J. Robb - Divided in Death

“It was like the world was off a step,” he murmured. “Nothing quite in time when I couldn’t really touch you.”

“Touch me now.”

He smiled, stroked her hair. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, but touch me. I need to feel close to you again.” She turned her lips back to his. “I need you, and I need so bad, so bad to show you.”

“In bed then.” He circled her toward the elevator. “In our bed.”

When the elevator doors closed, she pressed against him, strained.

“Gently now.” He ran his hands down her sides, then boosted her into his arms. “You’re bruised.”

“I don’t feel bruised anymore.”

“All the same. You look so delicate.” When her brow creased, he laughed and dropped a kiss on it. “That wasn’t an insult.”

“Sounds like one, but I’m going to let it pass.”

“You look pale,” he continued as he walked off the elevator into the bedroom. “And a bit fragile. There are tears on your lashes yet, and shadows under your eyes. Do you know how I love your eyes, your long golden eyes, Eve. My darling Eve.”

“They’re brown.”

“I like the way they watch me.” He laid her on the bed. “There are tears still in them.” He kissed them closed. “It kills me when you cry. A strong woman’s tears can cut a man to ribbons faster than a knife.”

He was soothing her, seducing her, with words and those patient hands. It amazed her that a man of his energy, his needs, could be so patient. Violent and cold, tender and warm. The contradictions of him, the whole of him that meshed, somehow, with the whole of her.

“Roarke.” She bowed up, wrapping her arms around him.

“What?”

She opened her eyes, laid her lips on his cheek, and searched for her own tenderness. “My Roarke.”

She could soothe, she could seduce. She could show him that whatever the world threw at them, whatever reared up from the past or lurked in the future, they were together.

She unbuttoned his shirt, pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “You’re the love of my life. I don’t care how corny that sounds. You’re the start of it, and the end of it. And you’re the best of it.”

He took her hands, cupping them in his own and bringing them to his lips as love washed through him. It cleansed, he thought, this flood of feeling between them. And despite all the odds, what it left behind was pure.

He parted her shirt, then traced his fingers lightly over the bruises. “It hurts me to see you marked like this, and to know you’ll be marked again. At the same time it makes me proud.” He brushed his lips lightly over injuries, pressed them softly to the image of her badge. “I married a warrior.”

“So did I.”

His gaze came back to hers, and held, as their mouths found each other’s. Hands stroked, in comfort, in passion. They moved together in the quiet of the morning and words slipped into sighs.

When she rose over him, took him in, their fingers linked. Locked. With the pleasure, with the thrill, was the steady beat of love.

She curled up beside him, realizing they both needed this space of intimacy as much as they’d needed the reassurance and release.

Her world had been rocked. She only understood how violent the shake had been now that it was steady again. Only understood, she thought, that it had been the same for him now that they were reconciled.

Reconciled, she realized, because he’d given her what she needed. He’d submerged or denied his own ego for her. And there was nothing simple or easy about it. His ego was… she’d just call it healthy since she was feeling so grateful.

He’d given in, given up his own needs, not because he stood on the same moral ground as she at the end of the day, but because he valued her and their marriage more than that ego.

“You could’ve lied to me.”

“No.” He watched the light strengthen in the sky through the window over the bed. “I couldn’t lie to you.”

“I don’t mean you, I mean in a general sense.” She shifted, skimming his hair away from his face with her fingers, then running those fingers over the stubble he’d neglected to remove that morning. “If you were less of a man you could have lied to me, done what you wanted to do, stoked your ego, satisfied yourself and moved on.”

“It’s hardly a matter of ego-”

“No, no.” She rolled her eyes, but made sure she did so out of his range of vision. “Ego always plays a part, and I don’t mean that in an insulting way. I’ve certainly got an ego.”

“Tell me,” he muttered.

“Look, look, follow along here.” She shifted, scooting up so she could sit and face him.

“Can’t we just lie here quietly for a few moments, so I can admire my naked wife?”

“You should like most of this because it involves all sorts of compliments and admiring comments about you.”

“Well then, don’t let me interrupt your train of thought.”

“I really do love you.”

“Yes.” His lips curved. “I know.”

“Sometimes I think it’s because of that Plutonian-sized ego, sometimes despite it. Either way, I’m stuck on you, pal. But this isn’t about that.”

He stroked the back of his fingers along her thigh. “But I’m liking this very much.”

“I might be feeling a little sloppy yet, but-” She slapped his hand away. “I’m back on the clock.”

“Yes, I’m admiring your badge right now.”

The laugh snorted out before she could stop it, but she grabbed her shirt. “What I’m saying is you’re an important man, a successful man. Sometimes you make a splash about it, sometimes you don’t. Depends on the purpose. You don’t need to make a big deal about stuff because you are a big deal. That’s one part.”

“Of what, exactly?”

“Of the whole ego thing. Guys have a different kind of ego than women. I think. Anyway, Mavis claims it’s connected to the dick. She’s usually right about stuff like that.”

“I don’t know how I feel about you discussing my dick with Mavis.”

“I always say you’re hung like a bull and can go all night.”

“That’s all right, then.” But since the direction of the discussion made him feel just a little exposed, he reached for his pants.

“What I’m saying is you’ve got a… powerful ego. You needed it to get where you are, and, I must be feeling sloppy because I’m going to say you’ve earned it. You’re confident, confident enough in yourself, in who you are, to back away from a fight because it was important to me. You don’t agree with me. What you said before, that you’d be able to live with the consequences, is true. You’d have felt justified. You’d have felt right.”

“There was complicity in their neglect. They’re guilty because they ignored you. More guilty because they were in a position of authority.”

“I’m not arguing that.” She tried to put her thoughts into cohesive words as she dressed. “You understood me enough to know if you took action in that direction it would damage me. Us. You put that first, subjugating your own ego. It takes balls to do that.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but I wonder if you could formulate metaphors that didn’t include my genitalia. It’s beginning to weird me out.”

“You’re courageous enough to do something that in some part of your heart you see as cowardly.” She stepped toward him when he stopped buttoning his shirt, when he looked over at her. “You think I don’t know that about you? That I don’t understand the nasty little war this waged?”

She tapped a finger to his heart. “And what it cost you to surrender? It makes you the bravest man I know.”

“There was nothing courageous about hurting you. And I was hurting you.”