She couldn’t wait.
* * *
Standing at the bathroom door, Nikolas studied his wife’s profile and noted the shadow beneath her cheekbone. She had lost weight in just a week and her figure had become more womanly. He couldn’t miss the admiring glances of male patrons and, while he felt some pride in this, there was a part of him that mourned the loss of the soft-padded fleshiness of his young wife, as though it had represented something unblemished and true. Once gone, he knew, it would be lost forever.
Delfi’s appetite for food, usually voracious, had tempered as had her appetite for s*x. When he embraced her, he could feel her body stiffen and where he would once have woken to her face studying him with the softness of love, now she would be turned away. He had wondered if she was pregnan
