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CHAPTER1
Mandy
When we got married, my husband Rick was twenty-eight and I was twenty. I knew that the eight-year age gap wouldn’t make any difference a few years down the road. Not even a single week after we had gotten married, though, it still made me blush when an older woman I hadn’t even met called attention to it.
“Seems like you two would be a good fit for our little town,” she said, smiling in a way that seemed both kind and somehow knowing, “with that age difference.”
Rick and I were two days into our brief honeymoon to the Adirondacks, after getting married in my home town, a little suburb outside Trenton, New Jersey. Tonight was our last night at the beautiful mountain lodge.
“Really?” Rick asked, from where he sat next to me on the wicker sofa. We had come out to the porch of the lodge to enjoy the sunset and of course to cuddle a little, and found this older—well, older in my twenty-year-old eyes, though I thought at first they were really probably in their late thirties—couple already there on the next couch over from the one we chose.
The couches faced each other across a coffee table, so I could see that he had his arm around her in an affectionate embrace, and their hands were joined atop her crossed knees. I didn’t see anything overtly sexy about their pose at all, but somehow I felt like their so clearly familiar intimacy put Rick and my brand new marital passion to shame.
Silence fell for a moment as we all looked west over the next ridge, where the sun had just touched the mountains and the sky had gone a spectacular cotton-candy pink.
“That probably sounds odd to you,” the man on the other couch said. “I’m guessing you don’t know that there are towns where couples like us feel particularly at home.”
I looked over at the woman, who smiled back at me. Her comment about our age difference had literally been the first thing she had said to us. I wondered if she had meant to embarrass me or if she just had a very awkward way of speaking to people she had just met. I felt the warmth rise in my cheeks again, and I decided to get out ahead of it.
“I definitely didn’t know that,” I said, looking at the man. “I’m not even sure what you mean.”
“Well,” he said, his voice very casual. “You probably noticed that I’m about ten years older than my lovely bride April here. I’m Scott, by the way.”
My gaze flicked from Scott to April and back. I had certainly noticed a gap, but now I saw how dramatic it was: Scott had started to grow gray at the temples while April didn’t seem much older than me.
“Nice to meet you, Scott,” Rick said, tightening his arm around my waist as if he could feel how I’d just tensed up—though I had no idea why I should. “I’m Rick and this is Mandy. We just got married a couple days ago.”
April giggled. “We can tell,” she said. “You two were all over each other at dinner yesterday evening.”
I felt my blush get even hotter. Scott spoke a little sharply.
“April, that’s unkind.”
I watched him turn to look into her eyes as she refocused from me to look up at her husband. To my astonishment, I saw that April’s own cheeks had turned red. Scott’s expression had something in it that made my heart race, something I had never seen in real life before. A very old-fashioned look—a look that said April would have to face the consequences of giggling at the newlyweds, sometime later this evening.
She turned back to me. “I’m sorry, Mandy,” she said quietly, her voice seeming genuinely contrite.
I had been sitting almost in Rick’s lap, my legs over his. Self-consciously I pulled away, suddenly wondering what my mother would think if she could see how I had entwined my body with my husband’s here in public on the lodge’s porch—or, worse, last night when I had let our passion run away with us a bit, not thinking anyone could see. Rick had put his hand up under my skirt and touched me in the still-slightly-sore place where he had made a woman of me only two nights before. I hadn’t stopped him, the way—I knew well from my upbringing—even a married woman should do.
I had turned my eyes toward the mountains as I disentangled myself from Rick, who obligingly rearranged his own position to sit next to me with his arm around my shoulders. I didn’t really want to see what Scott and April thought of my maneuver—and yet somehow I needed to. I glanced over, and I saw Scott regarding me with a very serious, assessing kind of expression.
He turned his attention to my husband. “Are you going to let her get away like that, Rick?” he asked. “Young couple like you, youshouldbe all over each other. I’m pretty sure April has given you the wrong impression of us—and, I guess, of our town too, since we brought it up.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling that Scott had decided to evaluate us, for some reason I couldn’t fathom. I turned toward the sun, now halfway down, and hoped the ruddy light of its setting and the gathering twilight would hide the pink I could feel mounting in my fair-skinned cheeks.
Should we be all over each other?Unwittingly—or so I thought, then, before we got to know Scott and April better—this man had touched a sore spot in my mind and my heart. I chewed on my lower lip as I realized how that figurative soreness echoed the soreness between my thighs, which had vanished by this morning.
It had vanished, and I had felt fine down there this morning, and yet…
Yet I had lied to Rick… my husband… the one person in the world with whom I should be completely honest. I had told him, just as I had done the previous night, after dinner and the morning after our wedding night, that I didn’t feel ready, down there between my legs, to try again, just yet.
Sorer in my mind,I thought ruefully.It hurts more there, inside my head because it doesn’t really hurt on the outside.
Rick’s hand felt good on my shoulder. My legs had felt good, placed across his. I liked to cuddle. I had liked it from the very beginning, when my handsome boyfriend hugged and kissed me in his car, and sometimes in his bedroom in the apartment he had shared with two other guys while he saved up for a house.
I thought of that house, still only a dream although we could definitely afford to buy something small now, especially if we decided to move to one of the mega-corp–subsidized towns that had started to attract a lot of growth. In that house, Rick and I would sleep in the same bed. We had to, right? I chewed my lip a little harder, thinking about it. I shouldwantto sleep in the same bed as my husband, shouldn’t I?
Really I wanted to cuddle with him all the time. I loved the way the warmth seemed to build in my body when he had his arms around me, and how I felt so safe inside them. Working his way up from junior lawnmower to run his own landscaping and snowplow business, Rick had developed serious muscles, and although it made me blush a little, I did enjoy having an older husband with such a powerful body. The dark hair and eyes that came with his Greek heritage complemented my Germanic blonde hair and blue eyes magnificently—as my mother had never seemed to tire of saying.
