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“Are you upset right now?”
He stretched the muscles in his neck. “Technically.”
“Why?”
“How’d you and your boyfriend meet?”
“Julien recruited him onto his Black Ops unit.”
He smiled, and it stretched from one end of the country to the other. The tension on his face evaporated, and he reached over, lacing their fingers together.
“Now, how did Adrían and I meet?” she corrected. “He leased an office in the same building. This was back when Theo was a baby.”
Joel glanced in the rearview mirror. “How do you go from that to sleeping together?”
“Time and a bucket of loneliness mixed with grief. I was still raw, but I had the boys, so it wasn’t like I could drop everything and cry all day. I needed…warmth. Losing Curtis felt like someone ripping off a piece of my flesh, and I wanted the ache to dull, even for a little while.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that.” He kissed the back of her hand. “But when you first met him, did you feel like he was pushing you? Like he was on that path to get you in bed?”
“You mean like if he targeted me?”
“Something like that.”
“No. It kind of just happened. As a matter of fact, there were a few times before we slept together that we came close, and he would stop.”
“Hestopped?”
“Joel…”
“You said you liked me being possessive.” He pressed another kiss to the back of her hand. “Lucky for you, I can’t seem to turn it off.”
“He said he felt guilty,” she explained. “He knew I was hurting, and it made him feel like he was taking advantage of me.”
“And was he?”
“Not intentionally, but back then, I was a shell. Empty. In pain. Sometimes, I closed my eyes and imagined it was Curtis making love to me. Knowing I did that to him makes me feel like crap now, but…it hurt so bad, Joel. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I would lie in bed with Curtis’ clothes, sometimes wearing them and other times lying on them, and it was never enough. I felt like he was torn from me, and I needed to apply pressure to the wound, but I couldn’t find where the wound was.”
Joel kissed her palm and lowered it to his chest, his hand completely covering hers. “Ayesha, it was what you had to do to get through having something extremely difficult happen to you. Even if you two never…slept together, I don’t think it would have been different.”
“What do you mean?”
Glancing again in the rearview mirror, he pulled through the entrance gate of their sizable swath of land. “Because it’s you, Eesh. There’s something about you. Regardless of whether things had gotten physical, he would have still fallen in love with you.”
While she often joked that the universe hated her, to be blessed with someone like Joel Lattimore meant it appeared to love her just as much.
“I like that we do this,” she said. “And you’re not a bad communicator, no matter what you think.”
“I’m letting this indiscretion slide. Once I put a ring on your finger, if Adrían pops up again, I’m putting him six feet under.”
She thumbed her wedding ring, for the first time realizing that marrying Joel would mean taking it off. Usually, she only took it off to have it cleaned and when she was in the shower, but she wanted to marry Joel. More than anything, she wanted to marry Joel. The annulment talk was bull; he would have to wrench their marriage license from her curled, cold, dead fingers. Then, once they were married for a bit, she wanted to grow their family.
However, it occasionally felt like marrying Joel would, in some way, nullify her marriage to Curtis.
The phone rang through the car speakers. When they saw who was calling, they glanced at each other.
She accepted the call, her panic already at DEFCON Three. “Mo? Is everything okay? Did something happen—”
Crying sounded in the background at a level she hadn’t heard since Theo was a baby. Concern for Theo shoved everything aside—Adrían, the past. All she wanted was to hold her son so tight that she squeezed the agony from his body into hers.
