Page 60 of Keeping Ruby

It nearly killed me to give her privacy as she sat in the bath with her thoughts—thoughts she hadn’t been willing to share with me even though I’d asked. I’d nearly demanded she let me sit with her while she bathed, but when she looked at me with those big eyes, her whispered plea for privacy had nearly gutted me.

I won’t claim to be a good man, but my hands had been tied in that moment. With a single nod, my heart slamming like a beast in a cage against my ribs, I’d left her to her bath.

I heard Dimitri enter with the pizza and leave again without ever getting up from the chair outside the bathroom.

Then, at the sound of water finally draining, I stood and moved to the door. With a tap, I enter to find my wife standing with a towel wrapped around her body, staring at herself in a fog-rimmed mirror.

Her red hair is twisted into a knotted clip at the back of her head, her skin is flushed, and her eyes are wide. She tracks me in the mirror as I move, but makes no effort to escape me.

I tug the clip from her hair as I reach for her brush, watching as her eyes drift closed when the bristles connect with her scalp. Then I see it, the quiver of her lips. It’s faint, repressed. She’s trying to hide it.

My voice falls deep into the space between us. “How do you feel?”

She doesn’t answer for a moment. She’s trying to gather herself. To assemble the fragile, tender pieces, she doesn’t wish me to see.

I see everything, though. All the beautiful, wonderful, sweet fragments of her.

She steals a breath, but it’s shallow. “Fine. Why?”

Ah, so this is how she wants to play it. I nearly smile, but catch myself. “Considering I fucked you for the first time on the seat of a sled, I figured you might have a different answer.”

Her eyes flash to mine, the pink in her cheeks deepening. Under the towel, I watch as her nipples pebble.

My dick grows hard. Again.

I keep running the brush through her hair until it feels like a fall of silk.

She accuses softly, “You’re crass.”

“Was what we did not crass?”

She sniffs. “I highly doubt it’s the most unconventional of ways you’ve done it.”

She’s right about that. I’ve been fucking away my frustrations since I was a young teen. Before that, I’d had stellar relations with my hand.

But with her, it hadn’t been about the fuck. At least not entirely. It had been about losing myself in soft warmth. I’d felt, fucking bizarrely, that I’d come home.

Still, her comment nags. Snaking my hand around her neck, I let the pad of my thumb slide over the flutter of her pulse. Puffy lips I want to kiss, and bite, and lick, part on a shallow inhale as her eyes pin mine in the glass.

“You and I don’t go there, Ruby. Not ever.”

“Where?”

“To the women in my past. They will stay in my past, where they are meant to be. I haven’t wanted another woman—haven’t let myself be with another woman—since you came into my life.” Peering through my lashes at her, I lower my head to kiss the smooth, warm skin of her shoulder. She shivers under my touch. “They have no place between us. Not now. Not ever. Do you understand?”

I don’t expect the acquiescent, “Yes,” that she breathes.

I grin, and she shudders when I rumble, “Good girl.”

Twenty-Seven

Ruby

My husband is a dynamic man. I’m coming to learn, the more time I spend with him, that he is a man of many faces. I no longer think they are false, either. They’re simply him. Layers. Angles. Shields.

Yes, he’s a dangerous man with dangerous ties, but he’s also kind and thoughtful. He concerns himself with my feelings, even if he doesn’t always concede my wants.

I hate it, but I no longer hate him.

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