Seeing Red (9 page)

When Meg returned, she flashed a condom in front of his eyes and tore the packet open without further pleasantries. Rolling the rubber onto him, she said, “The gift shop’s clerk gave me a hard time about those.”

“Why?”

“I asked for the bigger size, and I guess she didn’t believe I’d need it.”

“If I get funny looks from the staff, I’ll know why,” he said with a chuckle.

“Yeah. If you’re going to keep letting me have my way with you, I’m…uh, we’re going to have to get tested for STDs. I’d like to feel you once without the latex.”

Yet another statement no woman had ever made to him before. No one had ever hinted that there’d be a next time.

“Okay. I’ll go after work on Monday.”

Pushing his knees closer together, she furrowed her brow, and her confusion was evident.

“What?” he asked as she climbed onto his lap, cowgirl-style, tits to chest, so her knees pressed into the mattress. He scooted back a bit to help her balance.

“So, just like that, huh? I suggest it, and you’ll do it without a grumble?”

He raised his shoulders as much as he could with her arms draped over them and pressed his nose into the warm crook of her neck.

She settled herself over his erection.

“It’s such a minor thing to get defensive about, Megan.”

“I’m glad you agree.” Easing down onto his shaft, she blew out a ragged breath and dragged her hands down his naked back. “Lend me a hand, big boy,” she whispered in his ear. “My thighs may look great, but they’re not strong enough for me to stay in this position long.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” he murmured, but moved his hands down to cup her ass, assisting her enthusiastic movements, and even slowing her a bit.

She punished him for that by clamping her muscles hard around him.

“Witch.”

“Yep. Gonna ride you like a broom, and when I get off you, I’ll make you clean up the mess.”

He paused her there at half-mast, and the joke settled into his brain in pieces. Laughing, he helped stabilize her already-broken rhythm and swiveled his pelvis us to meet her halfway. “Gonna prop me up in a dark corner until the next time you need me for some dirty work, too?”

“Mm-hmm.” She swiveled her hips in a circular pattern while gliding up and down with his aid, her breaths becoming shorter with audible rasps. “But…I won’t…leave you there…long!”

Her voice trilled upward into a breathy shout at the end as she came, hugging him tighter, and rubbing her cheek against his like the cat he’d called her earlier.

The name seemed apt now, because just like one of those mysterious pets, he couldn’t understand a damned thing about why she did what she did. She may as well have been from another planet. Women had always been a mystery to him, but this one took the cake.

Gratefully, he lifted that mental floodgate—that divide keeping his body in check as much as a man could—and he came too, pushing her down forcefully so the tip of him met the very end of her.

“God, you’re going to fucking break me,” she panted as he lay on his back, taking her down with him.

And there it went. That thing they all feared. “I’m sorry…I can—”

“Shush.” She pressed an index finger over his lips briefly and let it fall to the side of his face as she relaxed on top of him, seeming unable to catch her breath. “I don’t think you get it.”

“That’s nothing new.”

He listened to her breaths as they steadied, then quieted to mere whispers over the course of minutes. Rubbing his hand up her spine, he said, “Megan?”

No response came from her beyond an involuntary sigh.

He decided to let the cat sleep. She was sure to race away soon enough.

Chapter 7

“So, let me get this straight.” Carla topped off Meg’s Dr Pepper and returned the bottle to the nearly empty refrigerator. The Fennells were still unpacking, and the moment Meg’s plane touched down in Raleigh, she’d parted ways with Seth and made a beeline for her friends’ new home.

Carla stole a peek into the restored Victorian house’s living room to see what Meg stared at from her position at the end of the paper-strewn dining room table. The children were playing raucously, hiding in boxes and scattering packing peanuts all over the floor.

Meg had already tried to mitigate the mess once, striding into the room with a giant trash bag, but Carla drew her back, scolding, “Coping strategy, my dear. Clean up once, not fifteen times while the destruction ensues.”

Now the maternal brunette leaned against the closed refrigerator door, arms crossed over her small breasts, studying Meg.

“The same woman,” she began, “who practically crucified me for making a snap decision and traipsing off to Ireland with a man I barely knew is now okay with the idea of letting one of that same man’s best friends move into her house…with her son?”

Meg swirled the ice in her soda and watched the bubbles in the dark liquid rise and pop. “He’ll be in the guest room. It’s just for show.”

“Uh-huh. For how long? What are you going to do? Annul the thing? Or will you hold out a little longer and have another divorce?”

“I don’t like your tone.”

“And I don’t like you stringing Seth along.”

Meg snapped her gaze toward her friend and did a quick reading of Carla’s face, hoping perhaps the woman was pulling her leg.

Didn’t look like it.

“I thought you were my friend. And if I recall, you were on-board with this scheme. You flew to Bermuda, remember? You were one of our witnesses.”

“That’s right.” Carla eased off the fridge door and strode to the table. She pulled out the chair to Meg’s right and folded onto it. “Look, I guess we all thought this would be a convenient sort of thing,” she said softly. “We figured the two of you would just lay low and wait for the drama to go away on its own.”

“That’s a reasonable expectation, but you know almost as well as I do that Spike isn’t a reasonable man. I thought the same thing you did: that I’d marry Seth and people would leave me alone because he’s not famous. I’d fall off the radar and could have a normal sort of life after a while, but Carla…” Meg lowered her voice to a whisper as one of the children streaked past the open double door. “You should hear some of the messages he’s been leaving in my voice mail. He’s gone ape-shit. When everyone was feeling sorry for me for getting dumped, it made him look like a bad boy and somehow all the more desirable.” That made her scoff. She took a long sip of her soda and gathered her thoughts.

It wasn’t necessary. Carla could more or less read them. “And now that you’ve appeared to have moved on, he’s taken it personally. Probably pissed he didn’t do more to screw you up.”

And that’s precisely why they were best friends. Even if they didn’t always immediately warm to each other’s choices, they generally came around to understanding why they made them.

“I feel really awful. Toby doesn’t understand what’s going on. All he knows is that Seth is going to come around, and he thinks he’s going to have a buddy, but for how long? And what if people start to recognize Toby? How’s that going to affect him in school? Are other kids going to tease him? Are the teachers going to shame him for his father being an epic douche bag?”

Carla’s upper lip curled. “I hadn’t considered that. Toby’s the first out of all the kids to start school. I haven’t even so much as browsed that list of preschools my mother brought over.”

“Yeah, and there’s another issue.”

“What?”

She didn’t know how to put this delicately, but it was Carla, so she just spit it out in a hoarse whisper. “I know it muddles things, but I can’t—no, I don’t want to keep my hands off Seth. The more he says yes, the more I want him. I feel like some kind of rampaging nymphomaniac.”

Carla pressed her lips together to stifle her words, but her watery eyes gave away her amusement.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, it’s just… You’re probably far from being diagnosable by the American Psychiatric Association’s mental disorders manual.”

“Just how often is considered clinical?”

“I took introductory psychology, what, ten years ago? Twelve? Why the hell would I know that?”

She had a point.

“I suspect you’re comparing your level of urges at the moment to what society thinks is right and proper for a woman of our age. Well, guess what? Not all married women endure sex and roll over and put out every ten days with a weary sigh. Some of us like it. Ask for it.”

Meg leaned back in her seat and located her redheaded offspring standing in the corner with his back turned to the room, counting. “One. Two. Three. Seven… Ready or not, here I come!”

After he’d zipped past on the heels of Emma, Meg whispered, “It kinda feels trampy.”

That was her honest-to-God truth. On the rare occasion she’d actually ask for it from Spike, he’d demean her. Tease her. He’d made her feel like some sort of aberration for having physical needs. The same needs he’d gladly met when she was an idiot undergrad and he was a skinny, greasy, barista moonlighting as a singer.

Carla blew out a breath and pushed a swath of her long hair over her shoulder.

“I gotta say I’m surprised that with you being single for this long, I probably get more in a month, even with an infant in the house and staging a transatlantic move, than you do,” she said.

Meg didn’t doubt that. She drained the dregs of her soda and pushed her chair back to stand. “Gotta go run errands, and I’ve got a fifty-five-page instruction manual to write copy for by Friday. I haven’t even opened the files.”

“Okay. Call me if you need anything,” Carla responded at the same time the baby monitor crackled, and her daughter whimpered.

Backing toward the living room, Meg nodded. “Yeah.” She actually could do that. She could call, and Carla really could be there to help in forty minutes or less. It would take a while to get used to having her tribe complete again—for her to have help if she needed it and was brave enough to ask for it.

She couldn’t help but to wonder, though, whether that little tribe was more on her side or Seth’s.

* * * *

Several hours later, Meg slid her sedan into her assigned spot in the basement garage of her condominium building, rolling her eyes at the empty space to the left that used to be the resting spot for Spike’s motorcycle. Now the only reminder of the beast was a single skid mark and a bit of an oil stain in the center. Yep, that was Spike. One big, greasy stain.

Before unlatching Toby from his seat, she fetched her folding grocery cart from the trunk, opened it, and piled on the canvas bags of food and dry cleaning they’d picked up before returning home. She pressed the tidy stack of paperwork she’d fetched from the preschool office under her arm and slammed the trunk shut.

She let Toby down and placed him between herself and the cart, letting him push it from down low. She didn’t need the help, but he liked having something to do, and the activity kept him from running amok in the garage. The people in the building drove like assholes, so she put the burden of safety strictly on herself. He was her charge—her responsibility, and if she had to throw herself in front of a moving vehicle to keep him safe, she’d do it.

They took the elevator up to the lobby, and she bid Toby to hold the button while she made a dash for the mailbox. With her key already poised, she made quick work of grabbing the thick pile of catalogs, circulars, and assorted envelopes. She rejoined Toby in the elevator right as the control pad made a high-pitched beeping sound, complaining about the doors being propped open so long.

She let out a breath, glad the ride came with no extra bodies, and hustled Toby out as soon as the doors opened at the top floor.

There were a lot of things she liked about their downtown condo. The ten-story brick behemoth was a part of Raleigh’s new upward, rather than outward, urban growth. They could have bought a house out in the suburbs, and that would have put them closer to the airport Spike spent so much time at, but there was a certain street cred to having an address at The Gardner. The completely modern place lacked nothing in terms of amenities. There was a fitness room and sauna on the first floor, as well as a gathering room that could be rented out for meetings and parties. The small courtyard in the back came with a sunny patio and infinity pool she’d never used.

All that was nice, but what Meg had liked about the building were the spacious balconies. She’d spent hours pacing on theirs when Toby was a colicky newborn. They’d had to go outside, because that was the only way Spike could sleep. As they were on the top floor, the ceilings in their unit were extra-high and lent an airy openness to the place that had probably kept Meg from feeling claustrophobic all those times she’d been stuck indoors, staying home on Spike’s bidding.

She turned the knob and leaned her shoulder against the door, pushing it open while Toby skirted in around her.

“Gotta pee!” he called back in explanation, taking off at a brisk clip across the sisal rug.

“I’m going to have to teach that boy some manners,” she muttered, and wrapped her fingers around the cart’s handle.

The door across the hall creaked open, and Meg murmured, “Fuck,” under her breath as one of the cart’s wheels wedged against the hallway baseboard. She dropped the preschool papers into the basket and gave the damned cart a forceful tug.