“I’m giving you everything I have to give.”

Nell turned in his arms until she faced him, and rested her face against his chest. “Yes. And you give a lot,” she admitted. “I just asked for the wrong thing, that’s all. I love our time together. Don’t worry.”

It was confusing, maddening, but maybe she should just relax, and try not to put this experience in a marked box. After all, the feelings he described for her were more than most lovers had to brag about.

Dread lay heavy in Duncan’s gut. Something precious was slipping away from him, and he didn’t know how to stop it. He massaged the muscles in her shoulders and back, but she couldn’t relax. He didn’t blame her.

Duncan coaxed her over to his bed, stripping off what remained of her clothes, and turned off the light, dragging her close to him. She hid her face against his chest, and he cuddled her, stroking her back in long, soothing passes of his hand over the perfect fine texture of her skin, all the way down to the curve of her ass. His dick rose up, hot and hard, prodding her thigh, but he gritted his teeth and ignored its insistent, throbbing demands.

Patience. This time was all about Nell.

He slid his hand down the cleft of her bottom. She didn’t recoil or stiffen up, just nuzzled her face to his chest with a wordless murmur, and parted her thighs, letting his hand slide lower, delve deeper.

He slowly, tirelessly apologized for what he didn’t have to offer her by showing her what he did have. His other hand joined the action, caressing her clit from the front while he thrust two long fingers into her slick, hot little pussy from behind, petting and stroking in ways he knew she liked. Long and slow. No hurry. He drove her higher, until she was squirming, panting, thighs clenching, fingernails digging into him.

Finally, a little shriek, and her cunt pulsed greedily, hungrily around his hand. She flopped onto her back, limp.

He put on a condom he’d left on the bedside table, rolled on top of her, and filled her with a powerful, relentless thrust. He wanted to chase the pain and unease of their last conversation away. This was the only way he knew to do it, to lose himself in the heavy rhythm of his body jolting against hers, her gasping cries, his harsh breathing. Somehow he managed to wait for her climax again, and his own release followed a split second after, her hot pulsations prolonging his pleasure.

And then she burst into tears.

Duncan was appalled. She disentangled herself and curled up with her back to him, sobbing. He wrapped his arms around her from behind until her sobs quieted. She fell into an exhausted sleep.

He lay there with her for what felt like hours, until the pressure inside him built up to the boiling point. He crept from the bed, tucked the comforter around Nell, and got rid of the condom, then he slipped on some sweatpants and wandered into the living room. He felt scared, shell-shocked, and the ache of impending doom in his gut was growing. He went out onto the terrace and stared out into the endless skyscrapers while the chill made his hairs rise up on his naked skin. It was almost dawn. The city below would wake up soon. But chill or no chill, he just stood out there, staring. Thinking, and feeling.

He was losing her. He could feel it. He put his head into his hands, tried to think it through. The weirdness had started when he’d asked her that stupid, ill-considered question about marriage, kids.

Marriage. He examined the concept. Was that what she wanted? Because if it was, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it wasn’t such a terrifying idea. It wasn’t actually so crazy, either.

He ticked off the positive aspects. Protection. He would have a God-given reason to stay stuck to her like glue, if they were newlyweds, and that was fine with him. Then there was work, too. If they were married, their relationship would not be fodder for rumor and scandal in the office. No one would have any right to judge or criticize them. He would have a further claim upon her undivided attention and expertise for his company. He could easily pay enough so she could quit her other work, and have more free time. Hell, he had plenty of money. How much he paid her wasn’t necessarily relevant, once they were married.

She was so smart and imaginative, he would never get bored with her, as he had with other women he’d dated in the past. Sex was an important element of marriage, and they certainly had no problems in that area. And he would be faithful. No question about that. At all.

He would wake up every morning and find her there, beside him. That gave him a wonderful, spine-tingling sense of rightness.

Yes, marriage was the logical culmination of a partnership that worked. It was a win/win situation. So logical, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. He could hardly wait for Nell to wake up, so he could tell her what an excellent idea this was. He hoped it would make her feel better. That she would see that he was trying to meet her halfway, as far as he possibly could. And it was pretty damn far.

Marriage, for Christ’s sake. How much further could a guy go?

The cold ache in his gut had entirely vanished at the idea. He went back inside, with the intention of creeping into the bedroom, lying down beside her, and watching as she slept. Then he saw the eerie blue glow of a computer monitor emanating from one of the couches.

Nell sat there cross-legged, wrapped in one of his bathrobes, tip-pity-tapping on her laptop. She must have felt the breeze from the door, but she did not look up. She just worked on, utterly absorbed.

He must have stared for ten minutes before she took notice of him. Her smile was wan. “Hi. I woke up. Couldn’t get back to sleep.”

He stepped in. “What are you doing?”

“I had an idea for the last level of the game,” she said.

The freaking game was the last thing he wanted to talk about, but he wasn’t sure of a smooth way to shift topics and get from here to there. And a proposal of marriage had to be a segue as smooth as oil.

He swallowed, closed the door, strolled across the room toward her. “What’s the idea?”

Her voice was strangely businesslike. “As it is now, the player rescues the princess only if he garners sufficient points and collects all the magical weapons necessary to defeat the Sorcerer. If the player is clever and ruthless and forgets nothing, he gets the princess. It’s a very simple, banal, mercantile sort of exchange. It’s cold.”

The tension was back in his gut again. This was one of those dangerous conversations with undercurrents, where a phrase like “pass the butter” could blow up in his face and kill him. “Hardly simple,” he muttered. “You have to sweat blood to make it through all those levels.”

“I propose something different,” she went on. “These tricks should get the player through the Sorcerer’s defenses and to the door of the enchanted tower, but no farther. I propose one last barrier. To win the game, the player must make a leap of blind faith. Go against everything his senses and past experience tell him. To break the last spell, he has to leave his weapons and spells behind, and do something crazy. Dive headfirst into a pit of snakes. Jump into the mouth of a dragon. Walk into a wall of flames. He has to…to sacrifice himself for love.”

Duncan’s fingers bit into the top of the couch. She was still pissed. And fucking with his head. Brutally. He fought with his anger.

“I’ve been playing with a short text that could be inserted,” she went on. “Something like ‘only empty hands and a full heart shall pass through the wall of flames unburned’. This way, it’s not just cleverness that wins the game. It’s faith, and courage. And love.”

“It would make the game impossible to win,” Duncan said.

“That’s not true for everyone,” Nell replied. “Just for you.”