AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What was what like?” The words nearly choked him.
“Sharing a woman with Jethro Riggs? Didn’t you ever get jealous, Mac?”
Son of a bitch. He was going to come in his jeans!
If she hadn’t been watching for his reaction, she might have missed the expression that flickered over his face. It was dark, carnal, arousing. His eyes lifted slowly from his plate a second later, his features smoothing out, but his eyes, his eyes were like storm clouds now, brewing with dangerous undercurrents.
She could see his response and feel it inside herself. See the sudden shift of hunger in his gaze as he stared at her, the tension in his body, the way it whipped through the air and licked over her flesh. In three years of marriage she had rarely seen that look on Mac’s face, and it almost, just almost, frightened her. It would have frightened her if her own arousal hadn’t tempered the fear. She had to force herself to control her breathing, to control her response to him. To the thought of that forbidden act.
She had suspected he missed the Club and the sexual acts he engaged in there with Jethro Riggs. Rough, edging on dangerous, Jethro’s sexuality drew every woman she knew. Even herself at one time. Until she met Mac.
The thought of those acts had terrified her when she first met Mac, but something stronger, something darker had drawn her to him, made her love him.
She had thought she had pushed back her reckless impulses years before she met Mac. But in the past year or more, Keiley had found curiosity eating her alive. Mac never mentioned his sexual past with Jethro or the Club. He never referred to it, never suggested revisiting Virginia.
But that sexual darkness that had at first drawn her to him had been growing inside him, spurring her own. She needed to know what had drawn him to it. Why he had done it. For reasons that didn’t make sense even to herself, that past was now tormenting her dreams and her fantasies.
“Why do you want to know, Kei?” His tone was a velvet rasp, rough, with the promise of a dark caress beneath it. It stroked over her flesh, reminded her that she had been days without feeling his possession.
Why did she want to know? Because it was killing her. Because in the past three years it had grown within her mind as her confidence within her own sexuality had grown. At first, it had been tainted with fear. The knowledge of the gossip that could arise, the whispers and destructive rumors that could build. But as she had found her place in Mac’s hometown, watched it grow within the past three years even as she had grown, she had begun to wonder.
Why did he do it? And did he miss it? Was that the reason why the tension within him, the darkness that glittered in his gaze, had grown as well?
She shrugged uneasily. “We’ve never discussed it. We’ve talked about everything else in our lives except that. ”
And it was the truth. She had discussed things with Mac that she had never talked to anyone else about. The horror of facing the realization that her father had embezzled money from the company he worked from. The fea
r when she had lost her home, when her father had been imprisoned and her mother had committed suicide. Mac knew every part of her, but there was still so much she didn’t know about him.
“It’s not worth talking about. ” He turned his attention back to his breakfast as Keiley watched him closely. He was hiding from her, and that only dared her curiosity.
“That doesn’t tell me why you did it, Mac. ” She continued to press the point even though the tone of his voice warned her that it was a subject he didn’t want to discuss.
He was avoiding this subject just as he avoided other subjects when it came to explanations concerning the dark, shadowed parts of his soul.
Marrying Mac hadn’t come without a little baggage. He was an alpha with a capital A, irritating, proud, arrogant, and bold. Mac didn’t do anything by half measures and he sure as hell didn’t offer a lot of explanations.
He avoided issues he didn’t want to discuss, and when she pushed it they most likely ended up in bed where she couldn’t remember the subject they were arguing over anymore than she could remember her own name once he started touching her.
He challenged her independence with his arrogance, and compromise hadn’t come easily to him. She had the feeling that once she opened the door he was warning her to keep closed there would be no closing it again. There were parts of Mac so shadowed inside that she wondered if he wasn’t just as wary of them as she knew she should be.
She was tired of the wariness. She was tired of feeling that a part of her husband was hidden from her. That a part of her own life was missing when he grew quiet and dark.
She was tired of being more frightened of losing him than she was of getting to know him. That was the mistake she had made when they married. She had known it was too soon to make their relationship permanent. Known there was too much about Mac that she didn’t know, and now it was time to figure it. It was time to get to know the man she had married, whether he wanted her to know him or not.
His fork clattered to his plate as he laid his arms carefully on the table and stared back at her, his gray eyes brewing like thunderclouds.
“Because I was horny,” he answered.
“You were horny, so you shared your women with other men?” She lifted her coffee cup and drank from it as though her pulse wasn’t racing, as though she wasn’t suddenly nervous as hell and so aroused she could feel her juices heating the folds of her pussy.
“That about sums it up,” he growled.
“So, the women you shared, they weren’t your lovers in particular? Just someone else’s?”
His eyes darkened. In the three and a half years they had been married, she had never seen such contradictory emotions roiling through his gaze. Anger, irritation, longing, and arousal. It was a little scary and a lot harder to accept the suspicions that had been brewing inside her for months.
Or maybe she had just finally seen it in the past few months. She knew she could feel it. As the past three years had seen the growth in their marriage, it had also seen a vague restlessness. One she hadn’t recognized just in herself, but within Mac as well.
