Page 22 of First Comes Marriage

“Holy shit. Did we…” She dropped his hand and pulled the robe around herself tighter, flitting her eyes back to the bed. “I mean…Did we?”

“Did we fuck?”

She winced at the harshness of his question. It was a good reminder for them both. One drunken mistake didn’t change anything. She was still the youngest daughter of one of Boston’s wealthiest families, and he was still the man who hadn’t been good enough for her sister. A set of cheap gold bands couldn’tchange that.

Neither would touching her. But it didn’t stop him from wanting to. Something about seeing that ring on her finger and knowing he put it there (even if he didn’t remember doing it), something about the way her pupils dilated and her breathing grew shallow when he was near made him want to see how messy he could make her. He was no stranger to having beautiful women in his bed, but this feral feeling, this desire to mark her, to claim her, like the monster dragging the princess back to his lair, that was something new.

He liked it far too much. And judging from the heat in her eyes when she looked at him, she liked it too. Even if she shouldn’t.

He stepped closer to her, crowding her, and a thrill shot through him when she didn’t back away. Instead, she tilted her face up to him, holding his gaze with those deep green eyes.

“If we’d fucked, you’d remember,” he said, his voice low and gravelly as he dragged his gaze over her face, down the curve of her neck, to the shadow of her breasts and back again. “If we’d fucked, you’d still be able to feel me.”

She sucked in a breath, the sudden inhale pressing her terrycloth-covered chest against his. His hands fisted at his side, keeping himself from pulling her against him, to make sure she knew exactly how much of him there was to feel. She swayed closer, lips parted. It would be so easy to kiss her, to give her what they both wanted…

Except she didn’t want him. Not really. What was it she had said at the bar? Something about making her sister jealous? This was all a game to her, one he couldn’t win.

Then it’s time to stop playing.

He stepped away, turning his back on her before he could give in to the fantasy of it. He might want to kiss her, to fuck her until neither one of them could remember their names, but at some point, she’d call an end to this charade.

He’d just have to end it first.

He would not be rejected by another Page woman.

“Get dressed.” He didn’t look at her as he gathered his shirt and suit jacket and stormed off to the bathroom to change. “I don’t want to miss our flight.”

Chapter Eight

Sebastian hardly spoke to Sabrina in the hours after they left the hotel, sitting next to her in the airport terminal in stony silence. Sure, he’d grunted in the affirmative when she asked if he wanted a coffee and managed to grate out a word of thanks when she’d handed him his Starbucks, but that was the extent of it. His gaze hardly lifted from his phone screen.

Meanwhile, Sabrina couldn’t bring herself to look at her phone at all. When the buzzing and pinging of the incessant notifications and missed calls reached a fever pitch, she’d simply turned it off. Which meant she couldn’t play any of her favorite match-three games during their interminable wait for their flight home, but it also meant she didn’t have to see her mother’s name flashing across the screen every three minutes or the nonstop string of text messages from Holly, each one more incensed than the last. If she’d thought her family had been disappointed in her when she’d filed for divorce, she could only imagine what they must think of her after a quickie Vegas wedding to her sister’s ex-fiancé.

But who had time to deal with her family’s total meltdown over her Vegas misadventures when there was a whole flight, complete with possible impending death, to obsess over?

When at last it was time to board, Sebastian grabbed herbag without a word, hauling it down the jetway along with his own and hoisting it easily into the overhead bin. Sabrina didn’t know what to do with this grumpy chivalry. Now that she knew how he kissed, the way he tugged on her hair as he positioned her exactly where he wanted her, now that she knew how it felt to sleep in his arms, she found herself reading into every word, every gesture.

And when the plane jolted as it began taxiing down the runway and her hands gripped the armrests for dear life, she didn’t know how to feel about the fact that Sebastian pulled her hand into his own, twining their fingers together. He didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at her, but the reassuring strength of his grasp combined with the almost absent-minded way his thumb skated over the wedding band on her finger twisted her up inside more than any cross-country flight ever could.

They sat that way for hours, her hand in his, until she could no longer take the silence.

“Sebastian?”

“Hmm?”

“We’re married,” she whispered.

Strange how that word set off an avalanche in her brain, burying her beneath all the promises she’d made to herself when she filed for divorce from Jordan, all the things she swore she’d never do again.

“Oh, God, what were we thinking?”

He glanced at her, his eyes scanning her face for…she didn’t know what. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, looking away.

“What does that mean? Take care of it?”

“I’ll call my lawyer when we get back to Aster Bay. With any luck, it’ll be annulled by the end of the week.”

She blinked helplessly as his words settled between them, her stomach lurching. He was going to walk away, just like that.

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