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“Get out of here, Mia, before I show you how alive I really am,” he said. She blinked like she didn’t understand and so he dropped the shower curtain, standing there on fire for her.
Her lips fell open on a small gasp, and in front of his eyes, her nipples got hard, the ridges pressing against the wet flannel.
She stared up at him and he stared back, unapologetic.
You’re my wife, he thought. The words, before this moment, had meant nothing. But now he wanted to bury his hurt and confusion and guilt in her soft body. He wanted her to take his pain away. Comfort him, the way husbands and wives were supposed to.
He could see she was torn; her love for him was probably more painful than it had ever been and he was a selfish bastard to torture her. But he was feeling pretty damn tortured himself.
“Run away,” he said, grabbing the soap from the ceramic shelf it sat on. He lathered his hands and ran them over his chest, down his stomach to cup his erection. He stroked himself, gritting his teeth against the pleasure and agony. “Go,” he taunted her. “Back to your room. Where you don’t ever have to risk anything because you never go after what you want.”
“What would you know about it, Jack?” she spat.
“I know you married me and never told me you loved me. I know that I’m here, now, and you’re too scared to try. I think it’s easier to love me from far away,” he said. “It’s easier for you to live on this ranch, to bury yourself in work, to nurse all the hurts over all the years, instead of taking a risk and trying for something real.”
She gaped at him and he turned to face the water, rinsing the soap away. “Honestly, Mia, go away.”
He snapped the shower curtain shut in her face.
Her mother and sister arrived late that night. Walter tried to wait up with her, but he finally gave in around one, leaving her alone stretched out on the living room couch. Jack had come in after dinner, eaten Gloria’s pot roast over the sink in the kitchen and then gone to bed.
Mia would have felt invisible but he’d sent her one long glance that had about melted the clothes right off her body. In her whole life the most sexual, erotic thing she’d ever experienced had been that Santa Barbara rooftop with Jack.
Until last night.
Watching him touch himself had destroyed her. Ruined her. Torn down every single wall she had around her feelings, and now things were running amok. Some dark well of fantasy, of sexual deprivation, had opened up inside her head and now she was consumed by thoughts of Jack. And her.
And naked, filthy sex acts. Things she’d heard about but never totally understood or didn’t believe were physically possible. She wanted it all. With Jack.
He’d walked down the hallway to his room and it had been all she could do not to follow. Her family be damned, she was a woman. And suddenly she had needs.
But those needs were a complication. The lust and the fantasies and the constant tingle in her sad, neglected lady parts were only making an untenable situation impossible.
She needed to be back on her feet, back out in the barn so he could leave.
His words from last night, the way he’d taken her life and rearranged it, made every support and beam that held up her world seem fragile and silly. Insubstantial.
She needed her sister here, with her long memory and clear-headed cynicism, to remind her that Jack McKibbon and her feelings for him were toxic. Poison.
Delicious, delicious poison.
She dozed off after Walter left and woke up to the sweet smell of her mother—roses and cumin. Home.
Mia lingered in that place between sleep and wakefulness, where her body was thick and fuzzy, and the past and present were separated by cobwebs.
“Sweet girl,” her mom said, and Mia knew everything was going to be okay. The mess of her life would be put to order.
“Where’s that husband of yours?” Lucy’s acidic voice asked.
Or not.
13
It took a while for Jack to realize that Jeremiah’s eyes had glazed over.
“Sorry,” Jack murmured, replacing the PVC pipe with the section he’d taken apart. “I get a little carried away.”
“Who doesn’t?” Jeremiah asked with a laugh. “I mean, double cross filtration systems are fascinating stuff. My question is, can you fix my irrigation rig?”
Jack shook his head. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, it was that he wouldn’t be around to do it. Fixing the irrigation system would take more time than he had left on the ranch. He was going back to the university in two weeks, and by that time Mia would be up on her feet and his marriage would be over.
