Harkham's Choice (Harkham's Series Book 2) (34 page)

He sniffed back an emotional tear budding at the corner of his eyes. “You will do anything to please me, won’t you?” He rocked her in place.

“Of course, sweetheart—I love you. Your happiness and pleasure are everything to me.”

He angled back his head so he could look at her. “We’re going to be happy and married for a very long time.”

“Forever is what I was thinking.” She smirked and licked her lips. “Especially if you keep responding and tasting like that.”

“I will, Mari—’cause you’re my wife, and I want to please you every moment, too.”

“You do, love. You
do
.” She beamed at him, and he got in the tub.

No more being away from her. Not even for a moment . . .

Chapter 18

The flight overseas had been long. Adam was giddy as they backpacked across most of Europe over the next two weeks.

He called his dad every day to thank him for paying for their wonderful honeymoon and to ask how Choppy was doing.

Mari liked roughing it. It was better than hotels, in her opinion. They got to see more of the people and the land.

The major drawback was less privacy, but they made do. If Adam really wanted sex, he got it, and he found a way to keep them both quiet—pinching her inner thigh would make her gasp and swallow up her imminent screams of pleasure.

And the bastard would grow harder when she’d react to his fingers doing such an un-Adam-like thing.

She had yet to see him go absolutely nuts on her—she craved to see him go cave-man and nail her into tomorrow or even the next week. He was holding back, and it kind of pissed her off a little. Why wouldn’t he be rough?

Was it because of her rimming him two weeks ago, the day after they married? Did it freak him out? If so, why didn’t he just say? He always spoke his mind.

This cautious Adam was unnerving, because she had no idea what to do about it.

It made her insides raw to think she could barely control herself at all—that she would bite, scrape and want to dig her way inside him, and he’d grab her wrists, slam them onto the pillow and keep them there as he took his time with his sweet, slow seduction.

She felt guilty every time afterward for being an animal with him. It was useless. She couldn’t hold back. It was like all those months of strict repression had finally snapped her, and she was uncaged now. Besides that—she wasn’t used to this sweet, tender stuff with light teasing touches and whispered kisses. It had always been raw and dirty in her past, and she was lucky if she didn’t limp away.

With Adam, everything was different. She was definitely out of her element. This was not the type of sex she knew.

It was lovemaking without a doubt. Sometimes it baffled her.

She’d always thought all men wanted to skip through as much foreplay as possible, and get down to the grind and the meat.

The lighter and more careful she was, the more she had to have him, and have him 
now
! It fueled her raging fire inside for him.

“Five hundred and forty-five, minus—”

“Try to hum instead. It usually works better for you,” she reminded him.

He was holding onto the seam of his pants on his right and had his left hand crushing hers into his other side.

She fought back the urge to rub her pussy on him. He was so alluring like this—his lips trembling and his eyes wide with anticipation.

She nibbled her lip instead.

The cab rolled to a stop.

“Uncle Peter’s house,” she informed him since his eyes were shut.

He needed answers, and she was going to get them for him if he was too nervous to enter this home.

She stroked his knee with her free hand. “You coming?”

“I don’t know,” he whimpered.

“You don’t have to. You can stay here, and I’ll—”

“No!” he exclaimed, and he shoved the cab door open, bolting through it.

She paid the driver and thanked him for being so quick. This had been a split-second decision to come here.

They were in the Louvre when Adam saw a painting and his face drained of all color.

It looked like his mom, he’d said. And that was all it took. He wanted to find her while they were in France.

A two-hour drive later, and they were staring at his uncle’s door.

Rap, rap, rap, rap, rap . . .

She knocked for him. His gaze was on his shoes. She could see him mouthing the numbers once more, but he was silent.

The door opened eventually, after what felt like an eternity of Adam now holding his breath and turning a slight shade of blue.

“Peter Richards?” she asked the tall, graying man in front of her.

“Yeah, who’s asking,” he said with a hint of a French accent.

“I’m Mari. Mari Latham, and this is Adam, Sarah’s son,” she answered.

“Wow, I, uh . . .” He stepped back and ran a hand over his face. “Come in, please.” He opened the door wider and welcomed them in.

Adam had yet to look at his uncle.

They took a seat in his comfortable living room.

“This room looks like my mom,” Adam commented. His eyes moved up slowly, and he found his uncle’s face. “Can you please give me some answers? I need to know where she is.”

“She’ll be back in about ten minutes. I wish I could tell you where she is, but I don’t think she’d like that,” Peter said with a doleful look. “Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”

Her mouth was dry, and she figured Adam’s was too, so she answered for both of them. “Yes, please. Water would be great.”

Peter left. Mari rubbed circles on Adam’s back as he leaned forward, threatening to form himself into a tight ball. She hummed his song he made for her.

“What if she doesn’t want to see me?” he whispered.

“She will. And if she doesn’t”—she shrugged a little—“then we’ll leave, and we won’t ever come back here. But at least you’ll know you tried.”

“I tried? But . . . But I want answers, not just 
tried
,” he said, his eyes anguished.

“We can’t control what she does, but think about it—if she really didn’t welcome us, would your uncle have let us in? I’m sure he would respect her wishes, and if she said not to let us in if we ever showed up, he would have left us outside, staring at his door.”

Peter came back with two glasses of water and set them down on the coffee table in front of them. “You look an awful lot like your dad, you know that?”

Adam gave a hint of a glare. “How would you know?”

“He stops by here all the time. If you want to know what I think—that man’s still crazy in love with Sarah, but she can’t stop thinking about her last ex—Dustin. Or at least she talks about him a lot.” Peter leaned against the couch across from the one they were sitting on.

“Then why’d she leave?” Adam asked, hissing it through his teeth.

“She had to. She was a wreck when she got here. I had to help her get through—”

“It’s not like somebody had a gun pointed at her head,” Adam interrupted.

Peter’s face went whiter than the walls.

He pushed himself off the couch. “Look, I’m not the one that should be giving you answers. She can do that when she gets here. If you’ll excuse me—I’m gonna get back to work in my office, and you two can sit here. Holler if you need something,” Peter said, then left the room.

Adam curled his body around Mari’s, and his tight embrace turned into a manic need. His kisses grew urgent, and almost indecent.

“I need you!” he cried.

“Adam, we can’t do that here,” she said. “Uuuuunnnngh.” Why now? Why here? The feral beast inside him was choosing
now
to rear its head?

She wanted to punch herself in the gut for turning him down, but his mother walking in on him doing obscene things to her was 
not
 how she wanted to meet her.

“Pete! I’m back. She was doing much better today,” a feminine voice called from the kitchen. A door slammed shut.

They could hear Peter run to her and whisper a few things.

There was an audible gasp. Adam’s hand clutched Mari’s into his side.

“It’s gonna be fine,” Mari reassured him.

“How? She hates me. I hurt her, and she left,” he said, his voice low and quiet.

“Nobody hates you.”

He was about to protest, but a petite, dark-haired woman entered the room and her piercing green eyes tore right through Adam as he lurched off the couch and tackled his mother into a hug.

“Mommy!” he sobbed right away.

She cried too and rocked him as she petted the back of his head. “I’ve missed you so much!”

“Me, too. You should’ve never gone,” he said.

“I had to.”

He pulled away. “Why? I want to know why!”

“Okay, I’ll tell you, but maybe you should introduce me to your lovely wife first,” his mom said, turning her attention to Mari.

Mari had never felt more exposed than now. Facing Dustin was easy compared to this.

There was this purity in her look that Adam had as well, but hers was filled with wisdom and a palpable sadness Mari could almost reach out and hold in her hands.

“This is Mari Latham—used to be Cole—and I always liked that name, because she’s really pretty and it sounds like a poem or a song, don’t you think?” Adam rambled.

He took his mom’s hand, then took his Mari’s in his other. He put the two women’s hands together.

What was Mari supposed to do? Shake it? Hold it?

She bowed her head and had to look away. There was a blazing fire of goodness in this tiny woman.

“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” Mari said.

“Well, you are an amazing woman. I can see that already.” She let go of Mari’s hand and hugged her. “You love my son, and that makes you a goddess in my book.”

“How can I not? He’s incredibly easy to love and be with—well, when I’m not thinking about how I can never quite measure up to his level of perfection,” Mari confessed. There was this overwhelming feeling like she had to tell her everything. “He loves me even though I’ve been such an awful person most of my life.”

“You found your way to him and back into the light—and that’s what matters,” his mom said—no
sang
. Her voice filled the air like beautiful music.

Adam wrangled them both into a group hug.

When they broke away, Adam sat down and pulled Mari onto his lap.

It was . . . new and odd, but she figured if that was what he needed, she’d go along.

He nuzzled into her hair.

“Can you tell us what happened? Why’d you leave?” Mari asked. It was embarrassing prying like this, but they didn’t have days to flush this information out.

“It was Samara. She had a knife, and she . . .” His mom shook her head and wet her bottom lip. “She cut me—sliced open wounds that had been stitched up from the piano incident. I was already on such heavy pain medication, I could barely move or get away from her.”

Adam winced. “I’m sorry I did th—”

“Don’t apologize. You did nothing wrong,” his mom said. “I didn’t blame you then, and I don’t blame you now. Samara said I was ruining her life and yours.”

“Why didn’t you turn her in for that?” Mari asked. She gripped her thighs. “Get her some psychiatric help?”

“I tried. Nobody believed me. Samara wasn’t going to bully me. I figured she would never really harm me—just wanted to scare me when she knew I was helpless. But then she drained my private bank account, the one Dustin didn’t even know about, and anytime I tried to be there for Adam over the next few weeks, she’d threaten to harm other members of the family. She scared me to death when I saw what she was capable of. I knew if I left, it would stop. She said not to say a word—to simply go. So I did.”

“How is that even possible when she was only eight?” Mari asked. It sounded made up.

“I don’t know how she was doing all this. Maybe she had help from an adult? I have no idea—but that’s the only thing I can come up with for how she even got bank access.” His mom blinked with a blank stare.

Mari’s gut was twisting. Something in Sarah’s expression was off. Mari wasn’t quite sure his mother was telling them the whole truth, and it all sounded too fantastical.

“But things eventually got worse, so your leaving didn’t help solve anything.” Mari told his mother about the girl Samara attacked that had tried to take nudey pictures of Adam in the girls’ bathroom at a previous high school. She also shared about how she’d threatened Rory with a knife to the groin and bribed him, Kendra and Tara to make Adam and Mari’s lives miserable to separate them.

“She’s not telling you the worst,” Adam said, swiping his bangs out of his eyes. “She stabbed Mari. Attacked her one night right after I got Mari back. I shoved Sammie off, then she fled. That’s when she came here probably.”

“Yeah, I’d heard about that. I’m so sorry that happened.” His mother’s voice was shaky, but still her eyes were guarded.