Wanted: Wife

by Jones, Gwen

  So I said nothing; I just pushed up on my heels and kissed him. I kissed Andy Devine with everything in me, knowing I would never feel this way about another man, because no man would ever make me feel like I always felt with him: that I was worth it. He held me in his arms, lifting me off my feet.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, and within the hour we were there.

  There was no preamble, no attempt at seduction, just me and Andy and what, by now, came as naturally as breathing. I never thought I’d find someone so intrinsically in tune with me, but there he was, sloughing off what was left of my clothing, leaving it with his by the bed as he took me into his arms. How was it I never tired of him, shuddered each time like the first? Because every time was a small implosion, sparks flying. They were as real as I’d ever felt them. I buried my face in his neck, breathing him in.

  As he moved inside me, as he whispered into my hair, I fell deeper and deeper, and I’d never been so afraid. I knew it was illogical; didn’t he say he cared? But did he love me? Oh God—if he did, I’d never get out of here. The man would kill me for sure. But how could I stop it?

  Maybe if he hadn’t kissed me. Maybe if his eyes hadn’t looked at me the way they did, so swimmingly languid, so lost in me I was gone. With him buried deep inside me, with his scent dizzying my brain, my heart swelled with such a rush of emotion I couldn’t hold it back any longer.

  “I love you, Andy,” I whispered, finding release in the words. “I love you with all my heart.”

  His eyes widened and he fell to his side, taking me with him, his leg over my thigh, his hand at my hip. Except for our joining we lay a foot apart, his eyes falling to half-mast as he began to move again. He slid his hand down on me, circling slowly, and when it came we came together, my fingers tightening against the swell of his chest as his breath hissed through his teeth, the force of it draining what color I could discern from his face. When he finished he slid himself from me and rolled over, falling asleep soon after.

  What did I do?

  When I awoke the moon was up. I could see it from the bedroom window, high and bright, shining on Andy’s face from where he watched me, propped up on his elbow. Whatever had been in his eyes before was now replaced by passiveness, his hand insistently running up and down my back until I turned on my belly. With an arm on either side of me he rose up and spreading my legs apart, drove himself in from behind.

  All at once he became a force, pounding, pounding, his fingers digging into my neck, my teeth rattling from the impact. There’d been times when I’d crave such an encounter, moaning and groaning until I’d push back with equal gravity, but this wasn’t one of them; something was terribly wrong. “Andy . . .?” I said and suddenly he pulled out, falling to his side, his back to me.

  “Andy . . .?” I whispered, pushing up. “What was that?”

  “Go to sleep,” he said, pulling the sheet over him.

  “And you go to hell.” I shoved my arms into my robe and left for outside, slamming the door.

  My eyes stung, but I wouldn’t give in to crying. The air was cool yet sultry, like the eastern edge of a hurricane before it moved out to sea, and wasn’t that fitting? I had the feeling I’d just come blindly through a storm, feeling its rage without ever seeing what it’s about. With most of the houses were dark and the sky was bright and clear. I looked out over the water, the horizon dotted with twinklings of boats and barges. I gathered my robe and headed toward them, wondering why I continually wore my heart on my sleeve. Maybe I needed that bit of abruptness. It’d reminded me that Andy was no different from any other man after all. I hiked up my robe and waded into the warm surf, my gaze tossed up to the stars, the Milky Way spread like smoke.

  You just had to go and say it, didn’t you?

  A few moments later Andy joined me, his hands in the pockets of his jeans, panic all over his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I treated you like a whore just now.”

  “Yeah, you did,” I said tightly. “What exactly did I do?”

  “Nothing. Why would you think that?”

  I turned on him. “Then what did you do that’d make you do it?”

  He sighed, looking down as the water swirled around his ankles. “I’ve done many things, Julie, horrible things to women I could never tell you about—I’m too ashamed.” When I gasped he looked up sharply, holding his hand out. “Oh no—not like that. I swear I never have and never would physically hurt a woman and dear God . . .” He grimaced. “On my life I would never hurt you. But in the past? I’ll just say a cold heart can do infinitely more damage. I should know.” He laughed softly. “I’ve seen my wreckage.”

  He scrubbed his face, then looked at me. “Be patient with me, ma chérie. Please believe me, it’s nothing you did. Maybe I’ve just been at sea too long. Maybe I’ve just never learned how to treat a real woman.” He took a step closer. “Which you are, more than any woman I’ve ever known. When you left I thought you’d leave me for sure.”

  “Ha!” I laughed sharply. “Where would I go?”

  It was a throwaway line but where, in fact, would I go? Back in my real life I had no home, nor much of anything else. Only a promise of a book and nothing to anchor me anywhere. I looked up. Except . . .

  “Here. The cottage.” he said. “I want to give it to you.”

  “What?” I was stunned. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Well, I am. It was never meant to be mine anyway.” He looked out toward the horizon. “My father bought it for my mother so she could imagine France on the other side. He thought maybe if she could she wouldn’t feel so homesick, then maybe she’d care for him a little more.” He turned to me. “Julie, you can say what you want, but I know you were desperate when you married me that you felt you had no choice.”

  “If I was, I certainly don’t feel that way now.”

  “But who knows how it’ll be later? When I said I’d take care of you, part of that was knowing you’d always have a place to go, no matter what happens between us.”

  Why didn’t I like the sound of that? “Why? Are you planning on leaving?”

  “Leaving’s not the point. The point is you’ll have something of your own, a place you can always go to for whatever reason.”

  “But I don’t want to go anywhere,” I said, the thought coming to me like a revelation. “I want to be wherever you are.”

  He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. “Which is exactly what I want to hear, but knowing you have a choice will only make it sweeter.” He reached into his pocket and retrieved a key, pressing it into my palm. “Tomorrow I’ll work on getting the deed changed to your name only. Consider it my wedding present to you.”

  I was completely overwhelmed. “Andy, I appreciate the gesture, but it’s really not necessary. Put it in both our names if you want, but you don’t have to do this.” I thought of our contract, staring at the key in my hand. “Aren’t we supposed to share everything?”

  “Everything but this,” he said, dropping the key into the top pocket of my robe. He buttoned a flap over it. “It’s yours.”

  I pressed my hand to it. “I don’t know what to say.”

  He lifted my chin. “Say thank you, and say you . . .” He kissed me.

  He didn’t have to finish; the words were on the tip of my tongue. “Je t’aime,” I whispered as he gathered me into his arms. “Je t’aime de tout mon cœur.” I kissed his neck, his breast. “J’ai envie de passer le reste de ma vie avec toi.”

  Andy groaned, cradling my face in his hands. “Did you learn that for me?” He kissed me again. “Do you know what that does to me? Je pourrais mourir.”

  I didn’t understand, but I filed it away for later, as I always did with Andy, in a spare chamber of my heart. So I told him I loved him, and although I didn’t hear it back, I couldn’t think about it now, not with the water lapping around us, my fingers in his hair, my body lost in sensation. All I could think of was Andy carrying me to the sand, Andy opening my robe and his jeans, Andy
driving deep inside me.

  The moonlight was on his face, his lips a breath from mine. “You have no idea what you mean to me—what you’ll always mean to me, what you’ve done for me, and for that, I adore you.” He kissed me, moving achingly slow within me, his heart beating against mine.

  I slid my arms around him, Andy’s kissing so passionate yet so ephemeral I couldn’t decipher it and wouldn’t try. I loved him, and whether he loved me back didn’t matter. A happiness spread through me I never thought I’d feel. Maybe it was selfish. If it was, I didn’t care.

  That night he held me in his arms, our bodies so entwined we didn’t need a blanket, waking before the light crept through the windows. Once more we made love, Andy against the headboard as I straddled him, his head nuzzling my neck, murmuring nothing and everything. “No one’s ever made me feel as I do with you,” he said. “You’re my heart, my life.” He kissed a trail down my breast, taking a nipple in his mouth, his tongue encircling it as jolt wracked through me. “If I could climb inside you, I would,” he whispered, pressing me back against the mattress.

  “Julie . . .” he murmured, like a man deep in fever, “I do care for you, you do realize that, don’t you? But I’m . . .” He clenched his eyes, opening them with a quiet desperation. “Julie, you’ve changed everything. Please stay with me, make a life with me. How I’d want my child—our child—to have a piece everything we’ve had together. Would you want that?” He raised up, dropping his hand to my belly, almost reverently. “Would you do that with me?”

  Why was he saying this? Wasn’t it everything we were about? Or did he know? Had he somehow found out? Didn’t matter. Because if he could read my mind now he wouldn’t bother to ask.

  “Yes,” I said, meaning it more than I’ve ever meant anything in my life. “Yes.” I grasped his hips, rising up to meet each thrust, drunk on the possibility. He bore down and throwing his head back, buried his seed deep inside me. I closed my eyes, keeping everything, so much in love. So ridiculously in love.

  BEFORE WE LEFT we shut off the water and drained the pipes in case we didn’t make it back before the first freeze. As if autumn had moved in overnight, it was suddenly sweater weather, punctuated by Bucky’s head out the car window, his tongue lolling in the breeze. I slipped one over my shoulders as we pulled out of the driveway.

  I laid my head against Andy, feeling a little sad. “I couldn’t have asked for a better honeymoon,” I said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

  He kissed my temple. “Thank you for coming with me. I’m afraid the farm’s going to be a little dull for you after this.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think anything could be dull as long as you’re around.” Then I laughed. “Jesus, listen to us. We sound like a bad ‘B’ movie.”

  Andy grinned. “After acting like an ‘X’ for the past two days, I suppose we could use the change of pace.”

  We stopped for lunch at a diner on the way home, lingering over coffee and a shared lemon meringue, neither of us wanting to break the spell. But in the same sense I couldn’t help feeling a bit excited, like a page had turned and I was beginning a whole new phase of my life. I had left the farm literally choking on what it once had been, and now I felt alive with anticipation. For the first time in years I had a place where I belonged, and no one was going to take that away from me. I looked across the table to Andy: strong, virile, my protector. Nothing could happen to us now.

  The effects of the fire became more apparent the deeper we drove into the Pines. Because of all the smoke and darkness we hadn’t really noticed how much of it had burned, my skin prickling when we hit the charred patch we had driven though when the fire jumped the road. By the time we closed in on the farm the evidence had all but disappeared, the scent of smoke tamped down considerably by rain and three days distance, but still drifting through the air like an aftertaste. As we pulled into the yard we could see the ruts left by the pumper truck, deep digs into the mud now dried and molded into place by the sun, the firefighters’ muddy footprints trailing up the porch to the front door.

  “Can’t wait to see what the inside looks like,” I said.

  Thankfully, it appeared they had shed their boots before they went in. Everything looked fine until I noticed a water ring and a bit of sagging seam tape on the kitchen ceiling. I dragged a chair over to it and climbed up to look.

  “Andy!” I called, poking the damp spot. “It looks like the roof is leaking into the kitchen!”

  “The fire hose must’ve loosened some shingles when they wet down the house!” he called back. I could hear his inspection had already led him into our bathroom. “It leaked in here, too!” he added, over the sound of something scraping across the floor.

  I looked down to where the leak led, right atop the kitchen counter and not two inches from the sink. “Would you believe this?” I called out. “It couldn’t leak just two more inches to the right? It would’ve landed in the sink! That’s our luck, isn’t it? Is it leaking above the bathtub?” I ripped off a piece of dangling tape. “Andy?” Then all at once a cold awareness washed over me. I jumped off the chair, scrambling from the kitchen.

  The first thing I saw as I tore into our bedroom was one drawer, then the other, lined up like little soldiers outside the bathroom. Oh no, please don’t let him find them—not after last night. I turned toward the doorway, my heart jumping into my throat.

  “Looking for these?” Andy said from atop of the shell of the linens dresser, my next month’s supply of birth control pills between his fingers.

  Chapter Nineteen

  * * *

  Double Indemnity

  “WELL, ARE YOU?” Andy said evenly.

  I stared at the birth control pills in his hand, a blatant display of my own recklessness. “Is that a rhetorical question?” I asked, sarcasm always my first refuge. “Because if it is, you’d know by now they’re a little beyond the point.”

  He tossed them to the sink, coming toward me. “Just tell me the truth. Just tell me you considered the ‘starting a family’ part of our contract optional.”

  I couldn’t lie to him, not with that hurt in his eyes. “You know it’s not that simple. Not with how much that’s changed over that last few days. Plus with the fire and everything else I forgot to start the new month, so there’s an excellent chance I might already be pregnant. And you know what?” I laid my hand on his arm. “I honest to God hope I am.”

  He stared at me, that little muscle in his face twitching like it always did when his emotions got the best of him, as he struggled for control. “Really?” he said, moving past me to the window.

  I went to his side; he didn’t look at me. “Andy, we were strangers. Until I got to know you, could you really expect me to get pregnant? If I did, well . . .” I searched for the words. “I wouldn’t be anything more than an incubator for your issue.”

  “Yet you signed an agreement with this stranger to do just that.”

  “I did. But even you said I was pretty desperate at the time.”

  “Which is why I spelled everything out,” he said, finally looking at me. “Tossing in every protection so you wouldn’t be taken advantage of by me or anyone else. You’re forgetting you were as much a stranger to me as I was to you, but I still gave you every advantage. The risk was all mine.”

  “I’m no threat to you,” I said, affronted.

  “Except to make me look like a fool. Didn’t I start out as one of your silly little stories for TV? Aren’t I and our contract still the topic of your book?”

  “But I already told you—the book’s mainly about me.”

  “Especially now with those pills guaranteeing you a $50,000 exit.”

  “I never intended to take a nickel of your money.” God, this hurt. “Or to fall in love with you.”

  He looked away. “That’s your misfortune.”

  “You bastard,” I cried, pushing at him.

  He caught my wrists, pressing me back against the wall. “You’re
right, maybe the biggest bastard there is. I tried to warn you, but you still have no idea what I’m capable of. Julie . . .” His eyes softened. “It’s not the pills. Trust me, it’s a minor infraction. And that’s why loving me is a misfortune. Once you learn how much of a bastard I really am, I doubt you’ll want me.”

  I blinked, fighting tears; who was the fool now? I struggled against his hold, wanting to touch him so badly it ached. “You’re wrong, I’ll always want you. It doesn’t even matter what you did, as long as you keep on wanting me.”

  He leaned in so close I could feel his breathing. “So you do love me after all?”

  Love? I was out of my mind with loving him. “Please forgive me for lying to you. Whatever I was thinking at first, I don’t feel that way now. I just want to be with you.”

  He growled something decidedly feral and pulled me to him, crushing his lips to mine, and for the first time since this horrible conversation began my Andy returned to me, the Andy I knew, the Andy I loved. He let go, hanging onto my hand like a lifeline.

  “Julie,” he said, very quietly, “I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay. I placed my palm on his cheek.

  He turned into it, his eyes closing as he kissed it slowly, almost reluctantly, returning it to his grasp. “I’m not who you think I am.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, meaning it. “I know who you are now.”

  “No. You have no idea.” He opened his eyes. “For one thing, I was sick when I was a young man. They told me then it would be difficult, if not impossible, to father a child. The proof being, well . . .” He looked to me, a bit of the rake in his eyes. “I haven’t exactly lived the life of a monk. And after twenty-five rather vigorous years, there should’ve been at least one or two . . . accidents.”