Shades of Trust

  “Oh, Alistair Connor. Your—” She couldn’t bear to say wife, nor was she going to soil her lips with her name. “You are…breathtaking. Not your beauty, not your money or your status. You. Your heart. But she has damaged you too much for you to believe in what I am saying, hasn’t she?” Sophia began to feel an incredible anger for that execrable woman.

  The room quieted as Sophia protectively hugged the fierce and broken man who made her heart beat faster. She traced his jaw, asking, “When did you get married?”

  “On her birthday. March the fifth, two-thousand-four. She was two months pregnant.” His mouth contorted and his eyes darkened. “A month after the wedding, she had an abortion.”

  Sophia gasped, indignant. “She…she…killed your baby? Her own baby? How could she?”

  He shrugged. He didn’t have an answer, since he didn’t understand such a barbaric act himself.

  “And what did you do? It was one of the main reasons you married her, wasn’t it? The baby?”

  “She told me the baby had spina bifida. It’s a—”

  “I know what that is,” she interrupted him. “And?”

  “I found out afterward it was a lie. Another lie. At the time, I was too devastated to investigate further. I didn’t see the web she was spinning around me. Three months later, life returned to normal. If you can call debauchery normal. Day after day, she introduced more perversions into our lives. Until—” She asked me to have a threesome with another man. He paused for a second. “We had our first fight. She moved into Emma’s apartment, but a month later she was back. We agreed on some ground rules. At least, I thought we had. I had fulfilled my fantasies. I’d reached my limit.”

  “But…you told me you liked it.”

  “Sophia, I believe in equal rights. If she fulfilled my fantasies, she should have the right to fulfill her perversions.”

  “Perversions,” she repeated, baffled. What kind of perversions?

  He sighed and nodded, “Aye. She needed them like the air she breathed, but I thought I could prevent them, that I could supply her with other sensations. She was too damaged though, too sick. It was an addiction. The more she did, the more she wanted.” He waved his hand in the air. “Fool that I was, it never crossed my mind that she would look elsewhere to fulfill her desires.”

  Sophia cupped his face in her hands. “She cheated on you? I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?” he rasped.

  “I thought you had cheated on her.”

  His laughter was bitter. “She did it time and time again. I was working too much to notice it. I bought more shares of the bank in August, 2005. We started to work on different floors and it was easier for her to lure others into our house. She did it all, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll,” he mocked.

  Horror crept over her face and she didn’t try to disguise it.

  “Drugs? You too?” She breathed, relieved when he shook his head. “Why didn’t you divorce her?”

  “I didn’t find out immediately. She was always eagerly waiting for me. She did it all and still had the energy to fuck me.” And fuck me, she did. His lips thinned to a line. “She got pregnant again. She was so engrossed in her immoral self-indulgence that she didn’t pay attention to her own body. One night, when she was almost five months, I felt the baby kicking my hand. Nathalie.” He breathed the name of his daughter with so much love, like it was a blessing.

  “Five months? Impossible. I don’t believe it.” She shook her head.

  “She was very, very lean; thinner than you, even. She’d never had regular periods. And she was always on a diet. She was crazy about fitness.”

  “But almost five months…didn’t it show?”

  “A little, round belly, but that was all. She was sleeping when the baby moved. I didn’t recognize it at first, but I had remembered Alice’s first pregnancy, so when I felt the next kick I knew it had to be a baby. I panicked. The very next morning I took her, kicking and screaming, to Craigdale and locked her under my mother’s supervision. I threatened her with exposure, if she didn’t stay put and take care of herself until the end of the pregnancy. One month after Nathalie was born, I brought her back to London, and she returned to her perverted life.” He closed his eyes tight, the skin around them crinkling. “But I was too busy to see.” I didn’t want to see that I was a failure as a man, as a husband, as a lover.

  “And?”

  “I only discovered Heather’s betrayal because a very dear friend of mine insisted I hire a detective. I tried to make things right with her when I discovered it. She promised she would behave, but it was in vain. I was enraged with myself for not seeing Heather’s true colors from the beginning, for not heeding my parents’ advice. Feeling guilty of everything that was wrong in my life and Nathalie’s, I sank deeper into the mud. I don’t know what happened to me. I took off my wedding ring and each night, I fucked a different woman. I mean the word, Sophia. I didn’t make love—or have sex with these women. I punished them for Heather’s and for their own existence and I punished myself for being so stupid. I was ruthless. Vicious. I wanted to make them suffer.” His body was so stiff, that if not for his mouth moving she’d have thought he’d turned into a statue. “And do you know what made me even madder? They kept returning and asking for more.”

  Sophia didn’t want to hear any more, but something kept pushing her. “And?”

  “After a few months living in hell, I filed for a divorce…” He put both hands on his face, and his words came out muffled. “I did every fucking thing wrong. Every. Fucking. Thing. Wrong.”

  A heavy silence suffocated them.

  He pulled her into his arms and started talking again, “I thought…I asked Leonard to help me…we devised a plan. To pull it off, I needed proof of her drug addiction and of her unstable and perverted sexual behavior. I wanted to get full custody of Nathalie. It was not easy. First it took too much time to obtain the proof and to convince the judge. Well, the day Leonard guaranteed it, I informed her about the divorce.” He squeezed his eyes tightly shut again. “She tried to make amends, she pleaded with me, but I’d made up my mind. It is beyond my capacity to understand why she did what she did, because she never loved Nathalie. I could only imagine that she would use her as leverage…unfortunately.” His hands clenched on her back and breathed deeply, “In my selfishness…in my selfishness, Nathalie paid for my sins.”

  Oh, God. Sophia wanted to say it was not true, but only hugged him tighter.

  “Nathalie…she was an angel, Sophia. So beautiful, so calm, always smiling. I woke up early to stay with her a few hours in the mornings and in the evenings when I arrived home I spent all the time I could with her. She was a blessing. I…I moved out and put the apartment on the market two months after she died. Every time I walked in, I expected her to come running, just like she always did, a big smile on her face, to throw herself in my arms.” His voice broke and he blinked to stop the tears from falling. “When I arrived home, I would spend hours in her little bed, smelling her baby scent. I didn’t let my mother give away her clothes. I slept with her stuffed elephant, one of her favorite toys. I heard her gentle voice calling me. I was going crazy.” Alistair’s face crumbled and he spoke with a deadened tone, “It was my fault, Sophia. Heather told me she was at Alice’s and I didn’t check. Heather put her asleep in the Porsche with no seatbelt. She crossed a red light. A bus ran into them. Heather died instantly, Nathalie, at the hospital. My mother got so depressed, she died three months later.” His green eyes were dark, all the light gone from them. There was only despair in his voice. “You see, your instincts were wrong when you absolved me.”

  “Oh, Alistair. They weren’t.” His grief was so tangible, she knew he was far from overcoming it.

  He had created a fortress of guilt around him, holding himself hostage rather than giving sanctuary.

  His suffering ate her up inside as if it were her own, and drained her like nothing else had since Gabriel’s death.

  “I kil
led my daughter and my mother. That’s the truth.” His voice was so hoarse and his accent so thick that Sophia had difficulty understanding what he was saying.

  “For God’s sake, Alistair Connor! You weren’t responsible. A mother is supposed to protect her children. With her life, if needed. That woman you married was not a mother. She was not a woman. She was a sick, insane monster.”

  “I was—” He sighed profoundly, “I’m a monster, too. I’m guilty, mo chridhe. I have to suffer, to pay for my sins. I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve to be loved.”

  Sophia looked at his bared soul and didn’t find the man she knew. No. A very different man is drowning the Alistair Connor I know in a cesspool of undeserved guilt.

  She felt a deep need to ease his misery. She straddled Alistair and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Do you think I will allow you to continue harming yourself? Well, I won’t. You have to stop this self-punishment. What you haven’t understood until now is that I consider you mine, and no one, no one harms what is mine.” She fisted his hair and pulled his head up to look at her. “Not even you are allowed to harm yourself. Do you understand?”

  He jerked his head back to look at her.

  “Do you?” she insisted.

  A pained look appeared on his face.

  “Sophia, I need you,” he murmured, burying his head in her hair and inhaling her sweet smell. “I need you.”

  “Take me. I’m yours.” She pulled his head to kiss him as if she could remove from within him all that darkness which poisoned his heart and soul.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, his hands stealing under her wrap to palm her breast, plucking and pinching the nipples. “I can’t be gentle. I can’t take you right now. I can’t. I’d—” Hurt you.

  This is it, my chance to show him he can escape from all his violence and pain. His guilt and punishment. I can’t allow him to say no. “Please.” She spread her legs and pressed down on him. “Make love to me.”

  “That’s what you deserve. A man who’ll give you love.” He raised his head, his eyes searching hers. “But right now, what I want is to take. To take you hard and fast enough to make me forget.”

  Sophia gasped, astonished by this side of him she didn’t know, but didn’t block his advances. “You don’t need to hurt. You need to love.”

  Alistair hated the darkness that surrounded him every time he thought about Heather. He was wary of hurting Sophia, but only she could help take away the painful memories. She was his light, his sun, the one who could drag him back from the cold hell he had been living in.

  He bent his head and cupped a breast with a greedy hand, sucking a nipple hard, biting it.

  “Slow down,” she breathed.

  He groaned and shoved her backward onto the bed. His fingers trailed toward her sex. He teased her clitoris with rapid strokes. She moaned low and her hand tangled in his hair. With no finesse, he plunged two fingers into her.

  Sophia gave a small gasp of pain and fisted his hair, pulling his head back. “I’m okay with rough sex, but not with pain and punishment. I don’t like it and you don’t need this anymore.”

  He breathed deep and nodded. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t bring Heather into our relationship.” Sophia looked at him and whispered, “I want you to love me. Hard and fast.” She kissed him deep and completed, “When we make love, we’re celebrating life.” And redemption. “We are worshiping love.”

  He closed his eyes for an instant while his hands wandered on her torso as if learning her contours all over again.

  “Alistair Connor?” Sophia wanted to be reassured that he had understood her message. She gripped one of his hands and pressed it to her left breast. “I care for you. So much. Let me show you.”

  He slowly opened his eyes, mesmerized by the promise her voice held, the unsaid words. Her clear eyes, which held so much love, reached deep inside him, easing the vise around his heart, lessening the guilt that darkened his soul.

  “Love me,” she said.

  He sat on bent legs pulling her up, with her back to him. He propped her on his thighs, spreading her legs with his from behind and, slowly and gently, started to fondle her.

  “Yes,” she moaned and her head fell on his shoulder. She parted her lips, inviting him to kiss her.

  He complied and bent his head, plundering her mouth as he thrust one finger into her, in and out, and pinched her nipple lightly.

  “On all fours,” he ordered raspily, as he lowered her on her elbows and knees, her hair spilling all around her, her buttocks up in the air. He almost came then and there. He opened her legs wider and started to position himself inside her, grunting loudly as he did. Holding her hips, his other hand went for her clitoris. He fought again for some control.

  “Give me,” she asked and tried to adjust her position, backing onto him.

  “Sophia, don’t,” he inhaled loudly, “I’ll lose control.”

  “Lose it, dammit!” she exclaimed.

  That did it for him. He plunged all the way in; her tightness enveloping him as they gasped with pleasure.

  “You with me?” he whispered.

  Sophia nodded and he bent down over her, supporting his weight on his hand as he pounded in her.

  Alistair was lost, completely lost to lust and bewildered by how Sophia, again, acquitted him.

  His mouth burned a trail down her spine as he teased her, sliding in and out, nudging her pleasure higher.

  She felt he was reaching as deeply as he could go. Still, she wanted more. “Please, I need—”

  “Not yet.” He slowly withdrew and then pushed forward in a maddeningly slow pace.

  Their moans filled the room.

  He forced her shoulders down on the mattress, pinning her under him. He kissed her nape while his hand fondled a breast, squeezing a nipple firmly between his fingers.

  He had to forget the memories and prove to himself that he could be another man. He had to show her he could be the man that she wanted.

  Sophia let out a groan of pleasure when he fisted her hair. He raised a knee beside her hip, going even deeper. He increased his pace, mindlessly thrusting, filling her with all his might, fingers rubbing and pressing her in time with his shoving hips.

  “Who do you need?” he asked in a whisper as he kindled her lust, promising a spiraling drop over the edge.

  “You. Only you,” she sang, and he swept a finger lightly over her.

  “Say my name,” he growled, as he shoved harder and faster into her.

  “Alistair Connor!”

  Her every sense flooded with pleasure as his deft fingers and body played her like a fine instrument. She cried out incoherently in Portuguese and came tightly around him.

  He threw his head back, with a loud grunt, as wave after wave of pleasure hit him and spasmed violently, collapsing onto his side hugging her close with one arm, shuddering with release as his delight exploded into a thousand iridescent stars and he whispered her name as he poured all his passion into her.

  As always Alistair recovered first.

  Sophia was lying on her side, barely breathing.

  “Sophia, mo gràdh, are you okay?” He brushed her hair away, spreading kisses over her face.

  She flicked a dismissive hand at him, eyes still closed, curling into a ball.

  She was spent and sated, but unsettled. Sophia’s mind was fuzzy, her hearing distorted. She didn’t think she had ever been so confused. She was stunned by his story and her feelings shocked her.

  A stifled hiccup shook her body.

  Alistair Connor, you’re an asshole. You hurt her. He scooped her in his arms and the tender gesture made her lose it. Tears started to fall and sobs racked her as she cried wholeheartedly in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” they said in unison.

  He halted, surprised. Why is she sorry?

  “How I wish I could spare you this pain. I’m so sorry, so very sorry,” she said in a sorrowful voice muffled by his neck. Her arms wen
t around him and she splayed her hands over his shoulder and lower back, soothing and protecting him. “You have to let this guilt go. You have to bury this anger you have against Heather and yourself. Swear to me.”

  He was awestruck. Her silent acceptance of the darkness he carried within told him that, after all those years in the most barren wasteland, he was finally home.

  “I will,” he whispered in her hair, solemnly, “I swear to you.”

  Alistair pulled the covers over them as she calmed down and the sobs subsided. I have to recover from the horror of what happened, it shouldn’t consume me so badly anymore. Tenderness filled his heart at her acceptance of him as he was. She is so giving, so beautiful. Inside and out.

  He realized in that moment that he was profoundly in love with her.

  The sort of love that makes a man marry a woman.

  He brushed her hair away from her face and she softly smiled at him, her eyes still closed.

  She was the kind of woman that made men turn their heads and lust for her. But he knew she was more than that for him. She was goodness; fierce to her principles; a strong woman. She was the air he breathed.

  I love you. “Tha gràdh agam dhut,” he whispered in her ear, completely relaxed and satisfied. Would you marry me, Sophia? Oh, fuck! I haven’t told her everything yet. “Mo chridhe?”

  “Hmm?” She opened her yellow-diamond eyes to stare at him and demanded, “Kiss me.”

  He did, surrounding her with all the love he had to give.

  “Alistair…” her fingers brushed his long bangs off his forehead. “Why are you so afraid of people really seeing you for who you are? A good man, a person capable of love? Are you afraid of another betrayal? She was sick. Not everyone is like her. People won’t betray you like she did.”

  “Sophia, you have no idea what betrayal can do to a man. It hurts deep, very deep. I thought I had given her all I could. My name, status, love, sex, money, but nothing was enough. It broke me apart. I first felt diminished, less than a man. Then I became enraged. I wanted to kill her. I couldn’t, of course. Besides, she was Nathalie’s mother. So I punished her instead. The more I did, the more I was poisoned by the whole situation. I didn’t know how to deal with it and I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Tavish Uilleam was away. I wasn’t on good terms with him or with my father. They’d never liked Heather. And I was too ashamed to tell my friends about it. What would they think?”