on Friday that pleased him so much, he immediately invited Tilda to a lavish dinner in celebration. For some reason, the impending dinner put her in a strange mood. She vanished to her office, a rarity, and stayed there for a couple of hours.

  Were they still not at a place where she could tell him honestly what was going on with her?

  And then she appeared at four o’clock. And knocked. Which she hadn’t done in quite some time.

  He did not like the idea that their relationship had seemed to regress. Nor the fact that backing off now was likely a good idea, pending how long the approval took on his petition for her green card application. They might have weeks, but they probably had less.

  He didn’t want to think about it. So he told her tersely, “You don’t have to knock.”

  “Can I come in?” she asked tentatively.

  He sighed. His tone had put her on edge. Because he was an idiot. “Of course.”

  Tilda’s hair was coming loose from her bun-like thing and he was pretty sure his fingers had been the cause. Probably from the stolen kiss in the stairwell that he’d initiated as they’d come back from a meeting with the board earlier today. How had they gotten to the point where she was cautious with him all over again in a matter of hours?

  “I have a problem,” she said and hesitated, stopping just inside the door. Usually she beelined for the seat near his desk. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but I feel like I should.”

  Bracing, he sat back in his chair. “I’m listening.”

  “I don’t want to wear a suit to dinner. But I don’t have anything else to wear.”

  The laugh of relief that bubbled up made him downright giddy. That’s what had her tied up in knots? “That’s not a problem.”

  She scowled. “It is to me. You of all people should understand.”

  Screw the distance between them. He skirted the desk and shut the door behind her so they could speak privately, then he leaned on it with his arms crossed. “I do understand. That’s why I know it’s not a problem. You wear those suits so you can pretend you’re a proper consultant to the rest of the world because that makes you feel safe. On the flip side, the kind of clothes you want to wear make you uncomfortable, so you shy away from them. You’re stuck in the middle. How am I doing so far?”

  Since her mouth had been agape pretty much the whole time he’d been talking, the question was largely rhetorical.

  “I pay attention,” he told her. “Because I care.”

  The phrase had come out of his mouth before he could catch it. But the truth settled into his chest, fitting into the nooks and crannies far better than he would have expected. He did care. There was nothing wrong with that. It wasn’t the same thing as love, and besides, he already had his out predefined. There was no forever kind of happiness on his horizon with Tilda, nor did he want that.

  Or rather, he didn’t deserve it.

  Which wasn’t the same thing at all. He swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth.

  “Since you’re so smart, what am I supposed to do about that?” she asked him, hands on her hips.

  He shrugged. “Easy. You let me take you shopping. The only caveat is that you have to wear whatever I pick out.”

  “You’d do that?” Now she just sounded suspicious, like he made a habit of offering to take women shopping for nefarious reasons.

  “Make no mistake. I’m picking out what you wear under it, too. None of this is for you. It’s all for me.”

  When her shoulders relaxed, that’s when he risked reaching out to pull her into his arms. She melted against him and it was every bit the sweet victory he’d hoped for.

  “Okay,” she murmured into his jacket. “You win. But only because I can’t wait to see what you have in mind.”

  That made two of them. He’d never shopped for a woman before, unless you counted birthday presents for his mom, and that was so not applicable here that it wasn’t funny. But he could not deny that he’d longed to dress her in outfits of his choosing.

  “That’s a secret I can’t share yet. Soon.”

  He kissed her temple as the last of the tension between them dissolved. Funny how often he found himself doing something that had its basis in comfort or affection. Before Tilda, he would have said a kiss led to sex a hundred percent of the time; otherwise, why bother?

  But he liked providing Tilda with comfort and affection. And if it helped her, great.

  But as he wrapped up work for the day, his mind was squarely on the question of whether it was helping her—or him.

  There was no good answer for that.

  He led his wife out to the limo that would whisk them to the exclusive shopping center he’d learned about from Hendrix’s wife, Roz, and pushed all his questions to th
e background. Tilda needed a dress.

  * * *

  Actually, the dress needed Tilda.

  On the hanger, lifeless. On the woman? A work of art.

  Warren could not take his eyes off his wife as she emerged from the dressing room in the teal midlength dress with sleeves to her elbows. It was both elegant and stylish, showing nothing but a bit of leg, which left the eye of the beholder to notice only Tilda’s radiance.

  “I like it,” she said softly, and he nodded because he didn’t trust his voice to work. “I’m going to wear it out.”

  Warren handed the beaming clerk his credit card without looking because he didn’t want to miss a moment of Tilda in that dress. “Don’t put your hair up.”

  “I wasn’t going to. Thank you.” She settled a hand on his arm and her warmth bled all the way through his suit jacket. “For the dress. And coming with me.”

  “The pleasure is all mine.” Understatement.

  Warren took Tilda to the priciest restaurant in Raleigh. Not because he cared about being seen, though there was plenty of that going on. More than one diner had shot a sidelong glance at their table, and there was a discreet photographer making rounds who probably worked for a society column. Since it was all good for Tilda’s green card, he didn’t mind.

  What he did mind was how difficult it was to sit across from his wife in a public place knowing what she had on under the teal dress. Yeah, he’d followed through on that, selecting a matching silk bra and thong. There was nothing daring about the lingerie, either. All in all, the whole ensemble was relatively respectable.

  What was driving him nuts was how Tilda had blossomed the moment she’d stepped into the room wearing it. She owned her beauty, her confidence. Wore both fiercely, as if daring anyone to try and take them from her. He’d never been more proud of another person in his life and the lump in his throat could not be washed away with any amount of wine.

  In the end, he might as well have taken Tilda to McDonald’s for all the attention he’d paid to the food. He honestly couldn’t have said what he’d ordered or what color the wine had been that they’d drunk, though he was relatively certain he’d noted the bottle had cost him five hundred dollars when he glanced at the bill.