Page 75 of The Widow and the Wanted

She presses against my good shoulder to put a few inches of distance between us. “We shouldn’t.”

I freeze.

I swear this dastardly woman waited for me to be at my most desperate, legs wrapped around me so I could feel the heat coming off her cunny, just to guarantee my stones would ache.

I sit back on my heels, the cot groaning under the shift. The towel’s already wet and useless now. My skin’s still prickling from the barrel, gooseflesh tight against the cold. I’m bare-ass naked in the firelight, colder than hell with my manhood hanging heavy between my thighs, half hard already from kissing her.

She don’t speak, just lets her stare linger on my cock, swollen lips parted like she forgot what she was about to say. Cold water’s still got me shaky, wound’s still raw, and I’m sitting here exposed like a damn fool offering himself up.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I fall back onto the quilt, chest heaving. Lula settles beside me. Her eyes close. Mine won’t. I hold her anyway, even if my poor ballocks throb like the devil from her teasing.

Chapter 21

Lula

Boone lights a cigarette and draws slow. He tucks an arm under his head, bicep shifting once under pale skin.

My thighs are damp with arousal, my shift clinging where it ought not, and the feel of it makes me want to hide under the bed.

Boone catches me with the corner of his eye. I swallow. A quiet pause. The fire settles in the stove with a soft sigh. Boone flicks ash into the tin by the bed without looking as wind claws along the eaves.

What in God’s name am I supposed to do now?

Pretend it didn’t happen? Pick one? Bed them both?

…God.

If only Mother could see me now. Gemini-girl in training, she’d joke. But not in jest. In judgment.

I turn my face into the pillow so he can’t read every thought. “I don’t want to be a wedge,” I say. “I don’t want to be the thing that⁠—”

“Ain’t possible,” Boone says, not cruelly. “We ain’t a thing that breaks easy. We took vows.”

I prop myself on my elbow, close enough that our chests nearly brush, close enough to feel the heat rolling off him in slow waves.

“Vows?” I repeat. “Like a wedding?”

Boone’s cigarette pauses halfway to his mouth. For a second he looks caught—not guilty, just unguarded, as if he spoke too freely, and now the weight of it has arrived. “When we got discharged,” he says at last, voice lower, “we went up along the Lakes. Just needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere new without any memories ’round it.”

“The Lakes,” I echo, picturing cold water wide as an ocean.

He nods once. “There’s a port up there. Whiskey Island.”

“And you,” I say, and my mouth feels clumsy around it. “You and Okee⁠—”

“We stood where the water meets the rocks,” Boone says, cutting in quick. “Just him and me, and God, if He was payin’ attention.”

It stirs envy in me, maybe. The quiet that follows feels different than ordinary quiet. It’s heavier. I swallow and force myself not to look away. Boone shifts on the mattress. His thigh brushes mine under the sheet and makes my skin prickle.

Then, with a rough exhale, he lifts his free hand to his chest. “Ain’t no one known what it was but us. And now you, I reckon.” He hooks two fingers under the edge of the sheet and drags it down just enough to bare his upper chest. The lamplight catches the hollow at his throat, the rise and fall of his breathing.

Over his heart, ink sits in his skin. Two long strokes like pillars, with a solid mark between them, like some kind of ancient cipher. I’d noticed it before and wondered what it meant.

“Your tattoo. You got that for him,” I whisper, tracing it gently with my little finger.

Boone nods once, eyes on the rafters again like looking at me would make him more naked than he already is. “We both did,” he says. “Same place. Same day. A little shop off the docks.”