I didn’t want.”
“Really?” This didn’t seem the deep confidence she half expected. “Do you think he did it on purpose?” she asked, wondering if that was digging too deep.
“Hell, no. He’d never show that kind of forethought, but he created the excuse and I was glad. Swear to me you’ll never reveal that to him.”
A giggle escaped her, part relief, part joy that he was confiding in her a little. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
He took a deep breath and looked down on her with something like pride and...affection? His expression had softened into amusement and tenderness. It almost looked like happiness and made her warm all the way to the soles of her feet. He was solemn as he cradled her face and caressed her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
“I can’t wait to marry you.”
“Really?” She wanted to smile, but she was dissolving under his look and couldn’t seem to hold any part of herself steady. “Because I thought it was you at first, when Demitri came in. He made out with that woman right there in front of me and I thought for a horrible second it was you and we were finished. I was devastated,” she admitted.
His mellow smile faded. “I’ll kill him.”
Her turn to set a hand against his smooth cheek, freshly shaved and smelling of something tangy and fresh. “But then I realized it couldn’t be you because you’d never do that to me. I never expected I’d be able to trust a man this much, Theo. I wish I could tell you what a gift you’ve given me with that.” She slid her other hand up his chest and around his neck so her breasts pressed into the hardness of his chest and her damp lips touched his ultra-smooth jaw.
He gathered her in, crushing her close in tight arms and releasing a shuddering breath against her ear.
They sought each other’s mouths, colliding with practiced alignment, parted lips meeting and sealing, plunging her into a dark jungle of sultry heat and velvet sensations. Combing her fingers up the back of his head, she reveled in the short, freshly cut strands, the new haircut, exactly as he’d promised. The thought made her want to smile but he was kissing her too intently.
He rasped his tongue down her neck, one hand palming her breast, making intense sensations race into her loins. She clenched to contain the deliciousness there.
This was moving fast and a distant part of her wondered if she should be worried about that, but desire flowed through her veins in rivers of lava, making her burn for him.
“God, Jaya,” he groaned, stilling her rocking hips against the hard ridge of his erection. “The next two days are going to kill me.”
“Oh, Theo, I don’t want to wait anymo—oh!”
He scooped her up, his strength like a conqueror’s as he bounced her into a high clasp against his chest, his arousal evident in the flush on his cheekbones and the sheen on his feral half grin. “If you’re not going to stop me, then I won’t.”
She slid her hand from his shoulder to his ear, pulling herself close enough to kiss where his pulse pounded like a hammer in his throat.
As he started down the hall, two sounds halted him: Zephyr’s cry and a knock on the penthouse door.
He swore and she softly wailed, “Nooooo,” as he let her feet slide to the floor.
“That’s your family, isn’t it?” His gruff voice was rueful. “Better now than in five minutes when we would have been naked. I’ll get Zeph. I need to pull myself together.”
Snickering, she kissed his chin and started to walk away. He yanked her back for another deep swift kiss that included a taste of France. Dazzled, she bounced off the wall on her way to greet her guests.
* * *
Despite his sexual frustration, which was more acute than he’d ever thought he could bear, Theo was riding a natural high. Jaya still wanted to marry him.
He hadn’t consciously been aware of that niggling concern. She always responded so sweetly to him and even though they had their differences, they always seemed to work through them. Still, a voice inside him had kept harping that he wasn’t enough.
She thought he was a gift, though, because she could trust him. He swelled with pride knowing how hard-won that kind of reliance was for her. The determination to protect her ran through him on a current of reverence and resolve. In a few days he would pledge to uphold her faith in him and he’d do it with every fiber of his being.
Speaking of gifts...
Lifting his freshly diapered son to eye level, he took a moment to absorb the awe of fatherhood. While the magnitude of responsibility still scared him, and he wasn’t yet a hundred percent confident he’d be everything Zephyr needed, he was learning. For most of his life, he’d been driven by the need to be perfect so he wouldn’t catch hell. Now, he yearned to do well so he could be a better father than he’d had.
“That sets the bar pretty low, doesn’t it?” he murmured to his son before he kissed the boy’s forehead and carried him out to the main lounge.
Heated voices speaking Punjabi fell into a wall of blistering silence when he appeared. He’d picked up a few words from Jaya and was working on a speech for the wedding, but he wasn’t good enough with the language to follow any of what had been said even if he’d properly heard it.
He was the last man to judge a family for dysfunction, but Jaya had seemed to be making progress with them. Her tone had been growing lighter of heart when she’d spoken of them while travel and wedding plans had fallen into place. He had been counting on her finding some emotional fulfillment through her relationship with her mother and sister to compensate for his own lack. It was important to him that he not cheat her of love, that he give her every chance for it since he couldn’t provide it himself.
This wasn’t love, though. This was a tight army of angry young men backing up a grizzled bear with a thick gray beard. Two older women sat on the sofa, one in green, the other in blue. They bookended a young woman in yellow and a dazed older man. Their clothing seemed extra-colorful against the white leather of the furnishings, their expressions taxed. The women seemed to be trying to make themselves smaller while the young men puffed up their chests under crossed arms.
Jaya stood apart from all of them, her anxiety palpable. The way she dropped her gaze after an initial tense glance at him seemed almost apologetic.
Theo mentally swore. He might have been swimming naked through these sorts of shark-infested undercurrents all his life, but he’d never grown comfortable in them.
“Welcome,” he managed in Punjabi, then zeroed in on the woman beside the frail, confused looking man who must be Jaya’s father.
“Jaya has been eager to see you all.” He hoped that wasn’t overstepping. He hated it when people tried to talk for him. Forcing himself to move forward even though his joints felt rusted, he added, “This young man has been waiting to meet his Naniji, which is...Gurditta?”
He guessed correctly at the woman in the green sari.
Jaya’s mother gasped and stopped dabbing a tissue into her eye, dropping it away so she could pull Zephyr into her lap. Her tears turned to joy as she gathered up the wiggling boy like a bundle of laundry that wanted to drop socks.
Whatever dark cloud had been hovering broke into beams of sunlight for a second as Jaya drank in the sight of her mother holding her son. Then she glanced at the bearded man with a mix of defiance, resentment and—Theo’s heart took it like a stiletto—a remnant of shame.
Before he realized what he was doing, he had moved to her side and set a firm arm across her back. Belatedly, he wondered if his hand on her hip might be a familiarity that would repel someone with traditional views, but he needed her to know she wasn’t alone. They needed to know if they insulted her, they insulted him, and he was not a naïve girl working in a call center.
“Thank you