I feel my chest tighten. “Oh.”

“He loved her,” he says quietly, and I’m obsessed with the way he speaks. His English is perfect, but his accent lifts the words, tilts them so his h’s comes out nearly inaudible, his r’s always slightly guttural. He manages to sound both polished and crude. “He loved her in his strange way, and made sure to always provide for us, even insisting on paying when my mother wanted to attend culinary school. But he’s not a man who loves very generously; he’s selfish and didn’t want my mother to leave him, even though he had many other women in those years. They were at the house, or at his work. He was very unfaithful, even while he was possessive and crazy for my mother. He said he loved her like no other. He expected her to understand that his appetites for other women were not personal against her. But of course she was never to sleep with another man.”

“Wow,” I say quietly. In truth, I can’t imagine knowing so much about my parents’ marriage. Theirs feels like a bleached, sterile landscape compared to this.

“Exactly. So, when my grandmother became sick, my mother took the chance to leave France, to go home to Connecticut and tend to her until she died.”

“How old were you when she left?”

He swallows, saying, “Sixteen. I lived with my father until I began university.”

“Did your mother come back?”

I can feel him shake his head beside me. “No. I think leaving was very hard for her, but once she was gone she knew it was the right thing. She opened a bakery, bought a home. She wanted me to finish school here, with my friends, but I know being so far away ate at her. It’s why I came to the States for law school. Maybe she would have come back here if I asked her to, but I couldn’t, no?”

When I nod, he continues, “I went to Vanderbilt, which is not so very close to her, but much closer than France.” He turns his head, pulling back so he can look at me. “I do intend someday to live there. In the States. She doesn’t have anyone else.”

I nod, tucking my face into the crook of his neck and overcome with a relief so enormous I feel light-headed.

“Will you stay with me?” he asks quietly. “Until you need to be in Boston?”

“Yes. If it’s what you want, too.”

He answers with a kiss that deepens, and the sensation of his hands in my hair and his groan on my tongue fills my head with an emotion that feels a little like desperation. In a flash, I’m terrified of having true, intense feelings for him, of having to end this marriage game at some point, let real life back in and try to get over him. But I push it aside, because it feels too good to let the moment turn down at any corner. His kisses slow and tame until he’s just pressing his smile to mine.

“Good,” he says.

It’s enough for now. I can feel the heavy weight of sleep behind my eyes, in my thoughts. My body is sore and feels perfectly used. Within only seconds, I hear the slow, steady rhythm of his sleeping breath.

Chapter TWELVE

I’M DIMLY AWARE of a fist pounding heavily on the door and I sit up, disoriented. Beside me, Ansel bolts upright, looking at me with wide eyes before tossing back the covers, pulling on boxers, and sprinting out of the room. I hear his voice speaking to whoever is there, thick with sleep and so deep. I’ve never heard him sound stern before. He must have stepped out into the hallway and close the door behind him because his voice disappears after a heavy click. I try to stay awake. I try to wait for him and make sure everything’s okay and tell him how much I enjoy his voice. But I must be more exhausted than I thought and it’s the last groggy thought I have before my eyes fall closed again.

I FEEL THE air slide under the sheets and sweep over my skin as Ansel climbs back into bed. He smells like him, like grass, like salt and spice. I roll to his side, my mind still foggy and full of heated dream images . . . and as soon as his cool skin touches mine, longing flares low in my stomach. I want him with a kind of instinctive, barely awake yearning. The clock beside the bed tells me it’s nearly four in the morning.

His heart is pounding under my palm, chest smooth, hard, and bare, but he traps my wandering hand with his, stilling it so that I can’t slide it down his stomach and lower.

“Mia,” he says quietly.

I gradually recollect that he had to go to the door. “Is everything okay?”

He exhales slowly, clearly trying to calm down, and I sense more than see his nod in the darkness. The skylight over his bed lets in a bright slice of moonlight, but it cuts across our feet, illuminating only the very edge of the bed.

I press my body along his side, sliding my leg up over his. The muscles of his quads are defined and firm beneath smooth, warm skin, and I stop when I’ve reached his hip, gasping slightly when he arches up into me and groans. He’s still wearing only boxers, but beneath my thigh he’s semi-hard. Beneath my palm, his heart is slowly returning to normal.

I can’t be this close to him—even half asleep—and not want to feel more. I want the blankets tossed away and his boxers shoved down. I want the heat of his hips pressing to mine. As I hum quietly against his skin and rock against him—half conscious, half instinct—it’s several long beats before I feel his body fully stir.

But it does, and with another quiet groan he rolls to face me, shoving his boxers down his hips just far enough for him to pull his erection free.

“J’ai envie de toi,” he says into my hair and rubs the head of his c**k over me, testing, before pushing inside with a tight sound of hunger. “I always want you.”