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Well, plenty. But the scales were beginning to tip out of balance and the harm didn’t seem so bad in the face of how much she wanted to touch him and be touched.
Loved, somehow.
Jack stepped away, his eyes on hers, and she wondered in a weird spellbound state if he was going to shut the door and climb into this bed with her. If that was how the boredom of this night would be dealt with.
Once again, stupid and starved, her body got a little happy and started to hum.
But then he was out the door, brushing past the bells and making them ring.
For the best, she told herself, adding the small pain to the piles of pain and unhappiness her relationship with Jack had brought her.
But then he was back in her doorway, carrying a small case.
“You still play chess?” he asked, his eyes bright, his smile the sweetest she’d ever seen. He looked so much like the boy she’d fallen in love with that it stung.
Why did this feel more dangerous than touching him? They’d played a hundred games of chess, thousands. The smart part of her brain, that had been somehow silent when she wanted to rub herself all over the man, decided to chime in.
Don’t do it.
He took her silence as a yes and stepped into the room, pulling the chair up closer to her bed. The travel chess set opened under his fingers, the small black and white pieces nestled in little compartments.
Jack went still, looking down at the game as if it wasn’t what he’d expected. As if a snake lay curled up on the magnetic board.
“Jack?” she asked.
“Oliver—” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “Oliver and I played.” His thumb brushed over the white queen. “At night.”
Jack’s grief was a presence in the room and she could feel him withdrawing, watched his fingers start to fold up the set so he could go back to his room and do whatever he’d been doing the week after he first came to the ranch.
Grieving. Hiding.
And that wasn’t good. Not for anyone. As dangerous as it might be to her heart for them to play chess like they had when they were kids, it was far more dangerous for Jack to go back to hiding.
She put her hand on the board. “I’m black,” she said, pulling the pieces from the wells they were in. She set them up, pretending not to watch him, but so aware of him she could feel him in the air. His grief and sorrow, his indecision. Everything.
And she could tell, by the way he sat, by the way he watched her, and finally by the way he started to set up the white pieces, that his grief had turned to gratitude.
“Let’s see if you’ve gotten any better,” she said. “Somehow I doubt it.”
He laughed and the trash talk began.
Jack hadn’t been so happy in…months. He felt a certain ease that he wasn’t entirely familiar with. A looseness in his bones and muscles that indicated a state of relaxation that was foreign to him.
Santa Barbara had been the last time he’d felt like this. And before that...God, he couldn’t remember. Happiness wasn’t anything he sought. There’d been no place for it in his life. There had been his work and the subcategories of that: Africa. Oliver. School. The drill.
It had seemed like so much, a mountain he had to climb every day, an ocean of paperwork and problems that he, Jack McKibbon and no one else, could solve.
It had allowed him, he supposed, to hide. To run away from even trying to find happiness. To protect himself from the disappointment of never actually getting it.
And looking down at the crown of Mia’s head, he knew. In a way, he’d been hiding from her.
A tension awoke in his belly, an awareness of her body, the loose tee-shirt that pulled across her breasts, revealing the rigid points of her nipples. Her arms, tanned and strong, looked so sweet and tender poking out of the too-big sleeves.
His wife.
The celibacy he’d lived with, and grown accustomed to, wasn’t fitting so well right now. All he could do was sit here and think of Santa Barbara and the way her breast had felt in his hand. The way her tongue had tasted in his mouth. How tight and hot and sweet she’d been.
He coughed and rearranged himself in his chair, crossing his legs.
You’re an ass, he told himself. The woman has a contusion on her brain. And you’re sitting here with a boner! Get a grip.
“I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying,” she grumbled, moving her rook sideways.
He was barely paying attention to the game and he knew she’d win. She usually did. He liked chess, but Mia had a brain for it like he’d never seen. Oliver had been good, liked to brag about winning some junior championships in England, like that was something worth bragging about. But he’d been a hack compared to Mia.
