Page 44 of The Reason for His Wife's Return

“Then you better hurry. Oh, and please don’t muss my dress.”

With a rough growl and a curse that made her giggle, he picked her up and shuffled her an inch to the left. A firm palm on her back pressed her until her hands were resting on the dark wood chest that Mira was suddenly grateful for. Legs kicked apart, her breasts achingly heavy, she waited with panting breath. Closed her eyes as she felt the silk slide up her bare skin, heard the rasp of his zipper and then he was probing inside her already wet heat with a gentleness that brought tears to her eyes.

She bit the rough pad of his palm that was caressing her nape, needing his usual wickedness. Tenderness would do her in right now. Because it was for so many reasons except the one she wanted it to be. “I’m not glass, Aristos. I won’t break if you speed it up.”

“And yet you feel incredibly fragile in my hands,thee mou.”

Mira pushed her hips back into his next thrust and heard his rasping groan. He went deep that time, hitting the exact right spot where she needed him.

And slowly, they found the rhythm that worked best at that angle, Aristos upping his pace just a little bit more and Mira letting him know that she was more than fine with her vocal grunts.

The soft thud of his pelvis against hers, the rasp of his hair-roughened legs against hers, the incredibly gentle hold he kept over her hip through every stroke and thrust...and the counterpoint to his tenderness, the very filthy words he gave Mira, telling her how hot and hard she made him, how he adored every inch of her silken smoothness, as if to make up for his slow torment, she was thrown headlong into her climax.

Tears filling her eyes, Mira gasped at the pleasure fragmenting through her in a million fragments, biting off the words that wanted to pour out, hating that a small, tiny part of her was still afraid of saying them. Still afraid that he’d never say it back.

Her dress was not only wrinkled from where he’d bunched it in his hands, but Aristos noticed, way too late for his own comfort, that his wife was crying.

Big fat tears pooled in her eyes and flew down her cheeks and down her forearms that he’d clutched to arrest his own momentum as he’d reached climax. His thighs were still trembling from the aftershocks of how explosive it had been. How disjointed and out of this world his own body felt.

With a rough curse at his own lack of control, he cleaned her up, and then straightened both their clothes. Through it all, she stared at him, with a glazed look in her eyes, tears still clinging to her lashes, being far too biddable for a woman who refused to be caged.

“Is it the babies? Was I rough?” His voice rose with every second she didn’t respond. “Mira...”

“I’m fine. Just crying at my climax, like I do at everything these days. NBD.”

Holding her close, Aristos peered at her, as if he could look down into her soul.

She wasn’t telling him the complete truth.

She never told him the complete truth, always holding a little bit of herself back.

A part of him hated it. Hated that she gave of herself so completely to this marriage and the future but not to him. Hated that she was evasive even to this day when he brought up their engagement and why she’d broken it.

But a big part of him focused on the raw need she let him see in her eyes, the want she let him hear in her words, the laughter she evoked in him when she suddenly turned naughty to pay him back.

That she was fire and heat and sensuality itself underneath practical self-sufficiency—he’d always known that. But that she could be playful and wicked and enjoy every little thing he threw at her in their sex life...that she could make him laugh when he was deep inside her...it was something he hoped he’d never get used to.

He hoped she’d never stop surprising him with how much she invested into their relationship, into their future. Into their present.

In the last few months, his life had truly changed. A change he’d planned for—in colorful, scheming detail, as a man who always planned things before he walked into the blizzard. He’d known that bringing Mira back into his life would be something similar. And yet, it was nothing like he had thought it would be. He had only ever pursued excellence—a necessary evil for his own survival. He never let himself be still or stop on the way up the climb.

And he’d never once considered his own happiness.

He had known it only once, and even then it had been fleeting, gone before he had sense enough to recognize it.

And for all the changes Mira had brought into his life, it was the bursts of sheer happiness that threw him now. Because he had been happy in the last few weeks, he had been content. And yet the fear remained, like a niggle at the back of his head, a constant voice that kept saying he shouldn’t get attached to those moments, because it wouldn’t last. And he was beginning to hate that voice.

He was beginning to hate how it pulled him away from this current moment, from enjoying the woman who stared at him as if he was everything to her. He had waited eons for Mira to look at him like that. To see him and recognize someone equal, but also someone worth spending her life with.

“If I didn’t feel awful about all the effort Stella and Leo have gone to, for my benefit, I’d manipulate your overprotective instincts to get out of this party.”

And just like that, the voice of disappointment curdled his joy. He clasped her cheek and turned her until she could meet his gaze. “You refused to have a big wedding. You refused to let me show you off to the world. You refused to let me squash all those nasty rumors and gossip. And then you left.” Like embers barely put to bed, his discontent flared every time he thought of the damned contract and all the rumors his vile cousin had spread about them. “I’m done hiding you and this. I want the world to see that you’re mine. If, however, it makes you ashamed to be tied to me or the Carides name, then that’s your problem.”

“That’s unfair. It’s only the wild exploits, the utter gossip they write about you, that bothers me. That they painted me like some pathetic woman you rescued bothered me. That your so-called loyal PA leaked our contract to the entire damn world bothered me. You...and us and this... I like this life we’re building, Aristos. What do I do to make you believe that?”

“Look happy about it tonight,thee mou. I want the world to see you next to me. I want the world and the damn board and my entire extended family to see that you’re mine and you’re happy and that—”

“You never care about others’ opinions, like ever.” She stared at him, her eyes wide. “I didn’t... I didn’t realize it was so important to you.”

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