“Why wouldn’t I want to?” she questioned out loud, curious as to his thought process.
He didn’t have a gift with words, he never had. That was why he preferred being a rancher and hadn’t followed his father into a career as a lawyer. The fact of the matter was he didn’t really know how to express himself, but he knew he had to give it a try.
“I thought that maybe you’d want as little attention called to our, um, ‘arrangement’ as possible,” he finally said.
Her eyebrows drew together as she tried to find a reason why he would think this way. Try as she might, she came up empty. “Isn’t that the whole point of this? To call attention to the fact that we’re married and can create a good home for Jake?”
She had him there. “I guess you’re right.” He thought for a moment, then went back to his last proposal. “So, since you can’t be away from Sydney for any great length of time, why don’t we do what I suggested and just go for an overnight stay at the hotel?” he asked, watching her face to see how she really felt about the matter. “Would that be all right?”
Marina really wished she could gauge how he felt about the idea of a honeymoon. But, since she couldn’t, she felt she could at least tell him what she thought of his suggestion.
“That would be perfect.” She did her best to try to curb her enthusiasm. She didn’t want to scare him away. “I can get Dawn to babysit Sydney overnight. She’s already told me that she would be more than willing to take the baby for a night when I dropped her off earlier today.”
Or two, Marina silently added, recalling her younger sister’s words. She had a feeling that Dawn was trying to see what kind of a parent she’d make before taking the plunge and becoming pregnant herself.
“Then it’s settled,” Anderson said, pleased. “I’ll give my friend at Maverick Manor a call and as long as your sister’s available for the job, we can leave right after school’s over tomorrow—sooner if you want to take the day off,” he added.
She did, but she didn’t feel that it was right. “I already took today off. I don’t want the kids to think I’ve abandoned them.”
Absolutely incredible, he couldn’t help thinking. The woman’s a saint.
“Fair enough,” he told her out loud, finally starting the truck. “I’ll come by tomorrow and pick you up from school, Mrs. Dalton,” Anderson added after a beat, then realized that, again, he’d wound up taking something for granted. “Unless, of course, you want to continue being called Ms. Laramie.”
But Marina shook her head. She loved the idea of taking his name, but again, she didn’t want to scare him off so instead she said, “That might confuse everyone.”
Anderson was more than happy to accommodate her. “Mrs. Dalton it is.”
He had to admit, he liked the sound of that.
* * *
She might not have had a dream wedding. But in all the fantasies that she did have about the man she might someday marry, the husband she envisioned definitely paled in comparison to the man who walked into her classroom the following afternoon.
Anderson Dalton, at six foot one, with his slightly shaggy light brown hair and his electric blue eyes was just the kind of stuff that fantasies were made of. She felt her pulse skip a beat when she looked up and saw him standing there in her doorway.
“Ready?” he asked, his deep voice rumbling and filling up all the space around her.
“Ready,” she echoed, closing the middle drawer of her desk and locking it. “I just have to grab my suitcase. I packed a few things,” she explained. “If that’s all right.”
“Sure it’s all right.” Why would she even doubt that? he wondered. “I’m not kidnapping you, we’re going on a honeymoon. An abbreviated one,” he qualified, “but still a honeymoon. I didn’t assume you wanted to rough it—any more than you already are,” he added with what sounded like an apologetic note.
She was nervous, but his apologetic tone put her a little more at ease.
“Let’s go, then,” she said, picking up her suitcase from behind her desk.
“Let’s,” Anderson echoed as he took the suitcase from her and walked behind her out of the classroom.
* * *
Her nerves were back, growing progressively more pronounced the closer they came to the hotel. By the time she found herself standing before the honeymoon suite, her nerves had grown to towering proportions.
Opening the doors for them, the hotel attendant smiled politely and then silently withdrew, leaving them alone in the suite.
Anderson couldn’t remember the last time he had felt nervous, but for some reason, he realized that he was nervous as he waited for her reaction. Pleasing Marina had suddenly become important to him.
“Do you like it?” he asked, intently watching her face.
“It’s big,” Marina acknowledged. It seemed like a safe thing to say. Looking around, it all began to sink in for her. This was real. She was married to Anderson Dalton and standing in the honeymoon suite—and she hadn’t a clue how to act. Did she let him realize that she loved him? Or did she do her very best to act as if she was just going through the motions?
She continued talking about the suite because it felt safe.
“I think it’s bigger than my apartment.” She moved around the room, gauging the size. “You could have a party in here,” she told him. Her nerves were practically strangling her.
“A party for two,” Anderson replied. Realizing that sounded as if he was putting pressure on her, he immediately attempted to do damage control. “I mean, if that’s what someone wanted to do. It is, after all, a honeymoon suite.”
This wasn’t coming out right. He cleared his throat and tried again, wanting to make sure that Marina didn’t feel that he was thinking of taking advantage of her because they were legally married now. “The suite has two rooms.”
She looked at him, thinking that sounded rather odd. “A honeymoon suite with two rooms? Isn’t that strange?” She’d only been in a hotel room once, and it had been a tiny thing. Even so, there had been two beds shoved into it. Hardly room for a person to walk, she recalled. Here, they could have installed a bowling alley if they’d been so inclined.
“One’s a bedroom,” he told her, feeling more awkward by the moment, “the other is where they can share a private meal if they want to. It’s got a couch so I can sleep on that if—” The knock on the door interrupted him, bringing with it a wave of relief. “That’s got to be room service,” he told her.
“Room service?” she repeated. “Did we order room service?” She didn’t recall either one of them doing so. They’d just walked in. There had to be some sort of a mistake.
“Yes, we did,” Anderson assured her as he went to the door. “I thought that a little privacy might be nice. But we can eat down in the restaurant if you’d rather do that,” he told her, wanting to stay entirely flexible for her.
“Room service is fine,” she told him, doing her best not to let her nerves get the better of her. It wasn’t easy.
* * *
Room service was more than fine, it was exquisite. She couldn’t remember ever having a meal as sumptuous as the one Anderson had ordered for them.
The man might look like a cowboy, she thought, but somewhere in that broad chest beat the heart of a man with sophisticated tastes.
Along with the filet mignon and the lobster tail came a bottle of champagne that seemed to heighten all her senses and make her acutely aware of just how much the man sitting across from her at their small table for two actually aroused her.
By the time they had gotten to dessert—a chocolate parfait—she felt as if the temperature in the room had gone up more than ten degrees—and was getting steadily warmer.
“I had no idea you could eat so much,” Anderson said as the last bite of parfait disappeared behind her lips. H
e was extremely pleased that she’d enjoyed the meal he had ordered for them.
“Neither did I,” she laughed.
“I can order more,” he offered. “Maybe another dessert?”
“Oh please, I couldn’t take another bite, not without possibly exploding,” she confessed. And then she smiled at him. “This was all just perfect.”
No, she was perfect. The meal was just good, Anderson thought.
Putting down his napkin, he glanced at his watch. He hadn’t realized it was so late. Talking with Marina, time had just managed to escape him.
He pushed the table aside and rose to his feet. “It’s getting late and you’re probably tired. I should let you get to bed.”
Marina was immediately up. “Where are you going to sleep?” she asked.
She was testing him, wasn’t she? Anderson thought. “Well, like I said, there’s a couch here.”
She looked at it. It was a lovely piece of furniture, but it was curved. Definitely not the sort of thing a person over the age of nine could sleep on.
“That can’t be comfortable,” she told him. “There’s hardly enough room to stretch out.”
His mind hadn’t really been focused on the sofa. Now that he looked at it, she was right. “There’s always the floor,” he pointed out.
But she shook her head. “Even more uncomfortable,” she told him. “There’s a king-size bed in the other room,” Marina reminded him. “It’s certainly big enough for two people.”
The idea of sharing a bed with her was far too tempting—resisting her now was already hard enough for him.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
She looked at him for a long moment. She supposed what she said next she could have blamed on the champagne, but that would have been a lie. Because she’d thought about one thing ever since she had agreed to marry him.
“I am,” she told Anderson quietly.
He could feel his heart quickening, but for her sake, if not his own, he had to talk some sense into her. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Marina.”
She was already threading her arms around his neck, already bringing her body up against him, standing so close that a whisper wouldn’t have been able to get through.
“I think I am,” she told him, her voice low.
Did she realize how hard she was making this for him? “Marina, I’m only human. You keep standing so close to me like this and I’m not going to be able to do the right thing.”
“I think you’re doing the right thing right now,” she told him, her warm breath gliding seductively along his neck and his skin. Cocking her head ever so slightly, she looked up into his eyes. “I’m your wife, Anderson,” she whispered.
“I know that.” If this was some sort of a test, he was failing it, he thought, feeling himself slipping. “That’s what the wedding certificate says.”
Her eyes never left his and he could feel himself getting lost in them. “I want to be your wife in every sense of the word, not just on paper.”
This was a great deal more difficult than he had ever imagined. No, scratch that. It was beyond difficult. It was next to impossible and getting more so by the second.
“Oh damn it, Marina, I can’t keep holding you at arm’s length—”
“Then don’t,” she urged, rising up on her toes and kissing him.
She felt it instantly, felt him giving in to her, surrendering. Felt the kiss deepening and with it, the charade that they were both pretending to take part in ceased to exist.
Felt him wanting her.
Wanting her just as much as she wanted him.
She could feel a small whoop of joy echoing within her as her anticipation increased tenfold.
Their marriage was about to officially begin.
Chapter Seventeen
Marina admittedly had never been very experienced when it came to having sex. To her, the idea of doing it if love wasn’t involved was completely off-putting, so her partners over the years had been less than a handful. Moreover, it had been over a year since she had even felt a man’s touch. Since her affair with Gary had ended so badly she hadn’t even been tempted to make love with anyone. It was a complication she wanted no part of.
She thought—assumed—that she was just fine on her own. She actually felt content in the fact that it was just her and Sydney against the world. There was no need for her to yearn for a man in her life.
And yet, right at this moment, she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than to make love with Anderson, than to have him touch her, kiss her, possess her and make her his in every exquisite sense of the word.
Marina gave herself up to the sensation and sealed herself to her destiny—and Anderson.
She didn’t remember just how or when their clothes had come off, didn’t remember how they had gotten from the one room to the bedroom, much less into the king-size bed that dominated the room.
All she was aware of was this burning need to love and be wanted, to be taken up beyond the boundaries of the mortal world and into a realm where there were only two individuals who made up the population.
Anderson and her.
“Am I going too fast?” he’d asked her at one point, just before they’d landed on the bed.
“Your timing is perfect,” she’d managed to get out. She found that she had to concentrate in order to get her breathing under control.
It was all he needed to hear to inflame him and urge him on to higher plateaus.
That was when it actually hit him, that it all became crystal clear to him: he didn’t ever want to let Marina go. Not because she was helping him get Jake back—that was part of it, but it wasn’t the main part. He didn’t want to let her go because he was in love with her. In love with a beautiful, pure woman who wanted nothing from him, nothing but to help him.
How could he have possibly gotten so lucky?
He wanted to tell Marina how he felt, to shout about the glorious feelings going on inside him from the highest rooftops. But he was afraid that if he let her suspect how he felt, it might just ultimately frighten her away. So all he could do was show her. And he intended to, for as long as she would let him.
He made love to her with a vengeance.
* * *
Something had changed.
Marina could feel it. Or maybe it was just the champagne that was finally kicking into high gear.
Whatever was at the root of it, she could have sworn that Anderson’s lovemaking had escalated another notch—maybe even several. His lips were everywhere, making her crazy, branding her, causing her very skin to feel as if it was on fire. And the hotter it felt, the more she burned for him.
Her head was spinning and a stray little voice within her was whispering, This is special, this is something unique. This is definitely a man who could easily rock my world.
What “could”? she mocked herself. There was no doubt that he already was doing just that.
It suddenly occurred to her that she didn’t want him coming away thinking she was only there to take from him. She needed to let him see that she was just as capable of giving back.
So she did.
Somewhere deep inside her, something very basic rose to the surface. It was bent on pleasing Anderson, on making him not regret this marriage of convenience they had struck up.
She wanted to make Anderson want her every bit as much as she wanted him.
Marina found herself acting on instincts she never even knew she possessed. Instincts Anderson had, just by making love with her, by arousing her with his skillful foreplay, brought out of her.
And just like that, she was giving him just as much pleasure as he had been giving her. Hearing Anderson moan acted like a catalyst and ignited her.
Marina had no idea where
any of this came from, she only knew that suddenly, she had skills that had never been there before, fueled by urges that had never existed before.
Empowered, exhilarated, she reacted to it all as if it was perfectly natural for her to do so.
Anderson had had no idea, when he had walked in on his son’s teacher that first afternoon in her classroom, that beneath this woman’s cool, classic exterior resided the soul of a tigress.
His own personal tigress.
Foreplay lasted longer than he ever thought himself capable of maintaining. He pleasured Marina for as long as he could hold out, until his self-control was about to break apart. He needed to join with her now!
Rolling over so that Marina was beneath him, Anderson primed her with openmouthed kisses all along her smooth, writhing body until neither of them could hold back even a fraction of a second longer.
His heart pounding wildly in his chest, Anderson entered her, making them one unit—for now and for always.
Tapping into what he knew was his last drop of self-control, Anderson began to move slowly.
And then faster.
And faster still, until he thought the tempo they reached was as close to the speed of light as humanly possible. And they were doing it together. That was all that seemed to matter, that they were arriving at the very peak of the mountain they were scaling together.
Standing at the top of the world together.
And then the very final thrust came, bringing all the stars raining down around them.
He clung to her, amazed at how hard his heart was beating without breaking through his ribs and shattering his chest wall.
He was even more amazed at how much he wanted her—again. Wanted her with every fiber of his being even though there wasn’t a single ounce of energy left within him.
Marina reveled in the incredible magnitude of the feeling she’d just experienced, reveled in the fact that he was still holding her as if she was the most precious part of his world rather than just rolling away from her because he was done.
She could feel his heart mimicking her own and she had a surprising reaction to that.
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