But he was. Then he was doing more.
He extended a velvet box the color of the sea at its deepest. He opened it and she gasped again.
A sapphire, the most perfect stone she’d ever seen, the exact color of her eyes, caught the deepening gold of the sun rays and the flickering flames and radiated them back at her in a rainbow of hypnosis.
She tore her eyes from the jewel to his own twin diamonds, found them ablaze with what rivaled the heat of both flames and sun.
And he groaned, “Will you marry me, agape mou?”
Aris looked up at Selene, his heart barely pumping any blood, as if it was holding its breath like he was.
The stunned look in her eyes didn’t boost his equilibrium. When no ecstatic “yes” trembled on her lips, a terrible thought detonated inside him.
What if she hadn’t been telling him that his earlier efforts to make her his had been lamentable, but that she didn’t want to be his? That she was content to share Alex with him, but nothing more? Had his hands-off policy only served to make her realize she didn’t want him after all?
Or maybe he was doing this all wrong. Maybe he looked ridiculous to her, the cerebral, cynical lawyer, seeing him, the last person on earth she could imagine being sentimental, down on one knee, calling her his love, and looking up at her as if he’d suffocate if she didn’t give him a favorable answer.
He retracted the hand offering the ring she hadn’t reached for, rose slowly to his feet, decided to hope he was guilty of option two, the lesser evil by far here. “I botched up my first proposal. Am I doing it all wrong again?”
The shock seizing her face fractured. Her features trembled for a second then melted and a melodious sound burst from the lush lips he’d been suffering agonies not tasting.
She was laughing.
At him. At his offer. Again.
His shoulders slumped. What had he expected? That he’d exit a life of emotional exile and suddenly develop the complex skills needed to communicate his newfound emotions?
He looked down at the ring in the box dangling from his nerveless hand, exhaled. “It all seemed so right to me…in theory.”
Her laughter ended abruptly. He raised his eyes to hers, again felt the overwhelming sense of rightness, of everything about her slotting into all the empty places inside him, filling them, completing him. How could he live if he didn’t complete her?
He groaned his insecurity, something he’d only ever incurred on her account. “Will you overlook this? I’m suffering from a lifetime of emotional disuse. I want to please you, to honor you, to show you how much I want you to be mine, but I seem unable to get it right….”
Her hand stopped his before he stuffed the box into his pocket. “I can’t begin to think how you could have gotten it more right.” His gaze sharpened on her. Her eyes were growing heavy lidded, her lips dewy and flushed, as if he’d already kissed her senseless as he was burning to. “My wildest fantasies wouldn’t have come up with—” she flung her hands wide, before converging them on him in a sweep as elegant as a ballet dancer’s “—this.”
He shuddered at the things he didn’t dare interpret in her eyes, at the jolt of hope. And confusion. “Then…why?”
“Why did I laugh this time? Because you, the all-knowing Aristedes Sarantos, seem to suffer the same misapprehensions I was suffering from…till a moment ago.”
“What misapprehensions?” he rasped.
A cast of vulnerability, of relived hurt and despair entered her eyes, made him want to tear down the whole world so that he’d never see anything like that in her eyes again.
She lowered her eyes, took that mutilating expression away. “When you didn’t try to make love to me again, I thought you didn’t want me as much as you thought you did.”
That had been her fear?
“You were right.” That brought her eyes snapping up to his, that ready pain flooding them again. So she, too, felt incomplete without him, so much so that fearing he didn’t feel the same plunged her into despair. He’d pay his very life for her to never feel that way again. And he pledged, “I want you far more than I knew I was capable of. My desire for you defines me now. It is who I am—the man who wants you.”
Her heavenly eyes flickered with an alternation of surging delight and receding dejection as she gave him back his moments-ago uncertainty. “Then…why?”
“Fool that I am, I was trying to rewind and do things in the right order. I feared sexual intimacy would overwhelm us, that other pleasures we could find together would go undiscovered. So I held back, being only a ‘great friend’ to you. At the price of pieces of my sanity.”
“And mine.”
Her confession was searing in its truth, its totality.
She wanted him. As much as he wanted her.
It was almost inconceivable.
How could he possibly deserve it?
But she did. She did. And he’d live his life from now on to deserve every spark of desire she bestowed on him, to prove to her she’d done the right thing, the best thing for her, wanting him.
This time when he fell to his knees before her, it was with the enervation of relief. He extended his hand up with the ring to her again. “Will you have mercy on me, save what’s left of mine?”
Her face quaked with a joy so fierce, he almost wept seeing it. Then she extended a trembling hand back to him.
She wanted him to put his ring on her finger, do the running. And he would, for the rest of his life, if only she’d always let him catch her.
His hand shook as he slipped the ring on her finger before smothering her in his passion and gratitude. “And to think you mistook my restraint for lack of interest, when I thought I was building up anticipation.”
She moaned a laugh. “You did. How you did. You almost kill me with how well you do everything. Will you have mercy on me now?”
Blind, out of his mind with hunger and thankfulness and the need to claim her, conquer her, surrender to her, he surged to his feet, filled his arms with her, his moon goddess, magic-and-night-and-life made woman. His woman. The woman he’d been made for.
“You’re saying yes, Selene?” he groaned against her lips in between wrenching kisses. “Yes to me, to a lifetime with me?” Her nod was frantic, her lips as rapacious, giving him back his frenzy. “Yes to anything I want to do to you now and from now on?”
This time when she nodded, her breath made a catching sound deep in her chest, feminine greed and surrender made audible.