I stroked her face and praised her as she milked a quick, powerful orgasm out of me and down her throat.

I pushed her down and knelt between her thighs, lapping at her, sucking at her little piercing, stabbing my tongue against her clit, until she came, screaming.

I climbed on top of her, taking her mouth, sliding my tongue inside with a low moan.  We kissed like we needed it to breathe, tasting ourselves on each other's lips.

We were supposed to leave the island that night.

We said f**k it and stayed another five days.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

MY MARRIAGE

Marriage isn't easy.  It's not meant to be.  It is picking a partnership over a solo venture.  It is choosing to consider another person in every decision you make for the rest of your life, instead of just doing what feels right for you.  It is choosing to be selfless over selfish.

And like all marriages, ours had its challenges.

Neither of us had ever even attempted to have a committed romantic relationship with another person before.  I'd had copious amounts of sex with too many partners to count, but that in no way equipped me for a lifelong partnership with a woman I adored to the point of insanity.

We needed a learning curve, I figured.  We deserved one.

And so we learned together.

There was more good than bad, much more, always, even at the hardest times.  More things I loved than things that I couldn't bear, so many favorite things about her, about our life together that I couldn't pick even a dozen that were definitively ranked into the top spots of my hit parade.

I loved waking up next to her, pulling her na**d body close, feeling it warm in sleep, then thrum awake in awareness as I touched her.  And I loved touching her, in any way at all—sexually, chastely.

Possessively.

Covetously, tenderly, wonderingly.

Reverently.

I loved the way she looked at me.  She devoured me with those gorgeous eyes, swallowing me whole, eating me alive, her loving soul peeking out at me with no filter.

The way she studied me like she was memorizing my movements.  Watching me put on a suit was like Bianca- p**n .  With each piece I put on, she got more worked up.  It was a wonder I ever left the house dressed.

She was completely taken with my looks, and I couldn't help but enjoy that.

"You have a perfectly even skin tone.  I've never seen anything like it," she said one day, as I got ready to go in to work for a meeting.  Her tone was thick with lust, her eyes on my na**d torso just before I shrugged into a shirt.  That distracted me.  Her preoccupation with my flesh, her lusting for my person, always seemed to have that effect.

I was two hours late for that meeting.

I was late for a lot of meetings.

I loved dominating her sexually, craved it, needed it on a steady daily basis, even while I happily surrendered to her the total ownership of my soul.

I had so many things I loved, things I would not, could not, do without.

But of course, there were the things we could not take, could not stand, habits we both possessed that were hard to break.

What she could not take:  If I kept anything from her, even something minuscule, just to spare her feelings.

And when I became so enraged that I grew cold towards her, and refused to touch her, it upset her nearly as much as it turned her on.

What I could not take:  Her silent withdrawals.  Her need for space.

And of course the worst of it, for both of us, was my jealousy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

MY HATRED

I hated him.  Hated.  He wanted what I had, what I needed.

I could see it on him, smell it coming out of his pores, that want.

He couldn't hide it from me.  He was taken with her.  Smitten.  Enamored.

Who but me could better recognize the signs of that?

Joseph.  Fucking Joseph, the amiable security guy.  Such a carefree smile, such soft eyes for my wife.

He'd been around too long by the time I realized it, and now I couldn't fire him for no reason without looking like a jealous maniac to Bianca.

Because she liked him.  I knew she did.  She was attached to him.  He was her favorite bodyguard.  She enjoyed his company, thought he was funny and 'a nice guy.'

He and Blake were always the ones she chose to take when she needed security to accompany her somewhere.  Always.

But I hated him, and that hate went back a ways.

Two years, to be exact.  I remembered the very moment.  I could watch it in slow motion in my memories:

That night I'd carried her, scantily clad, from Stephan's house back to mine.

"Is she okay, sir?" he'd asked, something soft in his voice telling me even back then, when he'd barely met her.

And I knew he'd seen her like that, her beautiful, lush body barely covered, though he'd averted his eyes when I'd looked directly at him.

He'd fallen for my wounded angel from the first.

Why the f**k didn't I fire him right then and there?

If only I had, it would have spared me all of this impotent rage, this daily struggle to have to tolerate his presence.

Hate.

Raw, oozing hate when I caught him looking at her.

Acute, teeth-clenching hate when I knew he was home with her and I had to leave, or when he was out with her, when I couldn't go.

Bianca, who was normally too perceptive for comfort, seemed utterly oblivious to it.

And then, outrage of all outrages, I caught her painting him.

It was at the Vegas property.  I'd come home to find her not in the house, searched and asked until I was directed to the large back patio, a spot where she often went to work.