Her stomach fluttered, but she managed to nod. “Good. That’s good. Best.”
“So it seems. End lockdown.” His cool order had the shields going up, and the light pouring in the windows. “I’ll give you some time later this morning, but I need to see to some matters. If you’ll close the door on your way out.”
“Sure. Okay.” She started out, then pressed a hand on the door to brace herself. “You think I don’t know, that I don’t understand what that cost you. But you’re wrong.” She couldn’t keep her voice steady, gave up trying. “You’re wrong, Roarke. I do know. There’s no one else in the world who would want, who would need to kill for me. No one else in the world who would step back from it because I asked it. Because I needed it.”
She turned, and the first tear spilled over. “No one but you.”
“Don’t. You’ll do me in if you cry.”
“I never in my life expected anyone would love me, all of me. How would I deserve that? What would I do with it? But you do. Everything we’ve managed to have together, to be to each other, this is more. I’ll never be able to find the words to tell you what you just gave me.”
“You undo me, Eve. Who else would make me feel like a hero for doing nothing.”
“You did everything. Everything. Are everything.” Mira was right, again. Love, that strange and terrifying entity, was the answer after all. “Whatever there is, whatever happened to me, or how it comes back on me, you have to know, you need to know that what you did here gave me more peace than I ever thought I’d find. You have to know that I can face anything knowing you love me.”
“Eve.” He stepped away from the slot, away from what was gone. And toward her, toward what mattered. “I can’t do anything but love you.”
Her vision blurred as she ran, wrapped herself around him. “I missed you. I missed you so much.”
He pressed his face to her shoulder, breathed her. Felt the world steady again. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no, no.” She clung, then eased back only to take his face in her hands. “I see you. I know you. I love you.”
She watched the emotion storm into his eyes before she pressed her lips to his.
“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.”