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