She gave him one stiff nod.
“You said earlier this was all about what I want,” he said. “Well, I want you, not that vapid girl you were trying to punish me with. For the next two weeks, I want to be with you. The real you. Do you understand?”
They sat there staring at each other, and this time he refused to command her to answer. He saw several emotions flash through her eyes, defiance, calculation, and even fear, but eventually she nodded her head.
“Good,” he said. “Then you can talk again.”
“I liked you better with the accent,” she said almost before he had finished giving her permission to speak again. Her words were defiant, but he was happy to hear them delivered in her usual Texas-rich voice.
“That’s because when I had an accent, you had me wrapped around your finger. And now you don’t, and I have you at my mercy.”
Before she could answer, he kissed her as he had been longing to since first seeing her in the penthouse of a hotel he’d only bought because of her. And she kissed him back with such passion, he could tell they still set each other on fire even after all this time. He wondered, not for the first time, how she could have thrown what they had away just because her father didn’t approve and because he had been poor.
He’d hated her for so long for leaving him the way she did, not understanding how she could have taken his heart and tossed it back to him in shreds. But now he wondered if what they had hadn’t been what he’d thought.
For him it had been an all-consuming love, but for her, maybe it had just been sex, a way to rebel before she got sick of playing poor with him.
His anger should have flared up again at that point. But as he kissed her in the deck chair, the whole world fell away. For the first time in years, he didn’t feel the bitterness that had been his constant companion since she left him. Instead of revenge, it felt like a dream come true. Like someone had heard his prayers during the bad days when he was still begging God to return his Eva to him and had decided to grant them eight years later.
“I want you again,” he said. “I want to be inside of you.”
“Alexei,” she answered, her voice as hot and raspy as his.
He sucked in a breath when she took him in her hand and guided him toward her. “I want you inside of me. I shouldn’t. I wish to God I didn’t, but I do.”
She enveloped him in her steaming, hot wetness, taking him in with one desperate jerk of her hips. Then she let out a cry of such intense pleasure, he nearly came right then and there. As it was, he had to hold her hips still, not allowing her to move on top of him.
“Let me,” she said squirming against him. “I thought you wanted me.”
“I do,” he assured her between gritted teeth. “Too much. I need a moment or this is going to be over way too soon for both of us. Just give me a minute.” She moaned and let her head fall against his shoulder. Her aching need felt so tangible to him that he released her hips and started to move into her, his desire to give her what she wanted greater than his desire to stay inside of her for as long as possible.
And he was right. It was over much faster than he wanted it to be. They both came only a few minutes later, announcing their twin release against each other’s shoulder. It made him wonder if every time would be like this, fraught with frantic need, like they’d been starved of each other for far too long.
“I really need a shower now,” she said, laughing a little as she basked in her afterglow. They had cleaned up a little after the first time, but here they were again, sweaty and reeking of one another.
“I will show you to your room.”
Her face lit up. “I have my own room?”
“Yes,” he answered. “But it is only for storage. Your vacation wardrobe is in there and a few toiletries. I assumed you used the same hair products as back in grad school and I made Emilio a list.”
Her cute gasp of pleasant surprise made the entire effort worth it. “Look at you, even remembering my favorite hair products!” She clapped her hands together. “Show me, show me, please!”
So he showed her, and he had to fight hard not to get caught up in Eva’s reaction when she squealed upon finding a closet full of designer label, brightly-colored vacation wear. “And here I was thinking you were going to have me running around buck naked,” she said, pulling out a seventies retro-style yellow and orange tunic dress.
He tilted his head to the side. “I had not considered that option. Perhaps I should have the clothing returned.”
She hugged the dress to her and made a mad dash for the bathroom, yelling, “No backsies!”
He laughed and returned to the master suite to take a shower of his own. A certain contentment stole over him as he let the shower spray wash away his last interlude with Eva. Being with her again like this felt more right than he cared to admit, but for once, he refused to obsess over his feelings regarding her or try to quell them with bitter thoughts.
By the time he came out of the bathroom, dressed in another robe, he’d decided to take Emilio’s advice, and try “going with the flow” instead of waging a power war as he’d originally intended.
But then the sound of a cell phone ringing in his suite interrupted his thoughts. The bouncy ringtone definitely wasn’t coming from his smart phone. And he followed the sound to beneath the bed, where he bent down and found Eva’s phone going off. She had retrieved her things earlier, but the phone must have fallen out of her purse. It stopped ringing, just as he reached out and grabbed it.
And he would have delivered it to Eva right away, except a box that said, “Missed call: Aaron” popped up on the display screen.
He frowned, and a memory came back to him unbidden: Eva making a big deal of putting his name into her cell phone while they were eating breakfast in her apartment. “How exactly do you spell your name?” she’d asked, eating the omelet she had made for them with one hand and keying in his information with the other.
He’d spelled his first name for her, but when he tried to spell his last name, she winked and said, “No need. I really like you. I don’t need to put in a last name to remember who you are.”
His heart turned to stone in his chest as he looked at the one name on the screen. And it felt like he was walking through a room with no sound as he made his way back to the living room and stood there, waiting, until she finally appeared, now wearing the tunic dress she’d been so excited about.