His Wife for One Night
Molly O'Keefe
Jack McKibbon knows the score when he offers to marry his best friend Mia Alatore.He's fixing a bad situation for her - that's all - they aren't making a real life together. She wants to stay on the ranch and he's got his studies and inventions elsewhere. Still, this arrangement is a good deal for both of them. Until that one night A sexy interlude with Mia makes Jack rethink their relationshipand their future.But all his plans grind to a halt when she asks for a divorce. Once upon a time, Jack might have agreed. But now that he knows the chemistry they share, he's not giving up a second chance to be with his wife.
“I think it’s time for a divorce.”
Jack blinked at Mia’s words, his mouth suddenly dry. The apprehension exploded in his stomach again, darker, uglier. “Us?”
Mia’s smile was slight, her eyes unreadable. “Yes, us.”
“Why?”
She sighed, her breath fanning his cheek. She smelled like toothpaste.
“Is there…someone else?” he asked. He hadn’t thought of it, not really. There wasn’t any time in his life for him to find anyone else and it never occurred to him that she would be looking.
“Someone else?” She laughed. “Someone besides my childhood friend who married me as a favor and who I’ve seen all of five times in the five years we’ve been married?”
He couldn’t read her anger. Did she want more? Then why the divorce?
“I want…I want a real marriage,” she said, lifting her chin. “Your mom is gone. She can’t hurt my family anymore. And I want a family. A husband who lives with me. Works with me. Builds a life with me. Loves me.”
He stiffened, unable to process what she was saying. She wanted a family? Kids?
“And that’s never going to happen with you, Jack, is it?”
Dear Reader,
When I was five my parents took us on our first backpacking trip to Montana and Wyoming. We returned several times and some of my first memories are of the Rocky Mountains and Glacier National Park. One of those memories is falling off a horse and hitting my head on a rock. Despite this early brush with equine disaster, I wanted to be a cowgirl. Out West. With braids.
The next year, my parents booked a week at a Dude Ranch. My brother and his friend ate it up. They got to help with the horses, hang out with the cowboys, do cowboy stuff. I got to sit in the lodge and color. I was not happy. My parents were able to get my cousin and I on a little trail ride with a cute cowboy holding the reins. I remember being put on that horse and feeling it twitch under me. I remember how far the ground was from my feet. I remember how big that horse was and how little I was.
I started to cry, got sick and that was the end of the trail rides.
My mother-in-law owns a horse farm and I have since made my peace with those giant animals and even enjoy riding them. But I am no cowgirl. Despite that, I’m totally fascinated. So dreaming up my heroine Mia Alatore was a pleasure. Tough and salty, a crunchy outer shell around a vulnerable, gooey center. What’s not to love? My hero Jack was a tougher nut to crack. He’s a scientist closed off from his emotions, only able to think of relationships in terms of experiments and hypothesis. Getting these two to their happily ever after took some hard work! But it all pays off in the end. Please drop me a line at www.molly-okeefe.com to tell me what you think. I love to hear from readers.
Molly O’Keefe
His Wife for One Night
Molly O’Keefe
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This book is as close as Molly O’Keefe is going to get to fulfilling her childhood dream of being a cowgirl, since there are very few cows or horses in downtown Toronto where she lives with her husband and two children.
To all the teachers
who engaged and encouraged me.
Especially, Mrs. Jordal,
for not holding that math homework against me.
Mrs. Nelson, who handed me The Thorn Birds
and started this whole adventure.
Ms. Mayes,
who taught me it’s not good until it’s properly
punctuated. Ms. Weidman, who gave the misfits
a place to go and showed me art is equal parts
emotion and intellectual choice.
And Pillen.
Pillen who taught me how to analyze and
improve, hide my nerves, buy a proper jacket,
get over the hard stuff and disappointments
and that the only thing better than hard work
is hard work with chocolate.
Thank you, all of you.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
THE MAPS were…wrong.
Jack McKibbon flipped through the latest topographical charts and compared them to last year’s. The permanent compound was being built too far away from the new drill site. His crew would have to take a damn bus between the two. He’d been staring at these maps for an hour and there was no other way to interpret the information.
Someone had screwed up, and considering they were heading back to fix the pump and redrill in El Fasher next month, these kinds of errors could cause serious problems.
He patted through the files, the aerial photos of the well site that needed repair and the embassy report on the recent cease-fire between the Sudanese government and the JEM rebel forces in the Darfur area until he felt the hard edge of his cell phone. The desks in hotels were never big enough.
He flipped open his phone and hit speed dial without even looking.
“Jack?” Oliver, his partner and friend, answered. “Is Mia—”
“Have you looked at the maps?”
“The maps? You brought the maps?” Oliver, a little more jolly than the average hydro-engineer, laughed.
“Of course. I had all the files couriered, they arrived a while ago. I thought you’d want to get a jump on things.”
“I can’t believe you brought your work to the hotel. One night is not going to make a difference, Jack. How about you take a break. We’re going to party. Mia’s coming—”
“I’d hardly call it a party,” he said, sorting through the mineral reports. He needed to recheck that silver count. That could change the water table information.
“There will be food and booze. By most standards, that actually is a party.”
“It’s a fundraiser meet and greet,” Jack scoffed. Jack was head of research at Cal Poly where Oliver chaired the hydro-engineering department. They’d been working on a lightweight drill and pump that could withstand the extreme desert conditions of Africa and Asia. And over the past four years, these fancy events had become standard operating procedure, before and after every summer, Christmas and spring break spent in the field. But after the success of their drill during last year’s sabbatical, Oliver and Jack had brought so much prestige to the school that the administration had decided that more torture, in the form of these cocktail soirees, was in order.
Particularly now, to raise some money for Jack and Oliver’s trip next month.
Which would explain why they were here, on the cliffs of Santa Barbara, miles from the university, in an effort to bring up the big bucks from Los Angeles. Africa was a popular charitable cause in Hollywood.
“Just try, Jack.”
“Christ, Oliver. The university is trotting us out like trained monkeys—”
“For Mia. Try to get your head out of the dirt for one night.”
Right. Mia.
“It’s been over a year—”
“I know how long it’s been,” Jack said. A year and two months, almost to the day.
The excitement of seeing her, when he remembered, was bright and hot, shooting out sparks.
But these maps…
“When is she supposed to arrive?” Oliver asked and Jack swore, checking his watch.
“Any minute,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
He hung up and ran a hand over the scruff covering his chin. He’d wanted to be dressed—at least showered—by the time Mia showed up. As if being clean-shaven would somehow make this reunion easier.
But the maps had arrived and he’d gotten distracted.
Jack closed his burning, tired eyes. Jet lag dogged him. Not to mention the malaria he had barely recovered from. He was thirty-five and he felt a hundred and five.
The truth was, he was tired of Africa. Tired of the sand. The heat. The militias. Of coming home sick, only to turn around a few months later to go back. He was tired of never being able to meet the need, of feeling like a failure every time he left. But he couldn’t tell Oliver. He couldn’t tell anyone.
This had been his dream, water for the thirsty. And to give up on it now felt shameful. Selfish.
And this whole situation with Mia was making his crappy mood worse.
Calling Mia like this…not quite the reunion he’d dreamed about.
I owe you, she’d written in response to his email asking her to come to this event with him.
Owe me, he thought, turning the words over in his mind like a spit of meat over a fire. Logically, that was true.
But there were thirty years of friendship between them. A thousand emails. Promises made and kept.
Mia could be prickly. And his being out of the country for the past year had no doubt made her very prickly despite the daily emails.
This reunion of theirs was going to be unpredictable. And not being able to prepare for Mia’s mood made him nervous. Was she going to be angry? Happy, like him, just to see each other?
He didn’t know and it was making him crazy.
Someone pounded on the door to his hotel suite. The windows rattled as if mortars were being dropped. There was a pause and then more pounding.
It was her. Not that he could tell by the pounding. It was his internal barometer, which measured pressure and changing dynamics better than any equipment he carried into the field.
Warning, that barometer whispered. Be very, very cautious.
He ran his hand across the front of his worn T-shirt and crossed the room, his shoes soundless on the broadloom.
He was surprised to feel his heart thudding in his chest. Nerves? he wondered. Excitement?
A month ago he’d stared down a truck full of hostile militiamen and now he stared at the mahogany door, anxious about what stood on the other side.
It wasn’t the same kind of anxiety. Mia wouldn’t have weapons. He hoped. But she’d be armed with something far trickier and more insidious. Something he couldn’t negotiate with and had never known how to handle.
His past.
He opened the door and as expected, it was her.
Mia Alatore.
And his heart slipped the reins of his brain and he was so damn glad to see her. To have her here. Selfishly, she just made him feel good. The world fell away, the maps disappeared, and his whole existence was Mia.
“Good God, Jack, I thought I was going to drive right into the ocean before I found this place. You didn’t tell me we’d be hanging over a cliff.”
A whole lot of attitude in a tiny package.
She barely came up to his shoulder. Her too-big plaid shirt hung loose on her body. A ball cap, beat-up and white with dried sweat, sat low on her head, keeping her eyes shaded.
She was the same. Exactly the same and part of him rejoiced. In a world gone crazy, Mia Alatore was the same.
Her voice—laced with the sweet accent of her Hispanic heritage—was like a shot of whiskey right to his gut. He’d been to a lot of places, seen sex acts and rituals that would make a monk give up his robes. But nothing in the world was as sexy as Mia’s voice.
“I’ll keep you out of the ocean, Mia,” he said with a smile. Her head jerked up and he got a good look at her wide amber eyes.
There she had changed. Over the past five years, he’d seen her three times, not counting right now, and each time he saw her, her eyes had faded a little more. The fire and glitter worn soft over the years.
He could see the years in those eyes, the darkness where there had only been light.
“Did you have trouble?” he asked, leaning in to carefully kiss her warm, smooth cheek. She smelled like sunshine and horses.
Oddly enough, two of his favorite smells. He could have stood there, sniffing her cheek all day.
“No,” she murmured, ducking away and clearing her throat. “But they wouldn’t valet my truck. Some punk kid in a uniform made me park in the employee lot.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t make you park it in the ocean.”
“Watch it, Jack,” she said with a smile and his chest swelled with fondness. “She’ll hear you and she doesn’t like water any more than I do.”
“It’s good to see you,” he said, awkwardly patting her shoulder. “Thank you for coming.”
“Well,” she muttered, “like I said, I figure I owe you.” She stepped inside their room. Suite, actually—he made sure she had her own room off the living room. He didn’t want there to be any more awkwardness than necessary.
“Nice place,” she said, looking around. “Better than the last dump. Being Indiana Jones must pay better than it did a year ago.”
Christmas, a year ago, he’d asked her to come to Los Angeles, to sign some legal paperwork before he took his sabbatical. He’d paid little attention to the motel where they’d stayed, not realizing how crappy it was until she pointed it out.
“The university is paying for this. It’s part of the…thing.”
“The thing?” Her smile was brief but breathtaking, a lightning strike over the Sahara Desert. “You live some kind of life, Jack McKibbon, if people throwing millions of dollars at you is considered just a thing.” Her eyes were warm. Fond. He wondered for a minute if she was…proud of him?
How novel.
“It’s not at me, per se, it’s the university. I mean, it’s our research. Our pump. But the money is going to the university. For more research.” He was babbling, awkwardly talking about his work, which did not bode well for the night ahead. Another reason he hated these events.
If people wanted to talk science, he could do that all day. But explaining the complex nature of water tables and the ever-changing political nature of Sudan in lay men’s terms was impossible for him.
Oliver was better at that stuff.
“Either way. It’s a good thing you do.” Her smile reached her eyes, crinkling the corners. “Water for the thirsty. Like you always dreamed.”
He felt her measuring him, testing him through the years and choices that separated them. Seeing perhaps if she still knew the practical stranger that stood here, found in him the boy she’d known better than anyone else.
He saw that girl he’d known. She was right there in that stubborn line to her chin. The nose that led her into more trouble than one half-size female should ever see.
“I missed you. It’s been a long time, Mia,” he breathed, the words squeezed through a tight throat.
She blinked, as if jerking herself out of a daze.
“Where do you want me to put my stuff?” she asked, and the moment was shattered. She dropped her duffel on the floor, plumes of dust erupting into the air at the impact.
“There works,” he muttered. Whatever was in that bag couldn’t be in good shape. “You know, maybe I should have made it clear, but this is a formal thing…”
Her eyes sliced through him. “You worried I’ll show up to your fancy shindig with dirt under my nails?”
“No, well, maybe. And I don’t care.” He reached out his hands, showing her the red dirt that stained the skin around his fingernails. “I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable. There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny—”
“Because you’re Indiana Jones and making Cal Poly a whole bunch of money?” She said it as a joke and guilt clobbered him.
You’re an ass, he told himself, bringing her here to be scrutinized and gossiped about.
“No,” he said and took a deep breath. No other woman in his life owed him enough to stand beside him and face down the firestorm of academia gone wild. “I should have told you this in my email,” he said.
“Uh-oh, this doesn’t sound good.” She crossed her arms over her flannelled chest and those curves she’d always worked so hard to hide were unmistakable.
“Mia, I’m sorry—”
“Out with it, Jack. You always were a wuss when it came to dealing the bad stuff.”
That was a low blow and his temper flared. It was easy for her to judge him. She’d stayed. He’d left. Big freaking deal.
“Fine, because the dean has accused me of having an affair with his wife.”
She didn’t look at him. Not for a long time. The air conditioner kicked on, loud in the silence. He counted her breaths, the rise and fall of her chest, wondering why it mattered.
“Have you?” she asked.
“No, Mia. Of course not. But Beth…the dean’s wife, has been…” How did he put this? “Indiscreet.”
“She wants to have an affair with you?”
“So it would seem.”
“And you can’t just say no?” she asked, her eyes snapping.
“It’s delicate,” he said.
“You want me to tell her?” she asked. “You made me drive two hundred miles over the mountains two months before calving season, when I’m so busy I can’t see straight, to tell some woman to keep her hands off you?”
In a way. In his head it made so much sense. But that was his problem—what worked in his head didn’t always translate to other people. To real life.
Mia picked up the duffel bag, leaving dust on the floor. This trip out to Santa Barbara was a big deal for her, he knew that. Things were busy at the Rocky M and as far as he knew, she was still doing most of the work.
And now she was here and angry with him, which wasn’t what he wanted at all.
Give him a hundred feet of sand and seventy-mile-an-hour winds, and he could make things work.
Add another person to the equation, someone he had to deal with face-to-face, and he’d find a way to blow it.
“No, Mia, it’s not quite that dramatic. With you here, she won’t try anything. And people won’t…speculate about an affair. They won’t be watching me like a hawk. It will be forgotten.”
Her eyes got wide and her lips got tight.
“Because they’ll be talking about me,” she said. “I’m a distraction?”
He nodded and shrugged. Attempted a smile. “You’re my wife.”
She nodded once, anger rolling off her like the smell of burned tires. “Sure,” she said. “Makes perfect sense. I need to shower.”
“Through there,” he said, pointing to the far door. “We need to go in a half hour.”
MIA SHUT THE DOOR behind her and collapsed against it. The wood cooled her flaming face.
Jack, she thought, gutted. Gutted at the sight of him, the sound of his voice. Hell, the smell of that man killed her. He’d opened that door and her heart beat its way right up into her throat.
I missed you. It’s been a long time.
Whose fault is that? she wanted to yell. An emotion she tried so hard to suppress and restrain bubbled up, sticky and insistent.
You left me, she thought. You married me and left.
But that had been the deal. She’d known it going in.
This pain was her own damn fault.
If only he weren’t so handsome. So familiar and beloved.
The whole drive over the mountains she’d wondered what kind of changes the past year would have carved out of him.
His intelligence still lit up his chocolate eyes like a brilliant pilot light. The crow’s-feet growing out of the corners were deeper, from a year spent under a harsh sun. The silver hair peppered through the close-cut blond was a surprise.
His shoulders were broader, the calluses thicker.
Jack was a man who worked. Got his hands dirty and his back bent out of shape. He dug holes and built things and that kind of work made him comfortable in his own skin. Confident in himself.
Which was so different from the angry and serious kid he’d been. A kid who hadn’t known his place in his own family.
But that had all changed. Jack McKibbon knew who he was now and it was so unbelievably sexy.
It was no wonder deans’ wives were throwing themselves at him.
The pain cut her off at the knees and she sagged farther down the door.
Maybe tomorrow she’d laugh about it. Or next week. But right now it hurt.
A year and two months since she’d seen him. Since she’d gone to that dive hotel in Los Angeles thinking, like a fool, Now…now it will change. He’s going far away, someplace dangerous, and the fear has made him realize how he feels about me. About us.
Instead, he’d had her witness his will, sign power of attorney papers. He’d taken her to dinner, thanked her when she gave him the book she got him for Christmas. He slept on his stomach, his face turned to the window in the other bed in their hotel room, while she stared at the ceiling on fire with love and pain.
That should have taught her the lesson she just couldn’t seem to learn.
Jack McKibbon didn’t love her.
But, once again, she drove over the mountains today, thinking this time was going to be different, too.
It’s what she always did. Five years into this nonmarriage and with every email, every phone call, the rare visit, she kept thinking things were going to change.
That he would miss her. That he would wake up in the desert and want her beside him.
You’re an idiot, she told herself for perhaps the hundredth time since climbing into her truck a few hours ago.
Her sister Lucy’s words rang in her ears. You’ve let a crush take over your life. When are you going to let go of the hope this relationship is going to be anything but an afterthought to him?
Mia’d told herself, over and over again, that if it was an afterthought, Jack would end it. And because he didn’t end it, hope lived on.
Part of her—a big, stupid part, stupid like dumb, stupid like a fool—believed that he’d invited her here because he wanted to share this moment with her. The realization of all those dreams. Dreams he’d told her about when they were kids in the back of his truck, the desert stretching out around them like the lunar landscape.
Water to the world had been his dream. A pump and drill that could build wells in the deserts of Asia and Africa. She’d been following his progress on the internet. Going into her office at night to cheer him on from her little corner of the thirsty world.
Too many nights doing that. Too many years holding the memory of him close, despite his absence.
Too many years of patiently caring for the ties that bound them together.
Marriage.
His father.
The Rocky M.
Jack had done her a favor five years ago when everyone’s lives fell apart. And she was doing him a favor now. It wasn’t as if his father could care for himself.
But Mia was kidding herself. She knew that.
Jack McKibbon was never going to see her as a woman. A real wife. Someone to love.
She pressed her head harder into the door, the pain almost distracting her from the sucking pit of embarrassment and disappointment in her stomach.
It was time for a divorce. She’d do this favor for him tonight. Play the loving wife, face down whatever gossip and scandal the night had in store and then it was time to let him go.
To let the past go.
She had to, because this situation was killing her.
She stood up, the shaking under control. Her emotions in check. No need to get dramatic, she thought. If there was one thing she knew, it was that life always went on. And she could stand here, crying over something that was never hers to begin with, or she could put on her big-girl pants and do what needed to be done.
She glanced at her watch. She had a really wrinkled dress, some makeup, jewelry that looked like torture devices and a whole bunch of instructions from her sister on how to look like a woman rather than a ranch hand.
Tonight she’d be Jack’s wife.
Tomorrow she’d work on that divorce.
CHAPTER TWO
JACK SHRUGGED into his suit jacket as he stared down at the aerial shots of the militia compounds surrounding the villages where he and Oliver were digging their wells in Darfur.
The compounds had been built up. More than before, despite the cease-fire. Going back next month wasn’t going to be easy.
As if it was ever easy.
Mustering up enthusiasm was impossible.
“Jack?”
“Hmm?” he said, distracted by the desk full of papers. Christ, if Oliver could just do this meet and greet by himself, at least one of them could get some work done tonight. “Jack!”
“Mia!” He spun. “Sorry, I got—” Jack had some expectations of how Mia would look, stepping out of her bedroom. And he’d be lying if he said those expectations were high. She was a rancher on a hardscrabble pocket of land two hundred miles from here—and she worked that land hard.
Ranching life didn’t leave much time for shopping. Or dress wearing.
So the version of Mia standing in the doorway to her bedroom was both expected and a sharp, shocking surprise.
“Distracted,” he finished lamely.
The dress, black and simple, was still wrinkled and didn’t fit. Too long at the knee and too tight at the bust. Probably her sister, Lucy’s. Mia looked uncomfortable just standing in the high-heeled shoes with the sexy bow on the side; he dreaded thinking of her walking in them.
That’s what his head noticed anyway.
His body was busy noticing other things and nearly roaring in approval. Her skin, God, her skin was like caramel. And the rustic gold bangles she wore at her wrists made her look like an Incan princess. Her hair was long and loose, the curls riding her back and he wanted to touch those curls, feel them clinging to his fingers, twining around his hand.
But her body…oh, man.
Growing up, he’d thrown a lot of punches against the mouths of boys who’d been too vocal in their admiration for her young body. And he’d gotten used to not looking at her below the chin, out of respect. Friendship. Because he knew how much her curves bothered her. Embarrassed her.
She didn’t seem embarrassed now.
The black dress skimmed her breasts, revealing the pillowy tops, the perfect round contours, the mysterious black valley that divided them. And he knew, as awkward as she might feel in that dress, not a single man would notice.
Because all they would see was her beauty.
“I’m going to have to punch out a lot of guys tonight,” he murmured, and she smiled.
“I doubt that.” She smoothed the front of the simple dress. “It’s wrinkled.”
“Putting it in a duffel bag will do that,” he said.
“Oh, and suddenly you’re Mr. Fashion?” She narrowed her eyes, the years melting away under their teasing. “That’s not even your suit, is it?”
“Of course it is,” he said, running his hands over the too-big jacket. “I’ve just lost some weight.”
Mia stepped forward and pulled the tie from where he’d stuffed it in his suit jacket. She flipped up the stiff edges of his collar and settled the tie around his neck. He lifted his chin, standing willingly under her ministrations. She’d tied his tie on his prom night with Missy Manning, on his graduations from high school and college. The day they got married.
It was the only time in his life, other than the day of their wedding, that Jack actually felt like a husband.
She was close. So close he could see the freckles across her nose, the small scars along her chin where she’d fallen into the barbed wire when they were kids.
Her lips…
He blinked and looked back up at the ceiling.
What a marriage, he thought. He must be the only husband who’d never had a wedding night.
Sometimes he got the impression that Mia wanted something physical between them. She’d watch him a little too long, her eyes dilating, her breath hitching—principal signs of animal attraction.
But he’d told himself since he was twenty years old and she’d been fifteen that nothing would ever happen between them unless she started it.
And she never had.
“Well,” she sighed, patting his tie. “It’s a little crooked, but no one will notice.”
“It’s great, Mia,” he said through the tension in his throat. “Thank you.”
“We’re a fine pair,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Let’s go cause a scandal.”
And just like that, this night, this torturous night that he’d been dreading with every fiber of his being, was fun. An adventure.
He offered her his elbow and she slipped her hand, small but so strong, up next to his ribs and then around his arm. He felt the pressure of her fingers, the weight of her palm, through his skin and down into the muscle.
“Let’s go,” he murmured and opened the door to the night.
They crossed the moonlit path from their cabana suite to the glittering main part of the hotel. A crowded patio surrounded by bougainvillea jutted up over the cliffs overlooking the ocean. She stopped, staring off at the water, the oil drills in the distance, the Channel Islands sitting like fat coins on the horizon.
“The islands are so pretty,” she said.
“They call them the North American Galápagos,” he said. “Because there are over one hundred and fifty endemic species. Plants alone there are—”
“You don’t say, Professor,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.
“Sorry.” He ran a hand over his forehead. “I’m—”
“Nervous?” she asked and he turned to face her. Luminous in the moonlight. If only they could stay out here all night.
“I hate these things,” he said.
“You do suck at them.”
His laugh cleared the adrenaline churning through his stomach. He sighed, and they stood in silence, staring at the islands. The blinking lights of the oil drills.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said, and suddenly Mia pulled her hand away from his elbow, creating distance where he didn’t really want any.
“We need to talk,” she began. He hung his head.
“Not Dad again, Mia—”
“I think it’s time for a divorce.”
Jack blinked, his mouth suddenly dry. The apprehension exploded in his stomach again, darker, uglier this time. “Us?”
Her smile was slight, her eyes unreadable. “Yes, us.”
“Why?”
She sighed, her breath fanning his cheek. She smelled like toothpaste.
“Is there…someone else?” he asked. He hadn’t thought of that, not really. There was no time for him to meet anyone else and it had never occurred to him that Mia might.
“Someone else?” She laughed. “Someone besides my childhood friend who married me as a favor and who I’ve seen all of five times in the five years we’ve been married?”
He couldn’t read her anger. Did she want more for them? Then why the divorce?
“I want…I want a real marriage,” she said, lifting her chin. “Your mom is gone. She can’t hurt my family anymore. And I want a family. A husband who lives with me. Works with me. Builds a life with me. Loves me.”
He stiffened, unable to process what she was saying. She wanted a family? Kids?
“And that’s never going to happen with you, is it?”
“No,” he answered. She turned away, staring off at the ocean, her jawline as set in stone as he’d ever seen it. The idea of going back to the ranch was laughable. It would be like volunteering to go to hell. His work was on the other side of the world, his life was far away from where he’d been raised and abused by his parents.
“Why?” he asked, because what she wanted didn’t make sense to him. “My parents had a ‘real’ marriage. I don’t know why you’d want that.”
“My parents had a real marriage, too, Jack. And they were very happy,” she said. “Not every relationship is like your folks’.”
He didn’t say anything, because frankly, while he understood her hypothesis, he hadn’t seen enough proof to support it.
“It was always going to end this way,” she said, and he kept his eyes on her profile, wondering where this was coming from. “We knew that. It’s not like we were ever going to have…something real.”
“You’re one of the most real things in my life, Mia.”
She closed her eyes, a strange anxiety rolling off her.
“We’ll always be friends,” she finally said. “Divorce, just like the marriage, won’t change that.”
“Okay.” He had to agree, because he supposed logically, she was right.
And there was no arguing with logic.
“We can get a divorce,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want,” she said, with a definitive nod. Her mood shifted and she was suddenly cheerful. Totally at odds with the loss he felt. “I’ll put together the paperwork,” she said.
He nodded, numb and off course. He wished he could go back to his work, those charts. Even with the errors, he could read them. They made sense.
“All right, then,” she said, pulling him into motion, leading him into the party. “I need a drink.”
MIA’S HEAD BUZZED. Her stomach churned. A glass of wine on a belly full of nerves and no food wasn’t her greatest idea. But she needed something to ease the worst of the pain.
Divorce.
A million times in the years she’d known him, she’d thought about telling Jack how she felt. Maybe if he knew, things would change. But right now, this moment, was why she never did. Because in her heart of hearts she’d always known Jack McKibbon could never return her feelings. Never.
His wounds were too deep, his brain was too big and his heart was just a bit too cold.
And she was always going to be little Mia Alatore.
She took another sip of her white wine and tried to ignore the whispers that buzzed around her like horseflies.
It wasn’t hard to guess who the dean’s wife was. Mia would put money on the tall redhead staring at her from the corner of the room with enough malice to cut steel.
But the rest of the women at the party were staring at Jack, who, even in his ill-fitting suit, was the handsomest man there. Tall and broad, rough around the edges, he was so different from the slick men surrounding him. Like a wild animal surrounded by domesticated cats.
She’d bet that most of the women in the room wouldn’t mind seeing Indiana Jones without the suit. Herself included.
Maybe she should try to get that wedding night before it was too late.
She snorted into her wineglass.
“Mia?” A vaguely familiar young woman with bright eyes and a slightly plastic smile stepped in front of her. “I’m Claire, Devon Cormick’s wife.”
“Hi.” Mia shook hands with the woman. That’s why she was familiar; they’d met three years ago at her first of these cocktail parties. When she’d actually felt like a wife. When hope had made her excited to be on Jack’s arm.
“Devon’s going to El Fasher with Oliver and Jack in March to fix the drill.”
“Next month?” Mia asked, before she could stop herself.
Claire blinked, the plastic fading from her expression. Replaced by a baffled concern that looked, to Mia’s jaded eye, like pity. “You…didn’t know?”
Mia took a deep breath. “No. I didn’t.”
She finished her wine and handed the glass off to a passing waiter and without a second thought, picked up another.
She was going to get drunk, and right now, with the pain lancing her body like a thousand arrows, it seemed like a great idea.
“Mia,” Claire said, “I’m not sure what the situation is between you and Jack and I certainly am not going to speculate—”
“Really?” Mia asked, not believing it for a minute. She could feel the speculation from every single person in the room like hot air suffocating her.
Claire stiffened, her eyes shooting out sparks. “No,” she said. “I’m not. But Devon and Jack are the only two on the team with wives and…”
Realization sunk in. Claire wanted someone to commiserate with. Someone to hold hands with and pray, to pore over the newspapers and pull apart embassy reports.
I have to do this? she asked herself, bitterness making her feel a million years old. She wanted to find her rusty, beat-up truck in the employee lot and head back to the land she loved and that loved her back. I have to live all of this again?
“I’m just so scared for him,” Claire breathed, and Mia couldn’t mistake the fear in the woman’s voice.
A fear she knew too well.
“Stay away from the internet,” Mia said, staring into her wineglass, sucked unwillingly into the past. The first trip Jack took to Africa, Mia had been glued to her computer and the unsubstantiated reports had given her ulcers. “Try to stay busy. Focused on something other than your husband.”
“That’s it?” Claire asked. “No internet and get a hobby?”
Mia nodded, remembering the crushing anxiety all too well and knowing that there was nothing Claire could do to really combat it.
“Unless you can convince him not to go?”
“That didn’t work with Jack, did it?” Claire asked softly.
Mia finished the wine in her glass, gulping it down without tasting it—wishing the rest of her body could go as numb as her taste buds. “I didn’t bother trying,” she said.
She and Claire made difficult small talk—it was all too obvious that Claire wanted to ask about Mia’s relationship with Jack. Hash it out, woman to woman.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, Claire made some excuse about needing a bathroom and left.
Thank God, Mia thought, stepping onto the balcony where it was quiet. A cool breeze blew off the ocean and her skin chilled. Her nose went cold and her eyes stung.
Jack was leaving. Again. It had become so common; he didn’t even bother to tell her anymore.
“There’s my girl,” a happy British voice said from behind her and Mia turned to see Jack’s partner, Oliver.
Mia wasn’t what anyone would call a hugger. But the sight of Oliver, his bright, bald head, his dashing dinner jacket with gold buttons, drove her right over the edge and she pushed herself against his barrel chest.
“Whoa there, Mia,” he said, stroking her arms. “Are you okay?”
“You’re going back,” she said against his chest. “Next month.”
“He didn’t tell you?” Oliver whispered, and at her silence he swore.
“The government and JEM signed a cease-fire.”
“That doesn’t comfort me, Oliver.”
“We’ll be fine, Mia. You know that. We have lots of security—”
“And you don’t take risks,” she said, finishing the line she’d heard seven times over the past four years. Jack and Oliver had the same script.
She stepped away, already regretting the show of emotion. Wishing she could take it all back.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” She flashed him a bright smile. “Great. Just surprised. How are you?” She squeezed his big shoulder, a far more Mia-like greeting.
“Bored to tears,” Oliver said. “And wishing I had a wife to liven things up at these parties.”
“Well, don’t do anything drastic,” she said, proud that her voice was light. None of her grief or bitterness leaked out.
But Oliver’s piercing eyes saw through her. “You and Jack make quite a pair,” he said, sipping at a glass of tonic water. “He’s about to bite off every single hand that’s here to feed us and you look like you’re going to cry or start a fight.”
“Jack doesn’t like these things,” she said with a shrug. “And I’m not so hot on them, either.”
He watched her carefully and she watched him right back. If she was here to be the loving wife, she’d better get her act together.
“You know that first summer when Jack and I worked together and I heard he was married, I thought it was a joke. We’d worked side by side twelve hours a day for a week and he never said a word about you.”
“Are you trying to start a fight?” she asked.
“No.” Oliver leaned against the banister, looking like a man settling in for a long chat. A chat she had no interest in. “But when I asked him about you, he wouldn’t shut up. I heard about when you were a baby and your family first moved to his ranch. I heard about how you followed him around as soon as you could walk, snuck into the bed of his truck when he drove away to college.”
“What is your point?”
“He said you were his best friend.”
Her throat tightened up and she angled her face toward the wind, the breeze cooling her burning eyes.
And that’s all I’ll ever be.
“What’s going on, Mia?” Oliver asked. “I’ve never asked. I figured whatever relationship you two had worked for you—but something is wrong. It’s all over your faces.”
It was hard, but she didn’t look away or flinch.
The tension inflated inside her like a balloon, and she couldn’t get a deep breath. But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
“You don’t let anyone in, do you?” he finally asked.
Just Jack, she thought, and that didn’t end so well.
“Don’t be dramatic, Oliver,” she said.
“I’m not, I’m simply putting my underused and underappreciated sensitive people skills to work.”
She laughed, the tension escaping. The relief was so great she couldn’t stop laughing.
“That’s more like it,” he said, grabbing two more glasses of wine from a passing waiter. “Now, let’s have a party.”
By the time Jack found them, Mia was doubled over with laughter listening to Oliver’s story about Jack eating bugs as the guest of honor in a family’s hut.
“He was picking legs out of his teeth for two hours!” Oliver said, and Mia screamed, imagining it.
“Oliver is exaggerating.” Jack’s familiar low voice sent goose bumps down her arms and over her chest. Her laughter died in her throat, the tension back in force.
Her stomach was never going to be the same.
“Don’t listen to him, Mia. You have my word,” Oliver said, putting his hand over his heart, “every syllable is the truth.”
Jack sighed and leaned against the balcony next to Mia. Static leaped between them, small currents zipping along her skin letting her know just how close he was.
And how far away.
“This night is miserable,” he said, tilting his head back.
“Because you don’t hang out with the right people,” Oliver said, winking at Mia. “Did you make anyone mad in there?” Oliver asked Jack.
“Probably,” she said.
Jack looked at her. “How much have you had to drink?” he asked.
“Are you going to scold me?” she asked.
“No.” He raised his hand and one of the ever-present waiters appeared. “I’m going to join you.”
“I’d better do some damage control,” Oliver said. “You two have fun.”
The silence left in Oliver’s wake was thick and heavy, and she wanted to collapse under the weight. The sheer volume of all the things they weren’t saying.
“You remember fun?” he asked and she knew he was looking at her. Her skin felt raw under his gaze.
She nodded.
“I think the last time I had fun was your high school graduation.”
“Come on, isn’t Africa fun?”
“Fun?” He laughed, but it wasn’t joyful. “No, Africa is hard work and a bureaucratic nightmare.”
She wasn’t all that shocked to hear it. His emails had been increasingly rant-related.
“But your high school graduation?” His eyes twinkled. “Remember?”
She would never forget. “You drove all night from Cal Poly only to get me out of bed and drag me to the roof of the high school.”
And at dawn he drove her home and left—back to college—without once talking to his family. Without even stepping foot in the house.
“Oh, like I had to drag you,” Jack said with a laugh, and her body shook at the sound. “You jumped into my truck. And, if I remember correctly, you led the way up to the roof.”
“Only because you showed me.”
“That was probably a mistake. I spent a lot of sleep less nights in college sure you’d fallen or hurt yourself.”
“I never went up on those roofs without you,” she said.
“Really?” he asked, looking down at her in surprise.
Jack had this thing, growing up, whenever he got a chance to get into town, he would sneak around Wassau, finding his way up onto the roofs of every public building. The high school, the grocery store, the two churches.
He could walk from Second Street down Main Street without ever touching the sidewalk.
When she started following him around like a lost dog and he realized he couldn’t shake her, he took her to the roofs with him.
A whole other world existed up there. He had little forts with sleeping bags and food. Flashlights and books. Sometimes, he’d told her, he slept on those roofs.
His home away from home.
He had a thing for adventure, even then.
She just had a thing for him.
But once he was gone, the roofs were just roofs.
“I can’t believe you never got caught,” she said.
“Mom found out,” he said, his smile fading.
“Really?” she breathed. “I never knew that.”
He nodded. “The second night I did it,” he said. “I was fifteen and Dad took me into town while he had a beer at Al’s and I fell off the grocery store, came home with my clothes all torn.”
“What did your mother do?”
Because tearing clothes and climbing buildings weren’t something Victoria would let pass, and Victoria had been fond of punishment. Jack shot Mia a dubious look, which hid more pain than she could imagine. “What she always did.”
She didn’t say anything, didn’t offer any sympathy, because he hated that. Always had.
And she respected his wishes. If he didn’t want to talk about Victoria’s temper, about the abuse, that was his business.
Besides, the night was a big enough bummer as it was. Scandals. Affairs. Divorce. Painfully high heels. They didn’t need to stroll down memory lane with Victoria McKibbon.
“You hungry?” he asked, standing upright as if jerking himself away from his thoughts.
“Starving.”
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
TEN MINUTES LATER, Jack made his way toward her with a bottle of red wine under his arm, two glasses sticking out of his coat pocket and a heaping plate of food in his hands.
The twinkle in his eye—that twinkle that she’d recognize if he was eighty years old and disfigured in some terrible accident, that twinkle that led her heart places it had no business going—was like a siren song, leading her astray.
Get ready, that twinkle said, because I’m coming for you. And I’ve got a plan.
In the past that plan usually involved a ladder and a rooftop scheme.
Her heart lurched at the sight of him. At the memory of who he’d been to her.
“You want to go on the roof?”
“Do we need a ladder?”
“Nope.”
She blinked, looking around the glittering party that was all for him, and saw just how far he’d come from the roofs of Wassau. And how much she didn’t belong here.
“Jack,” she whispered, “I’m sure you have plenty of people here you need to schmooze.”
He sighed, but the twinkle didn’t diminish. “You’re probably right.”
“See—”
“But I don’t care,” he said. “I want you to come up to the roof with me.”
She’d had just enough to drink to know that going up there wasn’t a good idea. She was sad and nostalgic and turned on by the sight of his hand around the bottle of wine.
But she was Mia and he was Jack, and the years and memories between them were a hard knot of grit and rock that neither of them could forget or gloss over.
There was a lot they needed to talk about. His dad, Walter. The ranch and the rough winter they’d had. The financial problems that only seemed to get worse every time she turned around.
“Come on, Mia,” Jack said, that twinkle turning into something far more persuasive. “Let’s go.”
And that was it. Five years after marrying him, she was throwing her hat in with the devil.
The problems could wait.
Tonight wife, she reminded herself. Tomorrow divorce.
CHAPTER THREE
JACK SWIPED a key card and opened the door to a secluded rooftop patio.
“That kind of seems like cheating,” she grumbled.
“You expected something else?”
“A little breaking and entering, yeah,” she said, following him to a cold fire pit surrounded by single and double chaise longues.
“I’ve changed my ways,” Jack said, and she snorted.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I’ve known you my whole life, Jack. And you don’t change.”
“Well, neither do you,” he said. “Pick a seat, any seat.”
Mia didn’t play coy. She took one of the doubles, setting down the plate of food he’d given her to hold and he sat down next to her.
His was a living heat, an electric presence, and her body woke up with a tingle and a start.
The Swiss Army knife he pulled out of his pocket looked as if it could launch rockets. He popped open the wine.
“You sure you should leave the party?” she asked. “I mean, it’s kind of your shindig.”
“I did my part. Oliver can handle it from here.” He handed her a glass of wine, her fingertips brushing his and as stupid as it seemed—as high school and clichéd—a zing ran through her blood, warming her from her toes to her hair and everywhere in between.
“Besides,” he added, “this might be my last night with my wife.”
He said it as a joke, but she didn’t laugh.
“You’re going back next month,” she said, glad it didn’t sound like an accusation.
He nodded. “One of the drills broke and we need to see what happened. Might be a problem with the mechanism, in which case all the pumps might malfunction at some point. Or it could be tampering by the militia.”
Something in Jack’s voice sounded beaten and she’d never heard that when he talked about his work.
“Aren’t you excited about going back?” she asked.
“Excited?” He smiled down at the food. “That’s not the right word. Resigned, maybe.”
“Because of the militia?”
“Because nothing ever changes there,” he said. “We do work and go back a few months later to do the same work all over again. I’m just…tired. I think.”
“You need a break,” she said. “You could come home—”
“Home, as in the Rocky M?”
She nodded, and he laughed. “That’s your home, Mia. Not mine. Never mine.”
He turned to her, put his hand on her wrist and her body burned at the contact. “Even with a divorce,” he said, “if something happens to me, you’ll still have power of attorney. And when Dad dies, the ranch will go to you.”
She gasped, turning to face him head-on. “Jack, come on, that’s your land. Your family’s land.”
“You think I care?” he asked. “It’s always meant more to you than me.”
“But with your parents gone—”
He shook his head. “The memories are bad, Mia. Except for you, nothing good happened there. It’s yours. It’s why we got married.”
She snorted before she could help it. The wine, the emotion, the anger she wanted to pretend she didn’t feel—they all coalesced into something sharp and painful.
“It was about your mom,” she said, knowing that was the truth, even though she’d spent years trying to pretend it wasn’t. “About getting back at her. Beating her at something.”
“She had no right to try to kick your family off the ranch after your dad died,” he said through his teeth.
“She lost it,” Mia agreed, remembering those months when her life was being shredded at the seams.
“And Dad certainly wasn’t about to stop her.” He shrugged. “What else could we do? Getting married was the right thing.”
The truth was she didn’t really need to marry him. Her sister, Lucy, and mother, Sandra, had already made plans to leave the ranch. To move to Los Angeles where Lucy would have more success with her jewelry and Sandra could mourn the death of her husband away from the home they’d created on the Rocky M.
And Annie Stone, at the spread nearby, had heard about Mia’s troubles and offered her the foreman job on the spot. Mia would have been fine. Perhaps not happy, an employee on someone else’s property instead of the land she’d grown up on, but she would have survived.
But Jack had proposed marriage and her heart had answered.
“Eat something,” he said, digging into crab cakes with gusto. She grabbed a skewer of beef with satay sauce and leaned back against the cushions.
“I could get used to this,” she said.
“Yeah, well, it beats your cooking.”
“Slander, Jack. I’ll have you know I’ve improved.”
“Really?” he asked.
He glanced over his shoulder at her, and his eyes glittered, traveling quickly down her body as if he hoped she wouldn’t notice the trespass.
She noticed, all right. And she liked it.
“I think—” he cleared his throat and went back to staring at his food “—the last time you cooked for me, you burned the pot you tried to boil water in.”
“I was twelve, and the last time you cooked for me—”
“Was the night we were on top of the Methodist Church during that rainstorm. I gave you all my beef jerky,” he said. “And went hungry. So, don’t go complaining.”
They drank and ate under a canopy of stars.
The roar of the ocean and the faint hum of the party a few floors below wrapped them in a cocoon, insulating them from the world.
Her body was flush, warm. Alive for the first time in ages. Five years of marriage, thirty years of friendship and her body still tuned to him like a radio. There were so many things they needed to talk about—his father being top of the list—but she didn’t want to fight. There would be plenty of time for that tomorrow.
The stars, the wine, the heat in her body all said tonight was for something else entirely.
Jack grinned at her over his shoulder, some kind of relish stuck to his mouth. She used her thumb to wipe his face. So very, very aware of the rough growth of his beard, the soft damp heat of his lower lip.
They were lips that had touched hers once, when the judge told Jack to kiss her. A kiss that was desperate, grateful and scared.
She wanted him to kiss her again, as a woman.
The air between them was humid, and his eyes clung to hers. All those things she thought she should say about safety and being careful were chased away by the look in his eyes.
Every coherent thought scattered like startled birds.
“Why didn’t you divorce me before?” he asked.
“Why didn’t you divorce me?” she asked right back.
“When we got…married,” he finally said, the word seemed sticky on his tongue and she went so still, listening to him, she couldn’t even breathe, “we never talked about divorce. I didn’t know what you wanted and I didn’t…I didn’t want to make your life harder or cause you trouble. I always thought that if you filed, I’d sign. No question. But you…never filed. And then life went on.”
It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Life went on.
“That’s how I felt, too,” she whispered. “I wasn’t going to thank you for everything by divorcing you if that wasn’t what you wanted.”
It wasn’t the total truth, but he didn’t need the total truth. He needed to believe he’d been a hero and she needed to keep her love a secret.
“I wanted you to be safe,” he said. “You and your mom. Lucy.”
“And we were, Jack. You helped make us safe.” She smiled, gratitude a full balloon in her chest. “Thank you.”
He watched her for a long time, and she wondered what thoughts were twirling around that big old brain of his.
“You’re so beautiful,” he whispered, and her head jerked sideways.
“Jack—” she whispered, embarrassed.
“All night I looked over at you, expecting to see Mia, the kid who used to ride horses and herd goats. Who threw punches better than the guys on the football team and never backed down from a fight.”
“Everyone grows up,” she said, her mouth dry, her palms sweaty.
“Not like you, they don’t. I told myself I’d never…” He stopped and she held her breath.
“Never what?” she asked.
His smile was so male and sexy. “Never ask for more than you were willing to give,” he murmured.
He had no idea how much she was willing to give.
Kiss me, she thought, waiting for him to come closer, to press those perfect lips to hers. But he didn’t. He watched her until she thought she might die from the tension. From the painful desire spilling through her body.
It hurt to want him like this and have nowhere to take it.
And she realized, she could continue to wait for Jack McKibbon. Or she could start doing things her way.
She leaned forward and kissed him.
He started and she expected him to push her away, to tell her that he didn’t feel that way about her. But he didn’t.
His fingertips touched her wrist, curled around her hand, keeping her close.
Oh, she thought. Oh, he wants me, too.
It was careful. Soft. Two old friends testing the waters.
His lips were firm, chapped slightly and tasted of yogurt and mint. He smelled like everything good and warm in the world. Sun-baked pine needles and clothes fresh from the laundry.
She held her breath, keeping the moment close, memorizing every detail of this kiss. The electric distance between them. The way his nose bumped her cheek, how his lips parted and his tongue tasted the corner of her mouth.
A sigh slipped from her and she let him in.
He pushed the plate of food onto the ground and she tossed the skewer of meat over her shoulder so she could get her arms around him.
Jack McKibbon in her arms.
Solid and heavy. Real.
She held him hard, her fingers finding the curves of these new muscles of his. The jacket got in the way and she pushed her hands under it, feeling the heat of his skin through his white shirt. He was so hot. So alive.
This was better than every fantasy she ever had about him. Even the ones she tried to forget.
His tongue stroked her mouth, her teeth and lips. He shifted, rearranged himself, so he could hold her tighter, kiss her deeper.
“Mia,” he breathed, his fingers toying with the hem of her dress and the painfully sensitive skin of her leg just under it.
She felt every brush of his hand on that inch of skin as if he were stroking her naked body. Just how long it had been since someone touched her came hammering home and her body practically levitated with lust.
It had been a long, long time.
Mia was thirty years old. A wife who’d never been a wife, with only one terrible night of lovemaking she wished she could forget.
All of that was about to change. Right now.
She kissed him hard, pushing him back against the cushions. Yanking at the buttons of his shirt until some thing gave and she could finally—oh, yes, yes!—get her hands on the smooth skin of his chest. The muscles of his stomach. He groaned, deep and low in his throat as if the animal in him were coming alive, and that’s what she wanted. His hands, not gentle now, slid up under her dress, cupped her ass and squeezed.
She moaned, wanting more. Wanting rough. Wanting everything.
But he leaned back, breaking the kiss, leaving her panting above him.
“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way reluctant to do this,” he said, arching slightly against her so she knew how not reluctant he was. “But…” His eyes searched hers in the moonlight, liquid and knowing. “Are you sure?”
She nearly laughed. She was wet and hot and dying.
So, sure just about covered it.
“We never had a wedding night,” she whispered, watching his mouth and wanting it on her breasts, between her legs.
“No,” he said, with a slow grin that made her body clench and shiver. “We never did.”
His eyes froze her. Locked her in place, aching against him.
He slid his hands out from under her dress to find the small zipper under her arm and pulled it down. The rasp was loud in the electric silence between them. The dress bagged, and he put a finger under a sleeve, lowering it oh so slowly until the dress caught on her breasts.
He blinked, the heat banked for a second. “Mia,” he whispered as if asking permission and her breath clogged in her throat.
She hated her breasts. Heavy and full. Painful at the end of the day and they always, always attracted too much attention.
But right now, Jack’s hand trembling against her shoulder, she saw the upside.
She pushed herself away from him and when he moved to sit up, as if the night were over, she pushed him back down.
“Get comfortable,” she said and that smile slid back on his lips. Confident and sexy, he lay on his back, tucking his hands behind his head. Waiting for her to make the next move.
Lifting her skirt up nearly to her waist, she straddled his hips, notched herself against the ridge under his fly and they both groaned, twitching hard against the other.
He lifted his hands to her waist, dragging her slowly up and down his erection. Oh, it was so good. So perfect and delicious. The tension in her belly got hotter, harder.
Not yet, she thought. She wanted this to last all night. All night for the rest of her life. She pushed away his hands and shook back her hair, feeling powerful and womanly. Alive in all the very best ways.
And Jack, sweet Jack, just like when they were kids, kept his eyes glued to her face as if looking at her body would be disrespectful. She lifted her hands to her dress and eased the straps off her shoulders.
Jack swallowed, the smile gone now, his lips parting, his eyes wide in wonder.
She reached back and undid her bra, very aware of the revealing moonlight. Of the fact that this was Jack between her legs. Her husband. The man who’d married her and then walked away as if she and everything she loved were nothing. He’d spent the last five years being pursued by deans’ wives and probably gorgeous African women and foreign professors with giant brains and reasonable chests.
Self-consciousness crept in where she didn’t want it.
“You’re beautiful,” Jack said, snapping her attention away from her own head games. His eyes were serious. His face—the face of her best friend—earnest. “Whatever you’re thinking right now, I need to tell you that I have never seen anything in the world as beautiful as you.”
True or not, line or not, it was exactly what she needed to hear.
She dropped her dress and the bra and felt the warm breeze, the starlight, Jack’s gaze across her pale skin. Her nipples hardened in a painful cold rush.
“Oh, Mia,” he groaned, sitting up, folding her in his arms, his hands cupping her breasts, his eyes aglow. He kissed the trembling skin under her collarbone and worked, in some sort of bizarre migratory pattern, south.
Her skin blazed, every part of her thrumming with pleasure so bright and hot it almost hurt. His mouth was wet against her and all she could think was, This is Jack. Jack’s mouth on my breast. His hand in my hair. His breath against my skin.
His arms cupped her hips, his fingertips curving around her to find the damp crease that wept at his touch. She arched and he tipped them over, picking her up and shifting her into the center of the chaise. She felt a moan ripple out of her, turned on by all that blatant strength.
He leaned over her, huge and manly. His hands cupped her breasts, pushing them together, and he pressed hot, openmouthed kisses against them.
“I used to dream about you like this,” he said and chuckled against her nipple. “A lot, actually.”
She arched her back so her nipples brushed his lips. He licked and nipped at them with the sharp edge of his teeth. She groaned, rolling into him, seeking every pleasure center she could find, every point of friction between her body and his.
“Couldn’t have been any more than I thought of you like this,” she whispered.
“You’re kidding,” he said, stopping.
She shook her head. There was nothing more she could say.
I’ve loved you my whole life, she thought.
“Jack.” She sighed. “Please—”
His eyes burned in the darkness, and for a moment she thought he realized her inexperience. But then he blinked and his hands gathered her close.
And suddenly everything changed. The banked fires blazed out of control, the hum in her blood turned into a roar. The gentle press of Jack’s lips turned firm, hard. His lips didn’t kiss, they sucked, and his teeth bit. Mia groaned, pushing and pulling him closer to her.
He yanked at her dress, pulling it off her legs. His fingers found the edge of one of the ridiculous thongs her sister bought for her every birthday and he traced its edge as far as it would go and then back again.
“So naughty,” he breathed in her ear. “I had no idea.”
Shocks and sparks exploded between her legs, behind her eyes.
He shrugged off his jacket and she helped get rid of his shirt, tossing it away—a white flag against a black night. His belt clanked in the quiet and his pants rustled to the ground and she didn’t even get a chance to look at him before he was back on the chaise with her. All that hot warm skin against hers. The hair on his legs was thrilling, and she ran her feet up the sides of his shins, opening her thighs so he could slip between them.
Bitterness and regret, along with a desperation she didn’t know she felt, slipped into her head.
One night, she thought, growing out of control and emotional. One night.
Suddenly she was frantic to somehow start and end it all, eager to have this moment over and done with. So she could turn it over and over in her mind back on the ranch.
Memories of Jack were always easier to deal with than reality.
That tension low in her belly, aching between her legs, began to demand release and his fingers slid over her and then, slowly, so, so slowly into her.
She sobbed with pleasure. With pain. With nostalgia and love and years of disappointment.
“Mia?”
“More,” she said.
More so she couldn’t think. Just feel. More so she couldn’t hate him and love him all over again.
He was saying something, but she didn’t want to talk. Talking put space between them, allowed thoughts to grow, gave her too much room to think and agonize. To look into his eyes and see the boy who’d married her and walked away.
She reached between them, cupped her hands around the hard length of him. He throbbed in her palm and he hissed hard through his teeth. She lifted her lips, scooted her legs wide.
“I don’t have—”
“Shut up, Jack,” she whispered.
“No. Mia, I don’t have a condom.”
She blinked and blinked again. He didn’t know.
“I’ve been on the pill since I was sixteen,” she said. Once boys started looking at her funny, and those breasts she hated made their appearance known, Mom had taken no chances, and dragged Mia to the doctor.
“Really?” he asked.
She didn’t bother answering, she just guided him home.
They both cried out, shaking against each other. She hadn’t realized how big he was, how he would fill her to the point of pain. She took a deep breath, controlling the sting and burn of his flesh splitting hers.
“Mia?” Again that question, the half knowledge that she wasn’t a virgin, but not by much, was back in his eyes.
She wrapped her legs around his hips, pulling him so close there was no air between them. He pressed his head to her shoulder, his breath shuddering over her breasts.
“You’re killing me. Honestly, honey, we should talk or—”
She squeezed him, using every internal muscle she knew how to control, and he groaned, wrapping his arms around her. His hips, beginning to push against her, slide back and push again. He rearranged her a little, lifting her slightly so when he pulled away she saw stars and that tension in her belly filled her chest. Her head.
“Oh!” She sighed, her breath broken, her body taking flight.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” he groaned. “But I can’t stop. I can’t—”
“Don’t!” she cried, scared he would when she needed him so badly to keep going. “Don’t stop. Don’t…I—”
He lifted his head, his face blocking out the world, and she had no choice but to stare deep into his eyes, right at the boy she loved.
“I’ve got you,” he breathed, and she exploded into the night.
“WHAT THE HELL,” Jack muttered, evaluating himself in the mirror over the sink in the small bathroom off the patio. He looked punch-drunk. His hair all over the place, his lips swollen, his eyes glowing and…happy?
“You,” he told his reflection, “are a lucky son of a bitch.”
Mia. Good God, sweet Mia.
He never expected his five years of abstinence to end in quite this way—not that he was complaining.
No. No complaints here. He smiled again, rolling his shoulders and feeling the delicious weight of his own body. He felt like he owned his skin again. Over the past five years he hadn’t given much thought to his celibate life. There was always plenty of work to do and as unconventional as their relationship was, marriage, he figured, was marriage.
If he wasn’t having sex with his wife, he wasn’t having sex.
But he couldn’t totally get his head around what had just happened.
Didn’t know if he ever could.
The why of it bothered him. Why tonight? Why after talking about divorce? And something about the desperate way she’d pushed him inside her body rankled, too. She’d been so tight.
His hands stilled on the buttons of his shirt. Something sad turned over in his stomach. Divorce? Now?
Nothing made sense. Which was the theme of the night, he guessed. Before tonight, his relationship with Mia had been the one constant in his life he didn’t question. She’d needed him, he’d married her and that was that. And now in one night, she’d told him she wanted a divorce and they’d made love.
He had a thousand questions. And as much as he wanted to throw her over his shoulder and carry her back to their suite to do it all again with a couple of variations, he needed some answers first.
She won’t like that, he told himself.
And he knew that if it came down to those variations or getting the answers he needed, he’d forget about the questions.
It had, after all, been five years.
He skipped the two buttons Mia had ripped off in her enthusiasm and did his best to slick back the worst of his haywire hair.
There was no helping it, though; he looked like a man who had been well and truly laid.
By his wife.
He laughed and pushed open the door, stepping back out into the night. And perhaps it was his imagination but it seemed the air still smelled like sex and spice and Mia.
“Mia?” he called, but the quiet was deep around him.
He went over to the women’s room and knocked on the door.
No answer. A trickle of unease slid through his caveman bliss.
No, he thought, she wouldn’t.
But she would. Mia Alatore did whatever she wanted.
He pushed open the door to the women’s room, checked every stall, but it was empty. As was the patio.
He ran back downstairs to the party, not believing she’d actually go there, but the alternative was even more unbelievable.
“Oh-ho, Jack,” Oliver said, pulling Jack right back out of the party into the empty foyer. “You don’t want to go in there, right now.”
“Why? Is Mia—”
“Not there, but, Jack, you look a bit—” Oliver tilted his big bald head “—undone. And while I might appreciate a good husband-and-wife reunion, there are those here who would not.”
Jack stepped away, panic hammering him hard.
“If you see Mia—”
“I’ll send her along.”
Jack held hope in his chest like a lantern in the dark. She must have gone to the suite. Of course. Perfect sense.
He ran across the path. His heart pounding; be there, be there, be there.
But the suite was empty. Her duffel bag gone.
Mia had left.
CHAPTER FOUR
Six weeks later
MIA REACHED THROUGH the open driver’s-side window of her truck and grabbed the gasket for the well she was in the high pasture to replace.
Twilight was coming down on the far mountains, splashing pink and gold across the endless sky. It was getting warmer up here in the foothills of the Sierras; a thaw was in the air.
Green grass clawed its way up out of ice and snow. Leaves battled it out on the trees. Spring was fighting the good fight against the last of winter.
After calving started, they’d move the cows up here, where they’d summer with the cooler temperatures, the greener grass. But in order to do that, they needed the well working.
And right now it was definitely not working.
Anxiety and anger tugged at her stomach. So much to do at the Rocky M and for the first time since she’d been foreman, she hadn’t been able to hire extra seasonal guys. There just wasn’t enough money. So it was her and her skeleton winter crew. She was tough and they were good, but everything was stretched thin.
She’d come back from Santa Barbara six weeks ago to a phone call from the bookkeeper. Walter hadn’t filed taxes last year, their accounts were frozen and the current taxes were due. Things had been tight before, but now it was downright dire.
The Rocky M wasn’t going to make anyone rich, Mia knew that. But she hadn’t expected to sink into bankruptcy. And it felt as though, unless she was able to put the brakes on this downward slide, bankruptcy was where everyone was headed.
She knew it was just a matter of getting the new calves to market, but Walter didn’t seem to fully grasp all he’d done or hadn’t done. Lost in the haze of his sickness, drinking too much and saying nothing at all— Walter was half the man he used to be.
And none of the rancher.
The wind howled over the high land, the ends of her ponytail whipped into her eyes, stinging her face. She wrestled the hair into the collar of her coat, and climbed over to the round corrugated metal fence that protected the well and pump mechanism from snow and wind.
She pumped the handle, and while the gears screeched as they had screeched for years, no water came out.
She really hoped it was a gasket issue—because that was the extent of her well knowledge. She pulled the wrench from the pocket of her canvas barn coat and crouched, her feet sinking in the mud, and wiped the grit and mud from the pump with her numb fingers.
Her neighbor, Jeremiah Stone, who shared this well, knew even less than she did about pumps. Walter usually fixed these problems but…she shook her head, resentment flooding her. Walter was his own problem now.
Her head pounded and her stomach growled. Two more hours of work before she could head back to the ranch. At least.
Sure would be handy to have Jack around.
Before she could stop herself she glanced up at the ghostly sliver of moon in the eastern sky and wondered where he was.
If he was safe.
Mia shoved her mind away from the thought—from all thoughts of Jack. Those wedding-night memories she thought she’d mull over through the cold, lonely nights, were sharp—too painful to hold. The tenderness and heat, the touch of his hands, the shocking intimacy of his body inside hers—it hurt to think about it.
It hurt and it made her angry.
Angry at him. Herself. The situation. Everything.
And the anger simmered, boiled right under the surface of her skin. In her head. Her stomach. She lived with it. Ate with it. Stared at the ceiling in bed every night and burned with it.
There had been a barrage of emails from him in the weeks after she left. She opened one and deleted the rest—because that first one, full of concern and worry—had been too much.
Now he was concerned. Now he was worried. She’d been his wife for five years and the night they had sex, he finally got involved.
Not that she expected anything different. That night wasn’t something Jack would take lightly. Jack was about as honorable as they come. Sure, he was absentminded and thoughtless at times, but the guy hadn’t taken their vows lightly. That he’d been celibate for five years, while shocking in theory, didn’t really surprise her.
That he’d finally slept with her was surprising.
Of course, she’d all but ripped off her clothes.
And as his email subject lines got more and more worried and finally started to get angry, it was easier to delete them without reading them. But then the emails slowed and finally, nine days ago, they stopped.
Mia forced herself to stay away from the news. She’d been too busy to see a divorce lawyer since coming back to the Rocky M, but in her heart it was over between them. And now she had no idea where Jack was. If he was okay. If his last trip had been successful.
She had nothing.
As she had for the past six weeks since grabbing her clothes and running away from Jack and the rooftop patio, she buried all those memories, her anger and every one of her fears in the endless work that came with the Rocky M.
“YOU OKAY, Jack?”
Jack barely heard Devon Cormick, who’d driven him from Los Angeles to the Rocky M, a mile outside of Wassau. He stared at the sprawling brown ranch house, the thin trail of smoke that rose from the chimney into the darkening sky. The building sat in the shadows of a granite cliff.
The house he’d grown up in always looked in imminent danger of being crushed.
Home, he thought, the word foreign in his head.
The painkillers he’d taken once he got off the airplane in Los Angeles were still kicking around his system. The world felt thick and fuzzy, and he knew being here was dangerous. Dangerous in a way that Darfur couldn’t even dream of being.
“I’m fine,” Jack said. Though he wasn’t. Wouldn’t ever be again.
“Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Devon asked. “You could stay with us. Claire would—”
Jack shook his head. His throat was on fire.
“It will die down,” Devon said. The young man leaned forward over the steering wheel. The bruises at his temple and across his face were yellowing. One of the explosions had tossed him into the air like a rag doll, throwing him headfirst against one of the fences. It was a miracle his neck hadn’t been snapped. “The papers, the university. It can’t go on like this.”
But his hundred-yard stare out the front window said he wasn’t so sure.
Their return from Sudan and their survival of the military’s brutal attack had put Devon and Jack in the papers from coast to coast. And it wasn’t just the media; the university was all over him, too.
The dean had been inside Jack’s house when he got home. As if he had the right, much less a key. And the way he demanded answers—Jack wouldn’t argue, the university had a right to those. But they didn’t have a right to him. He wasn’t his pump. He wasn’t the damn drill.
The university didn’t own him.
The attention was relentless. But for Devon, the attention would die down—innocence, after all, had its advantages.
For Jack, the questions would come at him for the rest of his life.
Do you remember the attack?
Why were you beyond the perimeter of the compound?
What happened to Oliver Jenkins?
Jack flinched and shut his eyes. The morphine burned in his pocket, a promise, a sweet whisper of how good forgetting could be.
“I can’t leave you here. I’ll take you back to the university,” Devon said. He put the car in gear and turned in the front seat ready to reverse down the long driveway.
“I’m staying,” Jack said, his voice a thin wheeze. The doctors had told him not to talk to keep from irritating his damaged throat. But Devon liked conversation. Another reason not to go home with him.
“But you’re pretty far away from a hospital, and with—”
Jack opened the door, and Devon shut up, putting the car in Park and hurtling out the driver-side door to help Jack out of the car.
It was hard with his knee and the broken hand.
“What about physical therapy?” Devon asked. “For your hand?”
Jack ignored him, swinging his duffel bag up over his good shoulder with his good hand.
“Jack! You need to talk to someone about Oliver, about what happened. You can’t just—”
“Thanks for the ride, Devon.”
Devon sighed, wiped a hand over his eyes. “Christ, you’re stubborn.”
Jack would have laughed if it hadn’t felt like swallowing glass.
“Fine. Is there anyone here who will take care of you?” Devon asked.
Jack looked at the brown house with the dark windows. It blended into the forest, the granite outcrop—a shadow in twilight.
No one had ever taken care of him here before.
Except Mia.
Anger burned through him like a gasoline fire, hot and quick and greasy. She’d left him on that hotel rooftop, run away like a child, didn’t return a single email or phone call for four damn weeks and then, after the bombings, after…Oliver, still nothing.
Where the hell were you, Mia? he thought.
The only things he could count on were the pills in his pocket, the nightmares and that no one would find him here.
“You better go,” he told Devon. “The pass gets dangerous in the dark.”
Devon looked sufficiently nervous at the idea and Jack bit back a smile. He’d watched the man’s fingers get whiter and whiter on the steering wheel on the way over the mountains.
“If you’re sure?”
Jack nodded. He wanted a get this over with—walk through those doors, face down the demons and then sleep. For two months, until he was forced back to San Luis Obispo to answer the dean’s questions.
He barely heard Devon drive away as he took the gravel pathway up to the house. Why were the lights off but the fireplace going? It was getting close to seven o’clock and at least the lights in the kitchen should be glowing, with some traffic coming from the bunkhouse to the dining room.
The barn to his left was silent. One brown gelding was in the nearby corral.
It was spring and the place looked like a ghost town.
The front door creaked open under his fist and he helped his left knee up the front stoop and entered the house.
He found a weak fire, mostly glowing embers, in the living room fireplace, but the house was cool. The furnace was off. It was eerie.
A vicious snapshot, a horrific memory of the pump site, the compound, blackened to cinder. Nothing but craters and smoke where people and equipment used to be.
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