“I hired two seasonal hands,” Chris said. The guys all filed into the room and sat down at the big table. Sandra had made spaghetti with meatballs and the men dug in as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks. They’d eaten that way every night since Sandra had been back. Even Chris seemed to have put on weight.
And Mom watched from the stove, a smile on her face.
“On whose authority?” Mia cried.
“Mine,” Jack said, grabbing an apple from a bowl on the counter that had sat empty for five years. “It’s my money, after all.”
She shook her head, anger and purpose filling her. She’d been an outcast from her life, from her work long enough. “No more bed rest,” she snapped. “This is ridiculous.”
“I agree,” Jack said, taking a giant bite of the bright red fruit, juice dripping down his chin. He looked so earthy, so raw, it felt erotic just to look at him, to stand here and watch him eat.
She could barely blink in fear of missing something.
“Sandra?” he said. “You got that box ready?”
“Here you go.” Sandra lifted a big box up onto the counter. “Try to have her home by midnight or she’ll turn into a pumpkin.”
“What the hell is going on?” Mia demanded.
“I’m taking you on a picnic,” he said.
A picnic? Her breath shook in her chest, her heart missed a beat.
“Mom, what did you do?” Lucy asked from behind her. Mia couldn’t turn; she was riveted by Jack.
“I packed up some fried chicken and a couple of brownies for my daughter and her husband,” Sandra said, the word
husband
laced with dynamite.
“Sounds wonderful, Sandra,” Jack said with a charming smile and Mom blushed.
“We’re here to help Mia,” Lucy said. But it all seemed so far away to Mia. The only thing she cared about, the thing she could touch, was Jack.
“Stay out of this, Lucy,” Jack said. “This is between me and my wife.”
My wife?
Was this really happening?
“Mia,” Lucy said, coming to stand beside her, tugging her hand. “This isn’t a good idea.”
“Lucy. Stop.” Walter’s voice boomed through the big room and everyone froze. Except Lucy, who whirled on the old man.
“Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” Lucy asked.
Sandra threw her dish towel over her shoulder and stepped out from behind the stove into the fray—and still, Mia could not look away from Jack.
“A picnic,” he whispered, his eyes twinkling, his lips wet with juice. “Away from the maddening crowd.”
Mia knew it was a bad idea, just like she’d known going up on that roof in Santa Barbara had been a bad idea, but she was tired of resisting. Tired of being safe in her misery and loneliness. When Jack left—and he would—she wanted memories. She wanted something real to hold on to.
“Let’s go,” she said.
A miracle he planned on taking full advantage of.
“You first,” he said, bowing slightly as if escorting her to the best seat in the house.
She shot him a wry look. “Don’t stare at my butt,” she said, starting up the ladder.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, staring at her butt. Good Lord, the woman’s curves had curves.
They climbed up the ladder to the top of the air-conditioning unit and then chinned up onto the flat roof over the main part of the school.
She didn’t need his help, as ready as he was to give her a boost. Mia Alatore got where she wanted to go all by herself, and it was one of the things he most admired about her.
He wondered if she knew that.
How would she?
he asked himself.
You never bothered to tell her.
Calling a woman tough was hardly a love song. And Mia deserved whatever love songs he could give her.
“Seems like other people have found your hiding spot,” she said, kicking aside beer bottles and empty cans of spray paint. A filthy mattress crouched in the dark corner next to a big vent.
“They need to take down that ladder,” he said, saddened to see his old refuge so misused. “It’s too damn easy to get up here.”
“The view is still the same,” Mia said, looking out at the mountains, bathed in pink light from the setting sun. The small town of Wassau spread out in front of them for a couple of blocks in either direction.
A kingdom of split-level ranch houses and pickup trucks.
“I feel like a queen up here,” she said, laughing. She tucked her hands into the pockets of the red zip-up sweatshirt she wore and tilted her head back to the breeze.
How was it that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen? Dressed in a sweatshirt and cowboy boots, she beat every other woman by a mile.
“I was more inclined to a god on Mount Olympus,” he said, and she shot him a dubious look over her shoulder. A look that sent arrows through his body. His heart.
“You were such a nerd,” she groused.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged off the backpack and opened it up, pulling out a blanket and some food. He wished he had wine, but he’d have to make do with two bottles of water. “Pretending to be a god makes sense for a kid who felt like he had no control in his life.”
“Listen to you,” she said. “All Oprah about your childhood.”
Jack laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far, but…you were right. I’m never going to have a real relationship with anyone if I kept pushing them away or leaving them.”
The atmosphere on the roof changed and he could feel Mia’s anxiety, see it in the set of her shoulders under that red sweatshirt.
It was now or never and as much as he wished he had more than an apple in his nervous stomach, as intricate a seduction as he’d had planned, he knew he couldn’t let this moment go by. He’d let too many moments go by, blind to them.
“I’m coming back to the ranch,” he said. “After the meeting with the university, I’m coming back.”
Mia hung her head and his heart ached for her, it really did, but he wasn’t going to be pushed around by her fears anymore.
“It’s my home, Mia.”
“For how long?” she asked.
“For as long as you’ll have me.” These past few days with his father had started to unravel the mess of his childhood.
The things he’d thought were real—that his father didn’t love him, that his mother’s hate and rage were somehow his fault—he now knew were false.
Except for Mia. Mia had always been real. Mia was joy in a world of cold science.
“I love you,” he said, and she jerked as if he’d shot her.
But she didn’t turn.
“I put my whole life in compartments,” he said, keeping his distance, knowing if he touched her she’d run. So he stood back and hoped his words would do the job. “I had my work. I had the past. I had you. And I kept everything separate. Simple. I didn’t think about the past or you when I thought about work and so, I let work take over.”
“Because it was easier,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, watching her for clues. But she was unreadable. A stone face. And he wanted to feel hope, joy even that he’d told her how he felt. That he’d loosened some of the chains of his past, but her stoicism wouldn’t allow it.
Panic started a drumbeat in his head.
“But I want it all,” he said, pushing on anyway. “I want a full life. A real life. I want you and my work to occupy the same place. To coexist.”
“How can we if your work is all over the world?”
“I don’t know what my work is going to be, Mia. Maybe I’ll stay here and fix irrigation systems.”
She scoffed. “Like that will make you happy.”
“You make me happy.” And then, because he couldn’t not touch her any longer, he curled his hand over her shoulder, feeling her heat and bone and muscle. But he felt none of her heart. None of her love.
She was closed off to him.
“You don’t believe me.” It wasn’t a question. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said. “I’m sorry I left. Trust me when I tell you I didn’t know what I was leaving behind. I didn’t know I was leaving the better part of myself, the laughter and the love. I didn’t know I was leaving behind my best friend and my family.”
She stared up at him, dry-eyed and doubtful.
“I’ll prove it,” he said, grabbing hold of the challenge with both hands. He pulled off her hat tossed it to the ground at their feet. Slowly and gently he untangled the ponytail from the nape of her neck. The breeze picked up her hair, blew it around her head. A lusty contradiction to the stone-cold look in her eye.
“You don’t scare me,” he whispered. She thrilled him. Excited him. And if his words didn’t get the job done, he had other ways to convince her.
Don’t believe,
she warned herself.
And then he kissed her and she couldn’t help it. This was Jack holding her. Jack, her husband, telling her he loved her. How could she not at least hope? How could she pretend to be unmoved?
He didn’t play games, held the back of her head and opened his mouth over hers. It was lush and exciting. Wet and all-consuming. A thousand never-ending kisses.
Her body turned to mist and she lost all boundaries, all sense of herself as something other than him. Other than raw sensation. She opened herself up and took everything he gave her. She had no protection, just desire and the man she loved.
She moaned and wrapped her arms around his waist, pulling herself to him, angry when it didn’t seem like enough.
“Mia—”
“Shut up,” she muttered, unzipping her jacket and tossing it over her shoulder. Closer. She wanted to be closer to him.
His chuckle rumbled against her chest and she didn’t appreciate him laughing at her. She dropped her hand to his belt buckle and his laughter died on a cough. His wiry strength was taut, expectant, waiting for her next move and she liked that. She really liked that.
Slowly, carefully, she ran her hands over the jeans below his belt, feeling the hard length of him beneath the metal and denim.
His groan threw gasoline on the fire burning in her body. Her nipples hardened so fast they hurt and the ache between her legs grew, spreading through her body.
He’d spread out a blanket and she tucked her fingers inside the waistband of his jeans and pulled him toward it, aglow in the last of the sunset.
His shirt rode up and under her fingers she felt the soft tenderness of his belly. The white-hot heat of his skin. She pushed her fingers deeper and felt the wiry curls of the hair that grew there.
It wasn’t enough; the teasing, fleeting sensations weren’t enough to satisfy her suddenly voracious curiosity. And appetite.
She leaned up on tiptoe and kissed him while her fingers undid his belt. His palms slid over her hips, grabbing her ass with both hands, squeezing and pulling her close. She lost focus for a moment, groaning into his mouth, pressing her aching breasts against his chest, searching for someplace to put this desire.
She wanted him in her hands. Her mouth. She wanted to suck on him. Taste him on her tongue. Feel him against her lips.
She’d never done this. Not really. And she planned to take her time. She planned to master the skill of pleasing her husband, right now.
Jack muttered something dark and dirty into her mouth and she wanted to laugh with wicked delight.
Finally, her awkward fingers got rid of the belt and the button and zipper of his jeans and she slid her hands into his pants.
His erection, hot and smooth, leaped into her fingers and she curled her palm around him.
He hissed, his hips jerking against hers.
“Mia, baby, listen, I love this, but it’s…it’s been a long time.”
She didn’t say anything. Wasn’t about to let him off the hook. She had a plan, damn it, and he wasn’t going to make a mess of this the way he had her life.
A gentle push and he was on his back on the blanket.
His shirt had been pulled up and she saw the muscles of his stomach, the tip of his erection. His pants were stub born, but she tugged them down past his hips, revealing the full length of him. The dark, coarse hair.
She’d seen men who weren’t her husband, of course.
Well, just Bill Winters. But this was her husband, and love made him beautiful, so much more than his body and his skin and hair.
“Men like this,” she said, though she wasn’t sure why. Doubts, maybe. She was, after all, a thirty-year-old almost virgin.
“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about…yes, they do.”
She ran her fingers over him, feeling the veins that pulsed just beneath the skin. His hips lifted off the ground and his legs shifted, bumping into her knees where she knelt.
His reaction excited her and she gripped him in her hand, ran her thumb over his tip, smearing the thick liquid she found there. She brought her thumb to her lips and while he watched, panting through open lips, she licked it off.
“Mia,” he groaned.
Yes,
she thought, heat and desire pulsing through her.
I like this.
She leaned over him, licked him from base to tip and he groaned, twitching beneath her. She sucked him into her mouth, loving the masculine scent of him and he yelled, fisting his hands into her hair, showing her what he wanted, how fast, how hard.
He praised her, his words raunchy and rough, and she wanted to laugh with delight. With how damn alive she felt. How connected to him and to her own womanhood. Her own power.
She used her hands, stroking him against the rhythm of her mouth, and he really seemed to like that. So she did it some more.
Until he pulled her away, his hands clumsy. His face was stony. She watched him, spellbound, her body aching, as he kicked off the rest of his clothes and turned toward her—a different Jack.
A Jack with all that urbane intelligence turned off. A Jack without the distance his brain put between himself and the rest of the world.
He was focused—a hundred percent—on her.
He tore off her pants, pushed down her underwear, and the violence was exhilarating. She’d driven him to this place, where he barely had control. Where that powerful brain of his was negated by his physical needs.
He spread her legs and rolled on top of her. He eased his fingers between them and she knew he was gauging her readiness.
She was more than ready.
When his fingers touched the wet heat of her, he kissed her. Hard.
He shifted again and when he thrust inside her, she screamed in welcome. The sound tearing out of some hidden place inside her. She relished his lack of control, but in truth, was scared of losing her own.
She struggled against him for a second, trying to find space for herself, the distance she needed to keep herself safe.
“No, Mia,” he said, forcing her to look at him. He pushed himself high and hard and she gasped, choking on pleasure. “Don’t pull away. Not now.”
“Jack—”
“This is us. Right here. Right now,” he said, his eyes boring into hers as he started to move. It was so beautiful she nearly cried.
Us,
she thought, matching his rhythm, his violence.
Distance, safety? The need was gone, the urge erased.
He bent his head, found her nipple with his mouth, lips and tongue. He thrust and kissed and sucked, driving her somewhere she’d never been. Didn’t even know existed.
She bit her lip against a thousand screams. She closed her mouth against the
I love you
and the
I need you and please, please don’t leave me
that clawed to be free.
Pleasure, thick and heady, rolled through her, gathering speed, pulling at every cell. For a second she was scared, scared of letting go quite this much, but then Jack slid his fingers through hers and buried his face in her neck.
“I love you,” he whispered and she exploded.