“Never say never, Emilia,” he retorted as I shut the bathroom door.

He’d admit, as soon as he saw me, that my choice had been a far better one than a naughty nurse’s outfit.

Almost a half-hour later, after I’d removed the wedding dress, freshened up my hair, and figured the contraption out, I reappeared, covered modestly from neck to knee in one of the resort’s complimentary bath robes. Almost all of the lights had been extinguished, except for one. It provided an indirect, ambient lighting that equaled that of lit candles…nice and romantic.

My husband lay across the covers of the bed, wearing nothing but his underwear. He was staring up into the netted canopy, thinking, when I came up to stand in front of him.

His head turned, and he gazed at me expectantly. “When I saw you in that dress today, I thought that I’d never want to see you in anything else. Am I about to change my mind?”

I shrugged demurely, loosening the belt and lowering my robe to the floor so he could see me in the chic Agent Provacateur lingerie. The thing had cost me a small fortune, but hey, only the best for a billionaire’s wedding night.

“Holy shit,” he muttered, sitting up with wide eyes.

The sparkly ensemble covered nothing at all, in fact. Not that it was really supposed to. It was for purely decorative—and titillating—purposes only. In fact, it was nothing but a series of thin chains holding together coin-sized golden disks in order to imitate a sexy chain mail dress. And it left little to the imagination. I held my arms out and let him have his glimpse.

The cold metal settled against my nipples, causing them to tighten, and though his facial expression revealed nothing, the obvious and immediate swell in his underwear said it all.

I posed prettily. “Now all I need is a giant glowing sword, and I’m all ready to be a first-level character in Dragon Epoch.”

Adam rolled onto his side, propping his head up on his hand to study me. His eyes glided over me appreciatively, taking in the small metal disks of my “chain mail” lingerie. The unmistakable glow of lust smoldered in his dark eyes.

Then he sighed loudly. “Oh. I was thinking that with the all-night aerobics we participated in last night, we could take it easy tonight. Maybe cuddle and talk.”

I blinked, lowering my arms. What the… “Huh?”

He cleared his throat and glanced out the window. “Yeah. We’ll tell each other stories and spoon and fall asleep holding hands.”

“For real?”

He watched my face for a long moment before busting out with laughter.

“Of course not,” he said. “God. You’re standing right in front of me naked except for that glittery slave girl bikini, looking like you stepped off the set of Return of the Jedi.” He patted the spot beside him, and I climbed into the bed, settling there. “It’s all for me. I’m not wasting all that with some spooning, that’s for damn sure.” He reached out and smoothed a hand up the inside of my bare thigh. “I don’t care if I was half dead, I’d still be all over you, explosive spleen or not.”

We kissed—he pinned my head back against the pillow ferociously, forcing my mouth open with his. When I came up for air, we were both breathing heavily. “I was worried there for a minute. That didn’t sound like you.”

He laughed. “I could want to cuddle and spoon…”

I made a face. “Maybe if you were half dead.”

We kissed again, this time less urgently. He was trying to figure out how to get his hands up under my chain mail armor.

“If I’m the slave girl, then that makes you Jabba the Hutt.”

He did his Jabba laugh. “Mmm. Fresh meat.” He squeezed my thigh. “Jabba hungry.”

“Now that sounds more like you.”

As he leaned in to kiss me again, and my hands encircled his neck, I thought about how we hadn’t forgotten a thing, how we were falling into the patterns we’d learned when we first started making love. Every movement of ours was like a dance.

Our choreography was practiced, but always fresh. Never tired.

We possessed an elegance branded all our own—legs aligned, parallel lines growing slowly tangled, then perpendicular, then locked together, needy. We intersected at certain vital points, becoming part of each other’s geometry, then separated again.

Skin kisses, touching, pressing, kneading against one another. Hands smoothing, grasping, pressing, griping, releasing. Breathy exhales mingling, inhaled once again. Everything a new mix of my chemistry and his. This wasn’t a mere blending of our bodies, the intersection of our sexual organs. We blended of our breath, our sweat, our skin cells. We merged and then separated, different in chemistry, different in body, different in soul.

Every time Adam and I made love, I came away with a new piece of him to carry around with me.

“Okay, that does it. I’m going to be unconscious in five minutes,” he muttered after he’d rolled away from me, lying flat on his back, flush from the afterglow of his orgasm. The tangle of my metallic chain mail lingerie now lay in a shiny pool on the floor, all but forgotten. I rolled over, resting my head on his hard chest.

“Did I wear you out already?”

His hand came up to twine through my hair. As the low light glinted off his wedding ring, a thrill zinged through me. Perhaps I liked witnessing my proof of ownership as well.

“Only temporarily,” he answered. “And mostly because of last night.”

We stayed like that for long minutes. His hand relaxed, and his breathing became measured. I lay pillowed on his chest as he slept, his breath tickling my hair. I was tired, too. So tired. But I couldn’t sleep.

I was a married woman. Someone’s wife. Adam’s wife.

Everything had changed even while this felt so familiar, so comforting, so us.

With a finger, I traced the outlines of the muscles on his delicious abdomen, and without realizing it, I was whispering their names. “External obliques. Pyramidalis. Tendinous inscription.”

My hand traveled lower, toward his navel. “Umbilicus.”

“What are you doing down there?” he muttered, and it startled me because I thought he’d fallen asleep.

“Oh, nothing.”

“You’re whispering something. What is it?”

I sighed. “It’s nothing much. I was…um…taking this opportunity to brush up on my anatomy.” I touched the ridge of muscle where his abdomen ended and his hip began, tracing it the entire length. His skin rippled under my touch as if I’d tickled him. “This is the anterior iliac spine.” I traced lightly along the skin, over the light dusting of dark hair on his belly to land north of his pubic bone. “This is the reflected inguinal ligament.” Which I duly outlined, slowly, firmly. “And this is—”