Did he have a God complex, or what?
She remembered that night a few weeks ago when she’d fallen asleep in the chair in the living room. He’d said, yelled really, it was all his fault and she’d forgotten about it.
But he’d been serious. He blamed himself for Oliver’s death.
“Oh, Jack.” She leaned back against the pillows. Picking him out of her life, like splinters out of her skin, would be so much easier if she didn’t care so damn much.
That he carried around this unjustified load swamped her with sympathy, with unwanted affection, because it was so totally like him to take on that responsibility. The too-big responsibility, the unreasonable and unnecessary responsibility, was Jack’s specialty.
Marrying his best friend so she could stay on the ranch she loved. Bringing water to a nation dying of thirst. Taking responsibility for a senseless, mindless act of terrorism, because he felt like the blame needed to be put somewhere.
His mother had done that, put the weight of the world on his shoulders.
And you are not the woman to make it right,
she told herself.
You are not the wife he wants, not really.
Taking her own advice to heart, she closed the file and opened up her program and began inputting the calving data. But she couldn’t focus. Jack had written that he’d known the about the map problem that night in Santa Barbara and claimed to have forgotten about it because of “personal issues”… Was
she
the personal issue?
He’d called and emailed relentlessly for weeks after they’d made love. And she’d dodged every call.
Oh, her stomach twisted between curiosity and sick, terrible dread.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” he said, tossing his hat onto his desk. It skidded across the bare surface and fell into her lap.
“I am,” she said, tucking the hat on her head, tipping it over one eye. “Note my reclining position.”
Oh, he’d noted it. She looked like some kind of lewd cowboy fantasy in that hat.
He’d had a busy day. Stone’s alfalfa field irrigation system was pretty much shot. And when Jack had stopped by to help the guys clear the fire road, his father had been there in the middle of things, like the man he’d been. He’d been leaning against the truck, his hat down low over his eyes and for a second Jack’d had a good memory of this place. A decent one, of the two of them clearing that road when he was a kid.
And he stood there on that road with the past he’d thought was dead coming back to life around him. But different somehow. Changed.
Mia wasn’t the girl he knew her to be.
He couldn’t cast his father as the villain. Not entirely.
And Jack felt himself changing along with his memories.
So now he smelled like smoke and fire, and he was confused.
And having Mia here wasn’t helping. Trying not to look at her only seemed to make him more aware of her; her black curls were stark and erotic against the snowy-white pillow case. The flannel shirt she slept in wasn’t buttoned all the way up and he saw far too much of her throat, the elegant rail of her collarbone, the mysterious valley between her breasts.
She wore a pair of boxer shorts, and her long caramel-colored legs were stretched out over his unmade bed, her thin ankles crossed. Her toes naked and practically taunting him.
He wanted to eat her, lick her. Spread himself on top of her like butter and melt right into her skin.
“Why aren’t you in that reclining position in
your
room?” he snapped, yanking his filthy T-shirt over his head and firing it into the corner with the rest of his filthy T-shirts.
“Because I want to talk to you,” she said. He noticed, because he noticed everything about her, that she went a little wide-eyed at the sight of his chest. Good.
He undid the top button on his jeans, ready to make her eyes pop right out of her head.
“What are you doing?” she squeaked.
“I need to take a shower,” he said as the other button slid free.
“Can you keep your clothes on while I talk to you?”
“I suppose it depends on what you’re saying.” He grinned at her blush. Damn it, but his mood was improving. Mia Alatore blushing was about the strangest thing he’d ever seen, like seeing a dog in pants, but it was pretty, too.
“I want to talk to you about the bombing.”
He unfastened the rest of the buttons all at once. “Sorry,” he said, pushing the pants down his legs, “not interested.”
“Stop!” she cried, all but shielding her eyes. “Stop, please, Jack, I just want to talk.”
She was taking quick glances at him in his underwear and then looking away for a second, before her eyes would come wandering back.
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “Not about Africa.”
He tucked his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers as if he was about to pull them down and Mia’s eyes lurched up to his.
“I read your statement to the university,” she blurted.
That gave him pause. “Snooping around?”
She nodded, not even embarrassed.
“How can you believe that the bombing was your fault?” she asked.
“I don’t believe the bombing is my fault,” he said. “I believe the fact that Oliver is dead and Devon and I were hurt is my fault.”
“You didn’t make the decision to build the compound so far from the pump site.”
“No, but I sure as hell didn’t correct it, though, did I?”
“And neither did anyone else, Jack. And would it have mattered if you did?” she asked. “The place was bombed down to nothing. Was the compound even left standing?”
He nodded, feeling bile rise in his throat, wishing he’d kept his clothes on. “The storage area was ruined, but the living quarters were practically untouched. If we’d been able to get inside when we heard the planes coming, Oliver would be alive.”
“Oh, Jack.” She sighed, and he knew she understood. His guilt wasn’t for nothing. There were ramifications for mistakes that he’d made.
And sure, Oliver and Devon might have noticed the problem with the build site and chimed in, but no one else had until it was too late. And by then they’d just decided to do the best they could.
“But what if you weren’t able to get inside?” she asked.
He stared at her. “I’m not following.”
“You can’t second-guess everything. It’s a war over there, Jack. You could have told someone about the problems with the map, but maybe that would have created another problem. Perhaps, if the compound had been placed correctly, it would have been leveled. Maybe you’d be dead instead of Oliver. Maybe all of you would be dead.”
Jack turned around, tired of this conversation. His towel hung over the doorknob to his closet and he grabbed it, throwing it over his shoulder. “I’m done talking about this,” he said and left her in his bed to go take a shower.
He’d just stepped under the hot spray when the curtain was jerked aside.
“Jesus, Mia,” he snapped, yanking part of it back to cover his crotch. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Trying to talk some sense into that thick head of yours. This is not your fault. You don’t need to take responsibility for every bad thing that happens.”
“Go lie down—”
“No!” she snapped. Mist sprayed her face and hair. The front of her shirt got damp, outlining the full slope of her breasts, the soft point of her nipple His anger toward her turned into something else, something dark and desperate.
“Your mom did this to you,” she said. “How many years as a kid did you do everything you could to make her happy? You made her your responsibility.”
He ignored her and that made her even more angry.
“It’s not your fault that you’re alive and Oliver’s dead,” she said, her eyes bright and hot, and the fever in his belly grew. Behind the shower curtain, his erection throbbed.
“Do you hear me, Jack?” she asked.
No,
he thought, staring as the white parts in that flannel shirt grew translucent.
“Get out of here, Mia, before I show you how alive I really am,” he said. She gaped as if she didn’t understand and so he dropped the shower curtain, standing there on fire for her.
Her lips fell open on a small gasp, and in front of his eyes, her nipples hardened, pressing against the wet flannel.
She stared up at him and he stared back, unapologetic.
You’re my wife,
he thought. Not long ago, the word had meant nothing. But now he wanted to bury his hurt and confusion and guilt in her soft body. He wanted her to take his pain away. To comfort him, the way husbands and wives were supposed to.
He could see she was torn. Her love for him was probably more hurtful than it had ever been, and he was a selfish bastard to torture her. But he was feeling pretty damn tortured himself.
“Run away,” he said, grabbing the soap from the ceramic shelf it sat in. He lathered his hands and ran them over his chest, down his stomach to his erection. He stroked himself, gritting his teeth against the pleasure and agony. “Go,” he taunted her. “Back to your room. Where you don’t ever have to worry about losing anything because you never go after what you want.”
“What would you know about it, Jack?” she spat.
“I know you married me and never told me you loved me. I know that I’m here now, and you’re still too scared to try. I think it’s easier to love me when I’m far away,” he said. “It’s easier for you to live on this ranch, to bury yourself in work, to nurse all the hurts over all the years, instead of taking a risk and trying for something real.”
She gaped at him and he turned to face the water, rinsing off the soap. “Honestly, Mia, go away.”
He snapped the shower curtain shut in her face.
Until last night.
Watching him touch himself destroyed her. Ruined her. Tore down every single wall she had built around her feelings and now things were running amok. Some dark well of fantasy, of sexual deprivation, had opened up inside her head and she was consumed by thoughts of Jack. And her.
And naked, filthy sex acts. Things she’d heard about but never fully understood or didn’t believe were physically possible. She wanted it all. And she wanted it with Jack.
He’d walked down the hallway to his room tonight and it was all she could do not to follow. Her family be damned, she was a woman. And suddenly she had needs.
But those needs were a complication. The lust and the fantasies and the constant tingle in her sad, neglected lady parts were only making an already tenuous situation impossible.
Mia needed to be back on her feet, back out in the barn so Jack could leave.
His words from last night, the way he’d taken her life and rearranged it, made every support beam that held up her world seem fragile and silly. Insubstantial.
She needed her sister here with her long memory and clearheaded cynicism to remind her that Jack McKibbon and her feelings for him were toxic. Poisonous.
Delicious, delicious poison.
She dozed off after Walter left and woke up to the sweet smell of her mother—roses and cumin. Home.
Mia lingered in that place between sleep and being awake, where her body was thick and fuzzy and the past and present were separated by cobwebs.
“Sweet girl,” her mom said, and Mia knew everything was going to be okay. The mess of her life would be put to order.
“Where’s that husband of yours?” Lucy’s acidic voice asked.
Or not.
“Who doesn’t?” Jeremiah asked with a laugh. “I mean, double cross filtration systems are fascinating stuff. My question is, can you fix my irrigation rig?”
Jack shook his head. It wasn’t that he couldn’t; it was that he wouldn’t be around to do it. Fixing the irrigation system would take more time than he had left on the ranch. He was going back to the university in two weeks. By then Mia would be on her feet and his marriage would be over.
“Yeah,” Jeremiah said, “probably below your pay grade.” Jack didn’t correct him; he didn’t have the inclination to explain the mess of his life.
“Well.” Jeremiah sighed and stretched, his lean body curling and uncurling. “Guess I’ll have to find someone else.”
Jack didn’t tell him, but the former rodeo star had a Cheerio in the hair over his ear.
“Do you miss your old life?” Jack asked, loath to go home despite the setting sun. Sandra and Lucy had arrived late last night, and Mia’s warnings about the women looking for his blood were beginning to make him nervous. “The rodeo?”
Jeremiah pushed his hand through his hair and ran into that crusty Cheerio. “Like you wouldn’t believe,” he said with a smile, flinging the Cheerio into the grass.
“You? You miss saving the world?”
“No,” Jack answered right away. “Not at all. But…I miss the science. Using my brain to solve problems.”
“Herding cows doesn’t compare?”
Jack smiled. “That’s good, too,” he said. “Surprisingly good. I like the guys and the work is honest and hard, which is more than I would get most days from the university. Being head of research involved pushing a lot of paper around a desk.”
“And getting bombed.”
“That, too.” He looked down at his boots, the dirt that covered them. “It’s no wonder I’m ready to be done with it.”
“Hey, I think it’s great you’re back,” Jeremiah said. “I mean, with your dad being sick and, you know, your wife being hot…it’s good you’re home.”
Home. Is that where he was? Because it felt like limbo. Purgatory.
Purgatory because his hot wife wanted nothing to do with him.
He thought about what she’d said the other night, about taking the place of his dream. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Mia and his work occupied two different sections of his life. Two different places. Wanting one had nothing to do with the other.
“I better go,” Jeremiah said. “I need to pick Eli and Casey up at day care.”
Jack shook his head, laughing.
Jeremiah’s smile faltered at the corners. His blue eyes were dark and Jack realized all was not well with his old friend.
“Sometimes I wake up,” Jeremiah said, “and I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
Oddly enough, Jack felt just the opposite. He woke up and knew exactly who he was; he just didn’t know where he fit.