Page 45 of Say You Love Me

“Morning,” Finity says sleepily. She turns, cuddling into me, her stomach pressing against mine. Her face brushes over my chest, her lips pressing soft kisses against my skin.

“Morning,” I whisper back to her. There’s something almost magical about this morning. Something in the way the light falls in a slice across us, something about the particles of dust that dance in its path, something about the warmth of my wife’s body and the knowledge of what it carries.

Her mouth makes its way up my throat, pressing kisses along my jawline until she finds my mouth. I return her kiss, but not with the same urgency.

“I need to go to work,” I mumble between kisses. Her hand wraps itself around my already hardened cock. I suck in a breath, resisting the urge to succumb.

She works me up and down as she continues to pepper kisses over my jaw. She keeps on kissing until she finds the lobe of my ear and then she suckles on it, streamlining a pull of desire that goes straight to my cock.

“Fin,” I whisper her name. “Fin, I can’t this morning. I need to get into work.” She ignores me and presses her breasts against my chest. They are larger than they used to be, swollen by the pregnancy.

Her hand works me harder and I have to grip her wrist to get her to stop. “Finity, please. I’ve got to go.”

She looks up at me with those eyes. Her fingers are still wrapped around me but they are frozen, kept that way by the pressure of my hand clamped around her wrist.

“Stay,” she begs. She looks at me with those eyes that do bad things to my insides. “Please?” She buries her face against my chest again, my skin distorting the words as they leave her lips. “Let’s just spend all day in bed. Just you and me. Remember when we used to do that?” Her eyes appear again. “Back at our old apartment in the city?”

She starts to stroke me again, slowly, my hand still wrapped around her wrist but not restricting her movement.

“Sometimes on the weekends we basically never left the bed. We’d order takeout or eat leftovers or skip eating all together just so we could stay in bed. You made love to me five times in one day, do you remember that?”

She’s talking years ago, while I was still earning my place in the world. When I wasn’t the CEO of a company that relied on me to turn up for work when needed, even if it was a Sunday.

Her fingers flex and I grip her wrist, pulling her hand away from me.

“I know and I remember, but I can’t. Not today.” I press a kiss to her forehead and slide myself out of the bed. She rolls onto her back, one arm flung over her face. Her left breast is exposed by the sheet and it takes all my willpower not to climb back into that bed.

She doesn’t look at me as I gather my clothes and make my way into the bathroom. I shower with my cock at full mast, trying to ignore it, ignore my wife lying naked in the next room in order for it to go down. She’s awake when I walk back into the bedroom, fully dressed and ready for work, but she doesn’t look at me.

“You got any plans for the day?”

She rolls away, sighing deeply, her shoulder once again bathed in the golden glow of the sunlight. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want her to be annoyed, but I have no other choice.

“No doubt my mother will be over.”

Still, she doesn’t say anything. Leaning down, I place my hands on the bed and wait for her to roll over so I can kiss her goodbye. She doesn’t, so I press my lips against her shoulder, hoping that it’s just the pregnancy hormones that have done this to my wife and that once the baby is born she’ll return to the woman she used to be.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I whisper against her skin.

This time she rolls over. She looks up at me with dead eyes then turns her gaze to the clock. “You’re late for work.”

Even though I am running late, I take the longer route. The one that winds alongside the river. I need the time to clear my head. I need the time to put her out of my mind and to gear it toward work.

As soon as I walk into my office, my phone rings. It’s a familiar number that flashes across the screen.

“Hey, Mum. Everything okay?”

“Of course everything is okay, why must there be something wrong for me to call you? I could just be calling to say hello, you know.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—” I take a deep breath. “Sorry, Mum. How are you? How’s Dad?”

It’s been a while since I’ve seen either of them. Weeks probably.

“We’re fine. Everything is fine,” Mum says hurriedly. “It’s Finity I’m worried about. You need to do something, Hudson. She needs you.”

I let out a long sigh of air and run my hands over my face. “I know, Mum. And I’m trying but—”

“You ripped that girl from the only place she’s ever called home, from her mother, from everything she was familiar with and dumped her here with no friends, no job—”

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