Tony ground his hips into her. She found his silence as maddening as his thrusts, even as she could hear herself filling it. She was helpless to suppress her gasps, her moans, her wordless high-pitched pleas for more. More. Having had a taste, she couldn't stop there. The crotch of her panties was soaked through by the time Tony's commanding hand found its way between her legs. His thumb rubbed her clit, once, hard and fast, and she arched beneath him. He kept going, pleasuring her in rhythm to his thrusts as his other fingers worked their way beneath her bucking hips. With his wide handspan, he could pleasure her while at the same time he caught the band of her panties and began to skim them down her quaking legs.

  They had used condoms before, back in Fiji—yet the baby had still happened. Maybe it was the sheer volume of their intimate moments, and testimony of their inability to keep their hands and other parts away from each other, that had rendered such protection obsolete. Now, as Diana worked the front of Tony's pants free, she realized it was no longer a concern. They were married. They belonged to each other... they had merely somehow taken a long, mule-headed way around allowing themselves to realize that fact.

  "Tony!" She gasped his name as he pushed her naked hips down into the couch cushions. Obviously not intending to waste time fussing with her dress, he reached up to pull the straps down, yanked the garment to her ribs, and exposed her breasts completely. They rolled from the ferocity of his maneuver and bounced back into place, her nipples tight and hard. He lowered that hot mouth of his to claim one, and Diana nearly erupted. Her back arched again as distantly she felt his hand roam ever higher on the outside of her thigh and push the skirt of her dress upward. His cock was there, pressed against the inside of her right thigh, thick and resolute as a battering ram.

  Tony's mouth moved back up to hers. "Spread your legs," he whispered, and she needed no more encouragement to open for him. Tony hissed, then nipped at her lower lip. His left hand caught her right hip, pressing her navel down as he got into position. He took his hand away only long enough to caress her a few more times between her legs, coaxing her to higher heights and an almost unbearable dampness, her juices painting her thighs by the time he took firm hold of his cock and sank into her.

  "Tony!" she shrieked as she clamped down around him. There was no hiding what they were up to under the murmur of the film's dialogue; she simply had to hope the rest of the household had gone home for the day or retired to their quarters.

  "Diana." His strong voice broke on her name, and it was the single sexiest thing she could have imagined hearing in that moment. Diana embraced him with her legs, her arms, clinging fiercely as he drove her deep into the couch. Each thrust of his incredible cock seemed to fill her to the brim—and beyond; each frantic push tested her absolute limits. They had engaged in their fair share of wild sex before, and even the most exhaustive second and third rounds had always left her wanting more. They had spent that blissful week in Fiji wrapped in each other so often, she should be used to him by now.

  "Oh god, Tony... oh god, yes." Diana rose to each thrust, undulating to match the rhythm he dictated from above. "Don't stop!" she begged him. Even lost in a haze of lust, she felt anxious to know there would be more of this to come... that they wouldn't lose each other again once the lights came on.

  "God, Diana, you're going to make me come if you keep pleading like that," Tony growled into her neck. He had sucked and nipped and teased the sensitive flesh beneath her jaw so long, she was certain she'd have to manufacture an excuse to wear a scarf tomorrow to hide the blemishes.

  "I'm coming!" she gasped. The mere thought of Tony's release inside her triggered her own, and without warning, her climax was upon her, overwhelming her. She buried an ecstatic cry in Tony's straining shoulder as he continued to pump, triggering his own release. A hot flood rose within her as she accepted every last drop of his seed, and hardly any spilled as he withdrew and collapsed atop her with a long-drawn-out shudder. He hadn't even bothered to remove his shirt or pants, and his own clothes were now sweat-soaked and tangled, as hopelessly in need of laundering as her poor abused dress.

  "Wow, you really do love A Room With a View!" Diana's chest bucked as she laughed beneath him. "Tony, you're squashing me and the baby."

  "Oh god, the baby," Tony groaned as he pulled away and repositioned himself on his knees between her glistening, still-aquiver legs. "I nearly forgot. Think they're okay?"

  Diana smiled fondly up at him, her heart still pounding fit to wake the household... if her ecstatic cries hadn't already. "I'm sure of it."

  "Think they'll remember this?"

  "Tony!" She laughed again at his absurd remark and grabbed for the discarded cushion. She used it to deliver a swat that left him wincing as he zipped up his trousers. "Read those parenting books! I'm begging you! Learn about your child's early development."

  "Mmm. Our child." Tony did the bare minimum to clean himself up before draping his long body beside hers once more. He pulled her in against him, spooning her as the credits rolled across the screen.

  Oh well, Diana thought. Something told her there would be plenty more opportunities to disrupt her viewing of the film from here on out.

  10

  Diana sat motionless in front of her computer screen and reread the email she had just opened. Its contents had shocked her into that rigid posture; Constance Harrington would have approved... though there was no kidding herself that her mother-in-law would sanction anything else in this situation.

  Diana rose and walked away from her laptop.

  She paced.

  Pacing didn’t help. She sat back down and drummed her fingers on her desk.

  Her room at Starlight Castle was lavish—and that was a conservative description at best. Every apartment she had ever rented previously had boasted about half the square footage—when she was living wherever "home" happened to be. For most of her adult life, she had lived abroad in quarters shared by volunteers and sometimes accommodating up to eight other nurses at a time.

  And now...

  Now, Diana peeled her eyes away from the email she couldn't even begin to process and took a long look at her bedroom. Since her rapturous night with Tony two evenings ago—the night that had also been the belated consummation of their marriage—she had started to pack up her belongings to officially make the move into the master bedroom. She had unofficially moved herself in, anyway, and had spent last night wrapped in Tony's arms... and getting very little sleep, as it turned out. Their hunger for each other had been whetted anew and didn't seem easily sated... not even after several rounds that left them soaked with sweat and physically exhausted. They were finally going at it like the newlyweds they were, and no part of Diana had regretted their new arrangement.

  Until now.

  The email had come as a shock. It had taken her a ridiculous amount of time already that morning to muster herself to open it. She knew what she would find, and her heart trembled with as much longing as it did remorse.

  It was the job offer of a lifetime: the chance to travel with the same organization that had sent her to Fiji as an administrator. The job description put her in charge of handling the nurses, coordinating relations with the places they visited, and overseeing supplies needed based on use, location, and accessibility. To anyone else, the offer might have seemed dry and terribly, well... administrative... but to Diana, it was mouthwatering. The position came with paid, meaningful travel all over the world. It was a dream come true.

  For a single woman. For a woman who wasn't expecting. A dream come true for the Diana of not that many months ago. Seeing it dangled before her now almost seemed like more of a nightmare. She couldn't accept.

  Could she?

  Diana drummed her fingers on the desk again and stared for a long, long time at the job offer until the text swam before her eyes. But the words didn't rearrange themselves in any sort of new configuration that would make her next move easier.

  She had to talk to Tony. Not that she needed her husband's permission to go... after all, they had both agreed to a very strictly defined independence in their marriage... but still.

  He would be excited for her, wouldn't he? He would help her hammer out the pros and cons, and they could plan together how to deal with her pregnancy schedule, and the subsequent childcare that would be needed.

  Her chest ached suddenly, and Diana laid a surprised hand to her breast. Heartburn? Or was it something different? The thought of leaving her baby so soon... it had never occurred to her that the offer of a lifetime might come at the moment her career as a mother was about to begin.

  "Time to pay Dad a visit," she said confidently, to herself and to the baby. Her heart gave a funny little jump again; this time, there was no blaming the symptoms on her pregnancy, not unless she wanted to lie openly to herself. Referring to Tony as “Dad” filled her with an emotion she couldn't easily name.

  But she was getting addicted to it. And that was a problem.

  Tony will know what to do, she thought again as she pulled her pea coat on and called down for a car. He would help her get her head on straight, help her prioritize. Seeing him would remind her of the arrangement they had both agreed to when they had entered this marriage.

  Diana was also reminded, wistfully, that she had promised not to lie to herself.

  "A job offer?" Tony barely recognized the voice or the question as his own as he stared at the contents of the email Diana had just forwarded to him. He felt dizzy, all of a sudden, as if none of this were quite real.

  His wife sat across from him, beaming. She slipped her phone back into her pocket, having used the device to forward the email. "Well? What do you think?" she encouraged.

  "This is... sudden." To say the least. Tony could clearly see the moment her brow furrowed in response to his stilted tone—but how could she expect him to be jubilant? "What about the baby?" he asked in a rush. It was easier to focus on the needs of their child than his own needs, which he knew better than to acknowledge.

  Diana frowned. "Well, I thought that's part of what we could discuss. When I send my acceptance back to them, I want to be able to tell them my time frame. I was thinking—"

  " 'Acceptance'?" he interrupted her. He was almost unable to pull in enough air for a follow-up. Almost. "So there's nothing to discuss. You've already decided to take the job."

  Diana huffed. Her stiff-backed posture broke all at once; now he saw the real Diana leaning forward in her chair, the one that he knew, not the perfect, well-behaved creature his mother had tried desperately to mold her into. "Of course I'm going to take the job. Tony, this is my dream. This is exactly what we both signed up for. Or have you suddenly had a change of heart?" He heard an odd catch in her voice, but damn if he knew what it meant. No way could he admit to her that he had caught feelings, not when she so clearly hadn't. She expected him to adhere to their original agreement—who was he to resent her dream, no matter how bad the timing?

  "No." The lie exited him on a short expulsion of breath, a single word that cracked like a bullet, leaving him wounded in its wake. "No, this marriage is still one of convenience, Diana. If you want to work out the details with me, that's fine. There's the baby to consider. But another time would be ideal."

  He closed his laptop to demonstrate how little the email concerned him, then rearranged a stack of documents on the desk in front of him, not meeting her eyes. It was rude of him, perhaps, to so easily dismiss the development she was so clearly excited about—but that was her life. And clearly, there was no room for him in her dreams. She wanted to organize logistics, and that was all. She neither wanted nor needed his opinion.

  So why then, when he lifted his eyes to her, did she look so completely dispirited?

  He cleared his throat. "Anything else?" He hated how callous he sounded, but better to risk a superficial injury to her, dealt by a few bluntly spoken syllables, than to reveal the awful wound he felt festering in his heart.

  "No. Nothing. It's... good to hear you say that." Diana rose and picked up her purse. "I'll... start to think ahead."

  "I'll do the same," he replied.

  "All right."

  "All right."

  And that was it for their exchange. She came around his desk to plant a chaste kiss on his cheek, leaving his skin feeling cooler from the touch of her lips. Numb, he watched her take her leave, registered her backward glance as she left his office, the blinking that he’d come to know as an expression of confusion. Tony knew somehow that, even if she didn't share his misery at their being separated, she certainly felt the change in the air, as if the English winter had come early and was now blowing in through the cracks as an unexpected draft.

  Not that Diana would have to worry herself about English winters. She could go anywhere, do anything, and he was powerless to stop her. As soon as the baby was born, the temporary link between them would be severed. He would provide all that he had promised: money, security. And she would be there for him to call on, with enough notice, to appear by his side and play the part of his dutiful wife.

  Not love. Just convenience.

  Tony didn't realize until too late that his fist had crumpled one of the important documents on his desk. He sighed expansively and relaxed his hand; he would have to have another copy printed. Later. At the moment, he felt incredibly weary.

  He couldn't help reflecting on A Room with a View. Lucy and George, the triumphant lovers. Only he wasn't the George to Diana's Lucy, was he? He was instead the spurned Cecil: that desperately cloying, dreadfully lonesome man. The one who didn't even realize how he had set himself up for solitude.

  The one who didn't get the girl.

  11

  Tony's leg jogged nervously up and down.

  "Help yourself to an extra cup of coffee this morning?" Diana queried him from her table amid the glistening sonogram equipment. "Or did you help yourself to the whole pot?"

  "You're just jealous you can't have any," he quipped in return. "What's taking the doctor so long?"

  "Relax," Diana soothed him. "She'll be in any minute now to fire up the machine. Then we'll finally get to see our child."

  Diana beamed up at the ceiling from her laid-back position as if she had seen the photo already. Tony was less convinced of the magic of all this than she was. Funny, he had expected the no-nonsense Diana to rear her head during this first doctor's visit... now, he felt he was being treated to a far more tender side of her than he might have expected. If she could wait patiently while she was prostrate and vulnerable on that torturous-looking table, what did he have to complain about?

  Tony dropped a surreptitious glance out of the corner of his eye at his phone. He had laid the device on the chair beside him while all too aware that its screen kept lighting up. Diana's own luminous beauty was a powerful distraction from work, but therein lay some of the problem... this did feel like a distraction. The longer their appointment dragged on, the more it carved into the prep time he had set aside for himself before today's meeting. This was his first official meeting with the newly acquired factory's CEO after the fiasco with the broken shoe, and he needed to make a better second impression. He knew it; his mother knew it; and the entirety of his boardroom and staff was counting on it. He felt as if he were being pulled in opposite directions without immediate access to a lever to turn off the machine. Why couldn't life simply slow down for a minute and grant him the space to breathe?

  Tony realized his hand was on his phone; he withdrew it quickly and sighed. Twiddling his thumbs was a far better look than answering his texts.

  "Are you sure you don't want to go over your presentation with me?" Diana studied him from the table with her sea-green eyes. "You have yourself a captive audience here. I don't mind. Really."

  "I don't see how it could hurt," Tony admitted as he pulled his phone to him. "And if you don't mind imagining this National Geographic poster behind me is a graph rather than a giraffe—“

  They shared a laugh at his terrible joke. A sharp rap at the door interrupted them, and the doctor admitted herself. "Well, here we all are!" Dr. Singer beamed brightly at them as if she hadn’t kept them waiting at all. "And how are we today, Mrs. Harrington? Your charts show me you haven't been gaining much weight."

  Diana blushed. "I've been trying. Honestly."

  "Is the nausea suppressing your appetite?" Dr. Singer looked sympathetic as she alighted on the stool beside Diana and began to flip through her folder.

  Tony felt an answering anger begin to rise within him at the doctor's question, though it had nothing to do with Singer. He knew why. Whether or not his mother intended it, all those society lunches where the women restricted themselves to tea and barely dressed salads was impacting Diana's weight gain. She’d often come home in the throes of low blood sugar, loudly complaining about the "foliage" she had been forced to order when all she really wanted was a good old American-style burger. Tony had immediately granted the castle chef an unlimited budget to cook up anything Diana wanted, but her pregnancy nausea unfortunately tended to hit hardest in the mornings and evenings, when she was at home.

  "It's not unusual," Dr. Singer was saying. "But if you like, I'll set you up an appointment with one of our dieticians to go over a few more options with you."

  "That would be wonderful," Diana answered her. "Yes, please."

  Tony's eyes returned to his phone as the women discussed Diana's other experiences and symptoms. He listened with one ear, unable to retain much; his voicemail was lighting up, with another call incoming. Shit. Could he justify ducking out of the room now to take this...?

  "Tony?" Diana queried. Tony glanced up and quickly pocketed his phone. He pushed his chair closer and took her hand as the doctor, now speaking technically in what sounded like a foreign language, walked them through every step of the sonogram.

  "...a-a-and there's the baby." Dr. Singer's tone took on a soothing, professional lilt as she scanned over Diana's belly. Both Tony and Diana instantly craned closer to the screen. His hand tightened over hers as he saw the tiny, precious image lighting up in front of him. His heart leapt wildly at the sight, completely out of proportion to what he was seeing, he thought, but logic and cool reason held no quarter in that moment. Not with him...