Besides, her words were a two-way street. He didn’t read romance, but he’d seen the covers, like anyone else. The heroines always looked sexy-as-hell, courageous, intelligent. His wife reflected more than elements of that fantasy. She was that fantasy. To him, always.
He stroked her hair, her neck, and the graceful line of her shoulder. “The staff took pity on me. They drugged your wine, so I’d seem more believable.”
She chuckled again. They settled back into a quiet mode. He thought she dozed for a while, and perhaps he did as well, but he was roused by an unexpected question. She was drawing circles in his chest hair with a fingertip, her breath whispering across his nipple.
“Is this the kind of Dom you were…before me?” she asked. “I know some of the others are into the equipment and restraints, and you seem to know how to use all of that, but…it feels like it’s not entirely you.”
He had to think about it. The longer he spent with her, the more opaque the curtain of memory about other women before her had grown. He had no desire to draw that back. While he would tell Savannah anything she wanted to know about him, in whatever detail she needed, he didn’t care to talk much about his past submissives or relationships, except how they’d led him to this one, the last one he knew he’d ever have.
His mother had died in his teens. Before that happened, he’d taken one girl to a dance, another to a roller skating rink. He’d stolen a kiss or two, been interested in other things normal for a teenage boy, but his heart had stayed curiously separate. When he’d confided his worry about that, his mother had smiled, a lot of things in her gaze he hadn’t yet understood consciously, but did later. She was already starting to show signs that the cancer was winning, but she was holding her own with treatments, so both he and his father were holding onto hope with both fists.
“Don’t worry,” she’d said, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear. He shrugged as if irritated with the coddling, but he didn’t move away. He actually moved a step closer. He was so strong. He was on the wrestling team, was big enough to be on the football team. If she could take any of his strength to make her well, he wanted her to have it.
“You’re your father’s son,” she said softly. Then, he had seen her with a teenager’s viewpoint, but in hindsight, he remembered her gaze seemed to understand everything he was thinking, worrying about, wanting. “I won’t be a bit surprised if, when you find the one you want, she’ll be the one. The one you have to have, that you’re going to have, because you won’t accept anything less than a woman you can love with every dark and light corner of your heart.”
“Matt?” Savannah, so attuned to his thoughts, lifted on her elbow, her hand still on his chest.
“It’s good.” He told her the memory, and her eyes softened with sympathy. He’d held in his feelings about losing his mother for the first several years after her death, intuitively wanting to support his father. As devastated as Matt was, Jonas had a hole blown through his chest that never filled. But then Jonas was killed when Matt was seventeen. Holding in the pain about losing his parents became a war he fought inside himself, using immersion in learning the business of the empire he’d inherited as his most potent weapon.
It wasn’t until Lucas, Peter, Jon and Ben all four became a permanent inner circle for him, that Matt let some of those feelings come to the surface. Sometimes, in limited ways. The son of Jonas Kensington was never going to embrace the modern a-man-can-be-sensitive-and-cry, talk-show horseshit. Yeah, try pulling that mama’s boy crap on an oil rig, and be prepared to swim to shore.
Even so, Jon in particular had helped Matt realize he needed to spill some things off, so they didn’t result in closed-off behaviors that could hurt not just his business practices, but his life and relationships. But it had taken a woman to allow him to really feel it, grieve them as fully as he’d needed to do.
The setting didn’t really lend itself to thinking about parents, but the look in Savannah’s eyes, the memory her question had unfolded, did. And led to another.
He remembered a night Savannah had asked to see a picture of his mother. He’d pulled out a scrapbook, something one of his aunts had given him after Jonas’s funeral and he’d put away in the back of a closet. It was a collection of pictures of both Jonas and Gianna Kensington. It was when they’d reached one of the two of them holding him as an infant, that he did what he never had. He broke down and cried. Just sat down hard on the carpeted floor of their enormous walk-in closet, Savannah curled over him, holding him with surprisingly strong arms, as he wept for the two people who’d loved him and cared for him, as long as fate had given them. Which had been too goddamn short.
“I was surprised I lost control like that, that night,” he said. Coming back to himself, he realized she might have no idea what he was referencing, but from the tightening of her lips and the swirl of emotions in her eyes, he knew he was an idiot for thinking otherwise.
“I’m glad you didn’t say you regretted it. I would have had to hurt you,” she said. “It’s a memory I cherish. Not of your pain; of course not. But it was the night my husband proved to me he knew he could trust me enough to lean. To break.”
“Afterward, I was worried that it had hurt you. To see how much I loved my parents, and how much they loved me.”
She shook her head, shadows crossing her face. “I had a very difficult and cold father, Matt. I’m so glad you didn’t have that same experience. They gave you the ability to love.” Her lips curved slightly. “It sounds like your mom put her stamp of approval on your tenacity about going after the woman you want. Now, are you going to answer my question, or are you deliberately trying to distract me?”
She knew the right moment to tease him. As much as he did trust her enough to have such a mental break, being vulnerable was far from his most comfortable state. Clearing his throat, he made a show of sighing and gazing up at the tented ceiling.
“I can’t remember the question.”
He laughed as she punched his side, and grabbed her wrist, protecting himself from further assault as she made a face at him. “Okay, okay. Give me a second to think about this.”
But he knew a way to answer her that straddled the line between his feelings for her, and information about the past that only mattered because of how it had taught him to pleasure her.
“The very first time I exercised my skills as a Dom, it was on a balcony, with a woman at a party. I told her to take off her panties and give them to me. No ties, no restraints, just feeling that click when I met her eyes and we knew exactly what we wanted and needed from one another. She surrendered herself to me in between one breath and the next.”