She wanted him to keep being the family man, and that meant keeping the sex good and giving it freely because he’d told her right at the beginning that was the glue which would make their marriage stick, and there was to be no stirring up desire without delivering, no bartering sex for other things. She had agreed and still did agree because she wanted a have and hold marriage with him.
‘Say you feel it, Tess!’ he demanded, heaving himself up to check the response in her eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said, because he couldn’t look so fiercely determined unless the caring was there to drive such depth of feeling.
Their marriage was important to him. Besides, she reasoned it certainly wasn’t the promise of an inheritance inspiring his love for Zack. The caring for their son was very, very real. And Tess did feel the caring for her in his next kiss.
It was much, much softer, tender, more wooing a response than compelling it. His grip on her hands loosened, the need to hold her captive to his will sliding into the desire for the mutual coming together that gave them both so much pleasure. There was no doubting the deep physical communion they invariably shared, which Nick had invoked in his argument and which Tess felt every time they made love.
Wanting to give herself up to it, wanting to forget Nadia Condor and the mercenary motives she had made so believable, wanting to make the date of November the fifteenth totally meaningless, Tess dragged her hands out from under Nick’s, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back with all the deep yearning for love in her heart.
‘This is the truth,’ he murmured against her lips. ‘Taste it, Tess.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
It tasted good.
‘Feel it!’ he repeated, trailing slow-burn kisses down her throat, building the heat that would end up fusing them together.
It felt good.
Her fingers slithered into his hair as he shifted lower and she hugged his head to her breasts as he kissed them, making her feel voluptuously sexy, beautifully female and intensely desirable. The woman he chose as his wife, she thought. For this, not for money. She had to believe it. She did believe it.
He moved himself further down, caressing and kissing her stomach, her navel, exciting tremulous rivulets of pleasure, his tongue sliding erotically over the scar from the Caesarean operation…no, sliding reverently…projecting how much he valued the gift of his son. Their son. And for this he had married her, as well. Not for money.
She felt his truth with every sense she possessed as his mouth closed over her clitoris, driving waves of desperate delight through her body, her limbs, her every muscle. The intensity of feeling pummelled her heart. She groaned, cried out, her fingers clenching in his hair, tugging, needing, and he lifted himself to answer her need, answer it as only he ever had, giving himself into her possession, wildly, wholly, every plunge a promise of exquisite fulfilment to come.
And it ended as it always did with him possessing her, holding her to a fantastic pinnacle of pleasure as she melted around him, then fiercely concentrating on his own climax while Tess revelled in feeling his entire body straining to join his life-force with hers, exulted in feeling the tumultuous joy of it when it happened.
And, of course, this could have nothing to do with money! It had a truth all its own…impossible to buy, impossible to simulate, impossible to deny. It was a truth that kept her warmly content within Nick’s embrace afterwards, her head resting on his shoulder, her arm flung across his chest, her legs sprawled over his.
She didn’t want to move.
She was with her husband, her lover, and in the secret fantasy she still nursed in her heart, her soul-mate.
Nick didn’t want to talk. His body was relaxed. Tess’s silky hair was spread carelessly over his shoulder. Her warm breath caressed his skin. The sense of physical harmony between them did not invite any thought of conflict, yet he could not quite rid his mind of the distress his mother had inflicted on Tess.
The date—November the fifteenth—had been significant, and there was a link between the packet from Brazil and his decision to pursue the idea of a marriage with Tess. His denial that the link was to an inheritance from the Ramirez estate was absolutely true because nothing would ever persuade him to accept any part of his father’s property. It would always feel like thirty pieces of silver to him—blood money.
But he hadn’t been entirely honest with Tess. Remembering how he’d been thinking that day…it hadn’t been the need to prove Enrique’s opinion of him wrong that had swayed him into picking up his father’s challenge. At that point in time he had arrogantly dismissed the view that his life was following the same pattern as his father’s. There wasn’t anything to correct. What had influenced his decisions and actions was the promise of a meeting with the two half-brothers he hadn’t known about.
His only blood-related family.
Except that wasn’t true any more. It hadn’t been true from the moment Tess had told him about Zack and blown him onto a different path again. Immediate fatherhood. And fatherhood took precedence over brotherhood any day. He was living the reality of his own family right now with Tess and their son and it was so good, Nick knew he’d do everything within his power to protect it from any damage.
The weird irony was he’d barely given a thought to Enrique’s challenge since Tess had presented him with Zack, yet two months down the track, Nick was beginning to feel the Brazilian playboy he’d so bitterly scorned, had finally seen the light on what was the good life. He’d written in his letter—Find a woman you’d be happy to spend your life with, a woman you’d be happy to have children with…
A father’s advice.
Nick had mentally mocked it.
Yet he wondered now if the letter—the challenge—might not have been motivated by genuine caring…the regrets of a lifetime piling up to produce a perception Enrique had wanted to pass on to a son, a last act meant to do good at the end, hopefully redressing the harm.
Tess heaved a sigh.
Nick’s arm instantly cuddled her closer to him. He dropped a kiss on the top of her head. ‘Are you okay with me now, Tess?’ he asked, hoping there was no poison left from his mother’s visit.
‘Mmmh…’ It sounded like a happy hum.
‘Feeling good?’ He smiled confidently.
‘Good sex,’ she said on another sigh.
His smile faltered and died. Yet there was nothing wrong with the comment. The sex had been good. It was always good with Tess. He had just more or less defined their relationship as great because it was never anything but good.