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“I’m still getting a divorce,” she said, and he felt like a fool, sitting there with half an erection.
“Fine.” He pushed himself to his feet. “I won’t stop you.”
She nodded once, looking for a moment like she had something else to say, but in the end she just turned on her heel. But she took three steps and stopped again.
He would have smiled if he were still that kind of guy.
“I have to ask,” she said, bowing her head. Her neck, white in the dusk, seemed so vulnerable, so achingly appealing, he wanted to press a hundred kisses to those tendons, the soft skin. Her heartbeat.
“Oliver?” she asked, and he flinched, all tender thoughts obliterated. He didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, and she turned, her eyes damp.
“What about him?” he asked, unable to push away a woman with so much grief in her eyes, grief he understood far too well.
“Was he in pain...before he died?” she whispered. “Was he scared?”
Oh Mia, he thought, her sorrow tearing through him.
He shook his head, wondering how to tell her that all they’d found of Oliver after the bombing was a shoe and his flask. The rest of him couldn’t even be scraped off the sand.
“It was fast,” he whispered, and she sighed in relief.
Before he knew it she was in front of him, wrapping her strong arms around his waist, pulling them together, chest to chest. Her hands were warm and wide on his back. A hug.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “You must miss him so much.”
The contact was distracting, like very loud static. He couldn’t think past all the noise his body was making. But slowly the comfort of her touch seeped into him, pushing aside all his grief and guilt, touching him in those cold dark places that he didn’t think would ever feel warmth again.
“I do,” he breathed. And pulled her against him like his life depended on it.
8
It took four days for the cows of the Rocky M to finish calving. Mia assigned the guys to shifts, and Jack was surprised and happy to be working at night alongside Chris. Despite his exhaustion, the nightmares were frequent and harrowing, and he slept better in the day, or maybe not as deeply as at night.
And Chris was good company. He’d been a young hand when Jack was growing up, and if he knew what was going on in the house, Chris didn’t say anything.
Like the other guys, Jack worked and ate and slept without any regard to the clock. He didn’t think. The voices were silent. The pills were no longer a magnetic threat on his bedside table.
Mia didn’t seem to sleep, or if she did he didn’t see it. Every time he turned around she was there with the tattoo pliers or talking to Dr. Peuse about the three calves who had been weakened by diarrhea.
On the third day he walked into the tack room and found her snoring on an upright wooden chair.
“Don’t wake her,” Chris said over his shoulder.
“You’re kidding,” Jack said.
Chris shook his head. “You wake her and she’ll start working again. This way she’ll get a little sleep.”
“And a sore neck.”
Chris shrugged but Jack saw the man’s concern in his blue eyes.
“This is crazy,” Jack said.
“This is the Rocky M,” Chris agreed and headed out through the barn toward the calving pasture.
Mia’s head bobbed forward onto her chest and she started but didn’t wake.
And she calls me stubborn, he thought.
He couldn’t leave her like that. But at the same time, Chris was right, which meant he just had to be sure Mia didn’t wake up. Jack bent beside her, sliding one hand behind her back, the other behind her knees.
Close to her, he realized she smelled as bad as the rest of them, and for some reason, it was endearing. He wanted to peel the filthy clothes off her skin and put her in a bath. Clean her. Feed her. Put her to bed for a week.
Want and regret clashed in his chest. He was sure no one had ever done that for her before; she was thirty years old and no man had ever taken care of her, pampered her. And as her husband, if he’d been a real husband, it would have been his right.
His privilege.
He stood, lifting her easily in his arms, his skin, his whole body, waking up at the contact.
But then so did she.
He stopped, embarrassed and slightly angry that she was so stubborn he’d had to resort to these cheesy tactics just to get her to bed.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked.
“You fell asleep in the chair.” He sounded guilty to his own ears, like a teenager caught copping a feel. He quickly put her on her feet, trying not to notice the way her body spilled over his. Warm and lush, every curve a reminder that she was his wife and he’d been celibate a long, long time.
