“You obviously have a problem, maybe it’s mental,” Jason said with a disdainful shake of his head. “I don’t know, nor do I care. The only thing I know, and you need to understand is; when it comes to that woman lying in that bed, the same woman it took someone over two hours to notify me had been involved in an accident; I am in complete control. Therefore, I’m telling you now; that conversation was the last time you will ever speak to my wife!” Throughout his tirade, Jason’s voice had turned to ice, and by all appearances the detective’s anger was on a par with his own.
“Let’s get this straight; you Kingdoms do not run New York City!” Saunders came back at him, giving a small insight into the reason for his hostility.
“You’re right, the Kingdoms don’t run New York City, but we could if that were our mind-set.” Jason’s words were deliberately spoken to anger the man even further, and it worked. Not waiting for a response to their non-productive conversation, he turned his back and re-entered the room, dismissing the detectives.
Chapter 12
Standing by the side of Aviva’s bed, Jason looked down at his wife, who was giving a poor performance of feigning sleep.
Taking his time, he looked her over, and his heart began to pound. There was nothing about this woman that he didn’t love. That she had been involved in an accident that was serious enough to land her in the hospital made his blood run cold.
Perching on the side of the bed, Jason took one of her hands, opened her palm and placed a lingering kiss against the faint scar that remained from her ordeal of months ago.
If she wanted to pretend she was asleep, that was fine with him. He just wondered how long it would take to elicit a response from her. Bending over, he first placed soft kisses against her closed eyelids. For his trouble, he only received a slight flutter of her lashes. Holding back a grin, he continued. Next he kissed the bump on her forehead before moving on to her cheeks, first one side and then the next. Still nothing apart from a very slight increase in her breathing.
Jason found that he was enjoying his little wife’s attempts at ignoring him. Her response left him no choice other than to go in for the kill. Ensuring his lips never broke contact her skin, Jason ran them up her jaw-line, giving her every indication as to where he was heading. Still nothing. He had to admit it; she was good, but he was better.
When he reached his final destination, her neck, for one brief moment he swirled his tongue against her skin, then sucked gently. Within seconds, he moved on, heading for the small indentation just below her earlobe. A whirl of his tongue followed by a small nip had his wife squirming on the bed.
“You are so easy!” Jason said with a bark of laughter, looking into the eyes of a wide awake Aviva.
“Whatever, Jason!”
Aviva’s petulant response and the roll of her eyes produced even more laughter from Jason. In an instant, all traces of his amusement were gone. Holding Aviva’s stare, thoughts of the accident that had landed her in the hospital assailed him. The whole incident could have been so much worse.
“You know how much I love you, right?”
“I know, I love you too.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine, please don’t worry about me,” Aviva said, brushing the back of her fingers against his face.
Closing his eyes, Jason allowed her touch to seep into him. Unable to stop himself, his head abruptly descended and his lips took possession of hers. There was no lead up to the kiss. From the first touch, it was filled with a demand that she responded to. He needed to prove to himself that her words of assurance were the truth. That apart from the bump on her head she was going to be fine.
As their tongues stroked against each other’s, Jason wanted nothing more than to enfold her in his arms, but even as his blind emotions threatened to overtake him, his mind acknowledged that he needed to be careful with her. She might not want to voice it, probably for his benefit, but she had been through an ordeal.
Pulling back, Jason kept his eyes closed as he brought his cheek to rest against Aviva’s, and whispered into her ear. “You are my world, and I’m sorry this happened to you. That you were hurt breaks my heart, my angel.”
Reiterating that she was fine, Aviva took Jason’s head between her hands and smiled. He knew her actions were her way of giving weight to her assurance that she would be fine. In the back of his mind, he knew there was more to the story than she had told the police. The time had come for her to stop the pretense and fill him in on all the details. He just hoped that when she was finished telling him the truth, his past wouldn’t inadvertently be the cause of her accident.
“Are you ready to tell me what really happened?” Jason saw that his question didn’t come as a surprise to her, she appeared to have been waiting for it. Her feigned sleep had been her attempt at delaying the inevitable.
“Just remember this has nothing to do with you,” Aviva warned.
Her reluctance to begin spoke volumes to Jason. That she was attempting to lighten a blow alerted him to the fact that he wasn’t going to like whatever she had to say.
“Tell me.”