Rooted (Pagano Family #3)(42)

In this position, he pushed constantly against the most intensely sensitive spot in her body. He rose up higher, got deeper, moved faster, and the water sloshed around them. The room dimmed by degrees as each wave of water doused more candles.

They were both grunting like beasts, the sounds rebounding, ricocheting. He bent over her and took a breast in his mouth, sucking it deeply, nipping at its tip, and Carmen again came hard enough to arrive at the edge of consciousness. Theo came right after her, while she was still throbbing. Then he sat back abruptly, keeping hold of her so that she went with him and ended up resting on his shoulder. He combed his fingers through her hair as they caught their breath.

“I love you, Carmen.” His voice was strained. “I love you. I love you.”

Jesus. Her head spun and spun.

She wanted to do the thing that felt good. For once, she wanted to follow the path of want and leave should behind.

When she opened her eyes, the first things she saw were the pendants around his neck. So she put her hand flat over them. Fuck them. Fuck Maggie. Fuck the past. Fuck her family. Fuck grief. Fuck fear. Fuck should. Fuck it all. Just f*ck it blue.

His heart beat under her palm.

“I love you, too.”





10



It took Theo a while to convince himself to open his eyes the next morning. But even before he did, he knew he was alone. He’d gotten used to sleeping with a partner again, and the bed felt different—even the air felt different—when he was alone. He lay still and listened; the room was quiet; only the pastoral sounds from the balcony broke perfect silence. She wasn’t here at all.

It was Sunday, though. She must have managed to get to Mass.

Theo was fascinated by this deeply rooted faith in Carmen. She was a contradiction, it seemed. Her personality was not beatific in the slightest. She was impatient. She expected the worst from people. She was guarded and cool at first meeting—and beyond. She swore like a sailor and blasphemed without a blink. She sinned without compunction—she was sinning like crazy with him. And yet she prayed regularly. Just quiet moments, closing her eyes for a few seconds before she ate, things like that. And she tried never to miss Sunday Mass. When he’d asked, she’d simply shrugged and said she didn’t know any other way to be.

Theo’s ideas about faith and religion were more academic, he supposed. He was interested in the symbolism. He didn’t disbelieve, but he didn’t often think of it, except to be curious about others’ faiths. Maggie’s beliefs had been of a more Eastern persuasion. Not Buddhist, exactly, but spiritual in that quiet, inward way. They hadn’t focused on religion in their parenting of the boys. Theo had always felt a light rub of guilt, or maybe incompleteness, about that. Nothing he could put his finger on. But he’d been raised with just enough religion to make him notice.

His mother had taken him to a Lutheran church in Cheyenne sporadically. She’d taught him the bedtime prayer and insisted he kneel at his bedside every night until he’d grown old enough to put himself to bed. She’d put a crèche under their little artificial Christmas tree every year. She’d spoken sometimes, usually when things were hard, about ‘God’s plan,’ but she hadn’t really taught him a faith, not in any intentional way. Not in the way Carmen had been taught. He’d come to think of the Catholic Church in Carmen’s life as he’d come to think of the family she would only talk about obliquely—the image he had was of tendrils coiled around her ankles, holding her in place.

Whether they were nourishing roots or constricting bonds, he wasn’t sure.

He rolled over, waited for the room to settle again, and cracked open his desiccated eyeballs. Fuck, they’d had a wild night. Parts were foggy now, but as he levered himself to sit, he looked around, and his memory cleared some. The room service cart was still in the room. The table was heaped with the leavings of their dinner, and, mingled with the familiar aroma of their sex, the room smelled vaguely of beef. Two empty wine bottles. A nearly-empty bottle of bourbon. And the silver champagne bucket, now on the nightstand, full of water and the magnum upended in it.

Little wonder his gut felt like his liver had abandoned ship.

She’d said she loved him. After that first time, in the bath, she’d said it again and again. A lot of the night might be faded around the edges, but that was perfectly clear. Things were different between them now. She’d taken that armor off. And now, in the sober light of this new day, they’d need to figure out where they went from here.

Sober.

He knew he was drinking too much. He hadn’t skidded down the slope yet, but the incline was getting steep. Carmen was drinking a lot, too, and he had a thought that he was to blame, in some part, for that.

But not today. Today, they’d go out in the sunshine and enjoy their last day in Avignon together, and they would do it with clear heads and open hearts.

His left shoulder itched oddly, and he brought his hand up and scratched absently at it, hissing when instead of an itch, he found a sharp pain. He looked down and found a perfect, oval impression of Carmen’s teeth—in some depth and detail—and a long streak of dried blood down his arm. Further inspection showed blood on the sheets, too.

He laughed, wincing at the spike of pain it brought to his forehead. Well, she’d said she’d make him pay.



oOo