Eileen Wilks - The Wrong Wife

She shoved back from the table so hard it wobbled, spilling coffee from Gideon’s cup onto the white cloth. “I guess that means last night was thoroughly unsuccessful for both our biologies, then, wasn’t it? That,” she flung at him as she started to pace, “is the most disgusting theory I’ve ever heard. Of all the self-serving justifications for infidelity, that just about tops the list.”

His eyes followed her as she paced. He’d always thought leprechauns would move the way Cassie did—quick, supple, efficient. “Calm down. I’m not promoting infidelity. Animals are victims of their biology. People aren’t. A man who lacks the willpower to keep his word isn’t much of a man. After all, men require fidelity from their wives so we’ll know whose children we’re raising. We have to be prepared to reciprocato.”

She paused in front of the window. The hard, white light admitted by the gauzy sheers surrounded her like an edgy aura. “Oh, you do, huh?”

He nodded. “It’s only fair. A woman wants to know her man comes only to her for sex, because sex is a powerful tool for keeping a male contented. A contented male is more likely to provide well for his family. Women—”

She screeched in rage.

“—are notoriously emotional about this sort of thing,” he finished, eyeing her cautiously. “But it is really quite logical.”

“I am not emotional.” She glared at him, her hands fisted at her sides. “I am reasonable. Calm. Logical. And I’m going to very reasonably explain to you why all your stupid logic is a pile of horse manure.”

The smile that broke over his face surprised them both. “I won’t be bored,” he murmured, mostly to himself. “Whatever else can be said about this marriage we’ve gotten ourselves into for the next year, it won’t be boring.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “We are not staying married.”

Oh, she was an O’Grady, all right. Stubborn to the core. But he knew her weakness. “Not indefinitely,” he agreed. “But I’ve no intention of destroying my friendship with Ryan by kicking his little sister out the day after the wedding. Even if that is what you want.”

“Ryan wouldn’t...” She drifted off uncertainly.

“You know him better than that. Ryan’s as good a friend as a man can have, but his first loyalty is to his family, not to me. How do you think. he’ll react if he thinks I’ve treated you badly?” He started toward her. “It’s not as if I’d blame him, either. I do remember parts of yesterday afternoon and evening, Cassie. I know what you expect from our bargain. You’ve had to spend too much of your time in dead-end jobs instead of painting.” He stopped in front of her. “I told you I’d give you everything you wanted if you would marry me. I’m not a man to go back on my word.”

Gideon studied the stubborn set of her jaw and decided he didn’t mind her obstinacy. He’d never objected to a challenge. “I’ve no intention of letting you go back on your word, either.” He moved closer.

She didn’t back away, but she wanted to. He could tell by the nervous way her tongue flicked over her lips. “Stop smiling like that,” she ordered.

“Like what?”

“Like a cat waiting. outside a mouse hole.”

His smile broadened. “As I recall, you always liked cats.”

“What does that have to do with—” Her breath caught audibly when he moved even closer.

Too close. Gideon stopped with a bare inch between their bodies. If he’d thought to dominate her, to intimidate her with the sheer force of his size, into his way of thinking, that thought fled at the feeling he saw flash across her face.

Desire. Innocent, but not simple, tangled up as it was in the shifting colors of those changeable eyes as she looked up at him, defiant, wary—and obviously unaware of what she’d just given away. And if Cassie’s breath had caught with sudden, unwelcome arousal at his nearness, Gideon lost his breath altogether.

She wants me. Cassie wants me.

His world shifted with that realization. Desire turned to need, to an aching imperative. He understood for the first time how a woman could drive a man to his knees...because Cassie, fey little Cassie with the fiery hair, was a woman. Not a girl. She was twenty-eight, not sixteen as she had been the first time he’d felt this way, not off limits, not forever inaccessible... oh, no, not inaccessible at all, judging by the look in her eyes.

The predator in Gideon roared to the surface of his brain while heat exploded in his body from the groin outward. Mine, he thought, already hard, impossibly ready. He reached out.

Reason didn’t rise and reassert itself. The flicker of uncertainty in her eyes didn’t keep him from grabbing roughly at what he wanted. Fear did.

His, not hers.

The fear didn’t even have to wholly surface to send shock waves through him. Like a leviathan at the bottom of a lake it stirred, and Gideon’s hand faltered just as he touched the place where the silk of her sleeve ended and the silky flesh of her arm began. I almost lost control, he thought. With the conscious thought came a dim amazement as the fear settled back into the murk.

Arousal still pulsed through him, making the tips of his fingers extraordinarily sensitive. That must have been why her skin felt so good to him, why he couldn’t resist stroking it lightly. He watched her eyes darken in response, and felt a flare of triumph.

She wanted him. He wanted her, too—but he could control his desires. He had to. “Give our agreement a chance, Cassie.” He slid his fingers down to her wrist and toyed with the delicate skin over her pulse point. “Be my bride. Live with me. Let me... take care of you.”

Cassie’s pulse was pounding. She knew Gideon could feel it. She wanted him to feel it, wanted, with a power that held her immobile, for him to go on touching her. Easily, naturally, she gave herself up to the feeling. “You just don’t want to admit you made a mistake,” she said, her voice husky. Cassie saw no contradiction between arguing with him and being aroused by him. “You’re not very flexible, Gideon. You think that because you’re married, however—” Her breath hitched as his fingers slid back up her arm, dragging tingles behind them like the frothy wake of a boat. “However accidental that marriage was, you think you should stay married. Stubborn.”

“Consistent,” he corrected. His fingertips slid up under the sleeve of her shirt. The small invasion felt unbearably intimate, as if he’d found some secret place On her body. “I’m a very consistent man.”

“It’s not logical,” she insisted as his fingers trailed around to the inside of her arm...lightly. Ever so lightly. Her skin broke out in goose bumps. “You don’t want to be married to me.”

His mouth, that beautiful, sensual mouth, tilted up at one corner. “Don’t I?” When his fingertips made a little circle on her arm, his knuckles grazed the side of her breast.

Oh, my. She swallowed so she wouldn’t gasp. Or moan. “You were going to marry the Icicle. I mean Melissa. You got drunk because you couldn’t marry her.”

His fingers stopped moving. His eyes went still with the dark, chill quiet of a frozen pond at night. Deliberately, his eyes fixed on hers, he repeated the motion of a moment before, circling the skin on her arm with his fingertips...circling the side of her breast with his knuckles. “You’re not sure if you can trust me, are you, Cassie?”

“It’s not very... consistent...of you,” she managed to say, “marrying me when you wanted her.”

He abandoned the pretense of rubbing her arm. His knuckles skimmed up the side of her breast. “I don’t want her now.” Slowly his hand went down. again. Up.

Helplessly her eyes closed as the undertow caught her, dragging her along like a shellfish tumbled by the tide across a gravelly ocean bed—a rough place in spite of the lightness of his caress, a place of confusion and sharp, conflicting currents.