into her harder and faster. Her hair in his hand bending her back, her face forced away from his, she felt each thrust like a jack hammer, filled with what felt like anger, meanness, a rage she’d never felt from him before. Eve tried to rationalize what was happening. Did he know she had a momentary fantasy of another man? He crashed into her harder. Eve braced herself, taking each thrust, feeling the guilt of her unspeakable sin. She took the pain as a kind of penance for her thoughts of Mac. Her mind raced. Maybe it wasn’t Mac. Maybe it was just all the frustration of everything that was happening in his life suddenly being released inside this act of violent sex. He whipped her around to face him and pulled them both down to the floor of the shower. He crawled into her, his body pressing onto hers. He was crushing her, jamming into her. The harder the stroke, the deeper his cock went, the bigger he felt inside her. Somewhere inside the pain she felt orgasmic waves of a very different kind of pleasure. Did she like his anger? Did she like the throbbing flashes that vacillated between pleasure and pain? She didn’t want to like it. She wanted him to stop!
Beau stood up, towering over her and snatched her up into his arms; lifting her, wet, dripping with water, he carried her into the bedroom and dropped her down on the silk comforter.
“Beau —” Eve started to protest.
He dove onto her, slamming himself inside. Beau, on his knees, pulled her hips up, pushing and thrusting his cock into her. He grasped the brass bed frame above her head for leverage. Eve moaned beneath him, taking the rhythm of each stroke. He kissed her, his tongue probing her mouth. Deep gasps of air echoed in the room as the pleasure her body wanted and her mind’s fears fought each other. His hand moved to her breast and he squeezed hard enough to make her arch up. His mouth went to her nipple. He sucked and licked and with each action there was a counteraction below until she surrendered. She came, exploding in a rush of silken fluid that flowed over his cock and down her legs, hot and wet. Her wet, throbbing cunt aroused him more and he responded, his hips moving faster and faster, his cock swelling bigger than she’d ever felt him. The pleasure was insane and horrifying. Eve bent her head back, her eyes closed. This time she slipped her hand down and cupped his testicles, fondling them faster and faster. She wanted him to come before he ripped her apart. He erupted with the force of Vesuvius and Krakatoa combined. A sound so primal, so lost in pleasure, bellowed from his throat and Eve opened her eyes. What she saw looming above her in the dim, shadowy light made her close them in disbelief. Something else was over her or was this some wild imagining too. She felt a rush of terror.
“Beau!” Eve called out in a helpless whisper.
Her body tightened, but he didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t stop. He pushed deeper and drove himself into her harder and faster. That sound … that primal sound filled her ears and she felt a searing, burning fire between her legs. She was passing out. She wanted to look, to open her eyes, but his mouth covered hers, his tongue inside of her, his hands everywhere. Eve twisted her face away and opened her mouth to cry out.
“Beau! Stop! Stop! Please! You’re hurting me!” She screamed, sobbing through gasps and tears.
Everything stopped. Beau stopped. The shadowy haze that swirled around him stopped and faded like a ghostly mist running away into the dim light. He hovered over her, confused, breathless and panting.
“Forgive me,” he said, gathering her into his arms. “I don’t know what happened.”
Eve was trembling. She wanted to push him away. She stared around looking into the shadows of the darkened room and then back at him. Inside a slim sliver of light that fell from the window she could see it was Beau … only Beau, worried for her, not a horrific monster that had tried to rip her to shreds… only her beautiful Beau.
“You make me crazy. I lost myself. You know I would never hurt you.”
Beau kissed her face and arms and fingers. The gentle stroke of his hand traced across her body.
“Tell me what you need me to do?” he asked.
Eve shook her head and curled up into his arms.
“Hold me. Just hold me.”
She felt like a child waking from a nightmare and those she loved had come to encircle her. He felt warm and strong, but he didn’t feel the one thing she desperately wanted to feel at this moment … safe and that frightened her more than the pain throbbing between her thighs.
Cora was having a very bad day. She had purchased the deluxe kit of Teach Your Baby to Read by Dr. Glenn Dorman and faithfully, every day, had done ten flash cards over 30 seconds of spoken and visual words, number dots, and famous paintings. Delia listened and looked, but to date refused to speak. On this element of child development, she and Philip had taken a strange code of silence, pointing to what they wanted, but never verbalizing their needs or demands. The two children would play together and sit or lie in an almost Zen state staring at each other as if communicating telepathically, a fact Cora was certain of since she first noticed the strange eye contact that held them spellbound for minutes at a time. However, nothing she said could convince either Eve or Beau that baby telecommunication was a feasible possibility.
Today, Delia was extremely irritable and unfocused. After the first set of cards she stood up, went to Cora and, placing both little hands on the cards, pushed them to the floor with a look so defiant it actually frightened Cora. Delia then opened her mouth and started screaming in full-on tantrum mode. The day nanny, Zamara, was about as plain a woman as Cora could find after the last two cute young nannies found their way into her extensive, black label, couture-filled closets and helped themselves to her clothes under the bizarre assumption that was acceptable behavior. Zamara, on the other hand, was a healthy muscular size 14, in her late forties, Latina, a trained nurse and an avid reader. When she didn’t have Delia, she had a book or a reader in her hand. Zamara rushed into the room as a stunned Cora reached out to embrace her daughter in an attempt to control her temper. Delia flailed, arching her back and kicking her feet. She whacked Cora in the face with such force she left a tiny red hand print on her mother’s cheek. Zamara stepped in.
“Let me have her, Miss Bouvier,” Zamara insisted.
Zamara lifted Delia into her arms and whispered something into Delia’s ear. Silence fell, leaving only the echoes of Delia’s voice ringing off the marble surfaces in the atrium.
“What … what in tarnation did you say to her?” Cora asked, rubbing her cheek.
Cora noticed there was blood on her lip as well.
“Nothin’ really, Ma’am,” Zamara responded.
“Nothing? A thirteen-month-old, in a full out nuclear tantrum shuts up and stills when you whisper in her ear and you choose not to tell me what you said? Seriously?” Cora said, glaring furiously at her nanny.
“It’s not the words, Miss Cora. It’s deep inside the breath that carries them.”
Cora stopped, completely stunned. Her daughter was not only calm and quiet, she snuggled into Zamara’s arms and buried her face in the nanny’s neck.
“It’s an art with children my Mamacita taught me. I could show you if you like?”
“I would like very much if you showed me how to do that, please,” Cora said.
Zamara lay Delia down in the cradle, gave her the warm bottle of milk she was bringing up anyway before the sounds of infant Armageddon broke out, and crossed to Cora.
“The key is to be as still and calm as you can be in the middle of such chaos,” Zamara explained.
“Well, that’s the first challenge, suga’. I can’t be still and calm when the world is in utter chaos,” Cora said with a roll of her eyes.
“Then it won’t work, will it?” Zamara said, her voice even, her tone pointed. Zamara tipped her head and arched her eyebrow as if to say, “Do you want to do this or not lady?”
Cora took a deep