His Wife for One Night (5 page)

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.

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.

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.