by Kate Meader
Her next words are soft. “Has there been anyone else?”
My eyes blink open.
She bites her lip. “I mean, unprotected.”
“The last woman I was with, protected or unprotected, was my wife.”
That earns me a watery smile. “And the last dick that graced the halls of my vagina belonged to my husband.”
I love her mouth. “Lucky guy.”
“I always thought so.”
Not just lucky but blessed. Being chosen by Aubrey was the greatest thing to ever happen to me. I never thought I deserved her, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to give her up.
Until it hurt too much to hold on.
“And I’m on birth control. So nothing to—well, you know.” That word “birth” sits up between us, but she rushes on. “Take what you need, Georgia.”
She was never one to stand on ceremony. Never needed me to ease in, but I do because I need it to go slow. I need it to last because I suspect I’ll be dining off this memory for a long time.
I notch at her entrance, nudging, watching the broad head slip inside. One inch. Two.
“Stop teasing, you prick,” she mutters, whether to me or my dick I don’t know. I laugh because this is my Aubrey, back from the dead.
The slide is crazy tight, crazy hot, as I fill her up. Too good. Too good. Too fucking good. I have been a zombie for two years. Only with her do I feel like a flesh-and-blood person.
Gripping the curve of her ass, I move inside her, taking care to keep her pinned in place where I can remain in control. For all Aubrey’s smart talk, she loves when I lead like this. Her bossiness is an act, cultivated for the courtroom. When we’re together, she’s a kitten, letting me pet and stroke her, arching her back, murmuring desperate demands for more.
I give it to her, as hard as she needs it. The rhythm remains steady as I try to hold back, anxious not to overplay my hand. Sex with Aubrey has always been a test of my endurance, but this feels like a test of my humanity. I’ve been a ghost without her, and now, with each thrust, parts of me reappear, as if from across some divide.
Stroke. Muscle, bone, and sinew return.
Thrust. Skin covers my frame, binding me together.
Groan. Her nails dig into my ass, and I feel more real than I have in two years.
She tightens around me, the quiver of her pussy the final step to my completion. My deadened heart beats again, pumping life into this shell I’ve lived in since we parted. Her scream as she comes triggers my release, which goes on and on, so long I’m sure I’ve set some sort of record.
I pull out as soon as my brain recognizes the risk of crushing her body with mine. Checking in with her, my gaze is drawn to her cast.
“How did this happen?”
“Well, you got all caveman about me being out in a snowstorm, and then two seconds later we’re going at it like the world is ending tomorrow.”
I growl. “Talking about your arm.”
“Oh, that.” She shrugs and mutters something about feelings.
“Say ’gain.”
“It’s stupid. I was—look, never mind.” A blush suffuses her cheeks.
I grasp her ass and squeeze. “Baby, you need to tell me, or I’m gonna have to lick it out of you.” A slick of my finger between her legs assures her I mean business. It’s so hot to see and feel my come where it belongs that my dick pulses in recognition.
“You’re threatening me with another orgasm?”
I thumb her clit. “You’re so sensitive right now, Bean, that you’ll be screaming for me to stop in seconds.” I press, then rub, only to have her squirm away.
“Okay, okay! I was dancing to ‘In My Feelings’ and I tripped.”
“Drake’s ‘In My Feelings’? Like the challenge? Did you leave your car to do that dumb dance and get run over?”
“No! I was doing it at home, and I fell over the coffee table.”
I roll off her and settle to her side while my body heaves with laughter.
“It’s not funny! I had to Uber myself to the damn emergency room. Cat was useless. No opposable thumbs.”
“Ah, baby, it’s so fucking funny.” I can’t imagine Aubrey getting down with Drake, for a start. She’s not the wildest woman I know. “Why didn’t you call someone to drive you?” I would’ve come in a heartbeat.
“I felt like a dumbass. I was just trying to be silly. Doing something outside my usual to try to trigger a different response, I suppose.”
I see how Aubrey might think that. She’s lived her life following a core set of rules determined by her family. Marriage to me upended that to a certain extent, but when faced with a crisis, she fell back into familiar patterns. I wonder if we’re doomed to always revert to our innate selves. Is change even possible?
“I like hearing you were trying something different. I guess that’s why…” I stop, remembering I don’t want to go there.
“Guess that’s why what?”
“Why I thought I should start dating again.”
Three months ago I met someone at the bachelor party of a friend, and I took her out a couple of times, once to a cookout at Max’s. Aubrey was there, and it was hell to watch the betrayal on her face, one year after we’d signed the divorce papers.
“No, Grant, that was good. We had to start moving again, get ourselves out of that trench we’d dug to remain safe. I’ve only ever wanted you to be happy.”
Which she thinks can happen only without her.
“Right back at ya, Bean.”
She screws up her mouth. “I knew you’d eventually start dating, and I also I knew you were going to be at Max’s party. I just hadn’t put both things together so quickly. So I drank a couple more glasses of wine than usual. I was pretty embarrassing.”
Not that I remember. She made a few offhand comments, but she also made me smile, and damn, it had been so long since that happened. That feeling around her was enough to conclude that it was too soon for me to even think about someone new, not when I was still crazy about my ex-wife.
“You weren’t. It was a defense mechanism to cope. I get that.”
“And this? Us banging away while the snow falls? What’s that?”
There’s challenge in her voice. Don’t even think this changes a thing, she’s telling me. “Just looking to warm you up, Bean.”
She laughs, and I’m filled with her light, but immediately her smile fades. “We can’t undo what happened. I’ve just figured out who I am without you, and I need to be that person for a while.”
Thing is, I don’t like who I am without her, this skeletal nobody itching to care for his woman. But patience has always been rewarded when it comes to Aubrey, and I’m the most patient guy there is.
“Wouldn’t dream of getting in the way of your self-improvement. And I’m definitely gonna need to see those Drake moves before the weekend’s out.”
Chapter 12
Aubrey
“Looks like we’re snowed in, Bean. Storm’s still raging.”
I jump from the warm bed that saw plenty of action last night and pull back the drapes. White as far as I can see and still pelting against the windows like heavy, wet balls of cotton. It’s Wednesday, and I’d hoped to be in Boston later today in time for Thanksgiving tomorrow. “Are you sure? Couldn’t we dig it out? And by ‘we,’ I mean you.”
“It’s still coming down in buckets. There’s nowhere to put it, and the streets are impassable. Just talked to Joanne.”
“Who’s Joanne?”
“Our hostess. She said they have plenty of canned soup. We’ll be fine.”
I peer out again, looking for a moving car or a gap in the storm that will prove Grant wrong. I see nothing to rebut his claim. Rats.
“Maybe this af
ternoon?”
“Weather people said it’s scheduled nonstop for the next eight hours. Maybe tomorrow. We’re snowed in, wife—and you know what that means?”
I narrow my eyes, though inside my heart is in chaos at his use of “wife.”
“Enlighten me.”
“Sex. A lot of it. And then talking. A lot of it.”
“You’re the only guy I know who actually wants to talk after sex.”
“And during it.”
A blush heats my cheeks. Grant demonstrated some creative use of the English language last night, that’s for sure. “Could we have some breakfast before this sex-and-gab fest?”
A knock sounds. Grant grins.
I throw a pillow at him. “Oh, you are so full of it, Grant Roosevelt Lincoln!”
Quickly, I scooch under the covers. Joanne—if that is her real name—needn’t see all that skin. Grant goes out to the corridor, has a murmured conversation with the sainted Joanne, and comes back in with a tray. The woman has outdone herself: eggs, toast, fruit, coffee. I’m in heaven.
And looking at Grant as he starts pouring the coffee, I realize that by “heaven,” what I really mean is “trouble.”
* * *
—
“So how’s Sherry doing?”
We’ve finished breakfast, and we’re snuggled under the covers. Grant’s tracing circles over my left breast—it was always his favorite. Guys are weird.
“Don’t want to talk about my momma right now.”
Is she the “sweetheart” you were speaking to? Or maybe it was…“How’s Zoe? She must be so tall.”
He groans and stops the careful, erotic scrutiny of my breast to grab his phone from the nightstand. A couple of taps later, and I’m scrolling through photos of last Christmas. Sherry and Jake look so happy, and as for Zoe…wow, she’s all grown up.
“Love that girl.”
“She misses you.”
“I sent her gifts for the holidays and something for her birthday.”
“Sweet of you.” But not the same, is what he’s saying. “Momma’s still working at the school, keeping all the terrors in place. I think she ought to retire, but I know neither Jake nor my mom would take a gift from me to move that long.”
Grant’s mom is a high school administrative assistant. “That’s up to them, don’t you think? Besides, she loves that job.”
Grant frowns. He’s always felt so grateful to Sherry, who had him when she was barely sixteen with no dad in the picture. It was tough for him to see Jake take over his protector role, even though he has to admit that his stepdad adores his mom.
“She’s been workin’ her fingers to the bone since childhood. I just want her to be happy, maybe even be a stay-at-home mom for a while.”
“The woman’s only forty-seven, Grant! Don’t put her out to pasture just yet.”
His laugh is warm and forgiving. “She always asks after you.”
My heart aches. “Does she know what happened?”
“No. At first, I didn’t want to worry her, and then by the time we split, it seemed like it was too late to talk about it.”
What have I done? I cup his jaw and trace a finger along the stubble, the sound subtle and delicious. “But you wanted to talk about it, and you kept it all in. For me.”
“I know how private you are. You couldn’t bear to think anyone pitied you, so I handled it the way I thought would honor that.”
This man. This wonderful man. But it was more than pity I feared. He fell in love with my cool, ice princess unflappability. Finding out I’m a hot mess where fissures would widen to cracks and eventually chasms would have been awful for my image.
I was mostly afraid of my husband seeing that ugly side of me.
“I shouldn’t have placed that burden on you. You should have been free to confide in someone. Max, your mom, anyone.” Maybe even another woman. I wonder if this will help free us both for the next stage of our lives, though the idea of Grant moving on with someone else twists my gut painfully.
A shadow crosses his face, a dark-winged bird. I’ve said the wrong thing. I’m always saying the wrong thing.
“Speaking of families,” he says in an inelegant—for Grant—subject switch, “how are things with your dad?”
So he doesn’t want to talk about us. Perhaps it’s too much to expect after such a long time of not communicating. We have to work our way up to it.
“He calls when he’s feeling insecure and is looking for an ego boost, especially lately in the war with my mother. He’s looking for me to take a side. I need to stop caring so much.”
Grant leans his chin on my shoulder. He knows my relationship with my father has always been distant. I envy Grant’s family, the warmth and solidarity of it. The first time I visited Helen, Georgia, the Christmas of my second year in law school, I spent half the time in his childhood bedroom sniffling and teary-eyed.
Bean, it’s Christmas. Why you wanna cry at the birth of baby Jesus?
And me, whose heart was expanding faster than my chest could withstand, could only respond with They’re all so lovely! Followed by more sniffling. (And he still married me!) Perhaps I’ve underestimated his ability to handle my crazy. Perhaps bottling it up hasn’t done me any favors.
“I’m not expecting much from my immediate family. This is all for my grandmother.”
“At least one of them is normal—or not a complete asshole.”
“You’re going to behave, aren’t you?”
His reaction is all mock affront. “I’m a southern gentleman, Aubrey. Good manners are in my blood, and your family will only see that.”
I wander my hand over his broad chest and down below the covers. “Don’t need those good manners in here.”
His nostrils flare. “Love a woman who knows what she wants.”
I know it’s just a figure of speech, but that word—“love”—has always been so weighted between us. Grant gave it to me so easily that I couldn’t possibly deserve it. After all, until I met him, no one but Libby had loved me so unconditionally.
My mother made it very clear that he had married up—and likely deliberately so. I didn’t see Grant’s pursuit of me in such mercenary terms. It was subtler than that, a need for him to fix something that was broken. The poor little rich girl was the perfect project for the gentleman protector. I was ripe for saving. And here I am, the damsel, sinking so easily into my assigned role.
I vowed I’d take back some measure of control on this trip, that I’d be the one in charge. Grant doesn’t need to save me, not when I’m one of those self-rescuing princesses.
No time like the present. “I need a favor.”
“Ask away.”
“I want to tie you up.”
“Uh…”
“It’ll be sexy, I promise.”
He considers me. “Is this all part of the plan to get your groove back?”
“It might be.”
“Handcuff away.”
If only I’d been that prepared! I make do with one of Grant’s ties and a belt, and Cat Damon gets a much-deserved vacation in the bathroom.
“Things are going to get freaky in here, kitty.”
“Argghh!”
Precisely.
Grant pulls at the tie binding his right wrist to the headboard. “Now what?”
I straddle him, still in my boyshorts but topless. “It’s sweet of you to let me do this.”
He rakes his gaze over my bare breasts. “Nothin’ sweet about it. I expect I’m going to benefit mightily.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” I run a finger along the border of my underwear, then dip below.
Grant’s eyes flare dangerously. “Yeah, I’m going to enjoy this.”
My ga
ze locked onto his, I touch myself, taking long, plunging strokes through my already wet folds. He strains at the bindings, his chest heaving, his blue eyes ablaze.
For several minutes, we play this game: me stoking the fires in both of us, him watching silently. I know he could free his bonds and take over, but he doesn’t. The man understands what I need right now.
Time to take it up a notch.
I grab a couple of pillows and stack them down the center, just like I did last night to separate us before we went to bed. Then I get under the comforter on the other side.
Grant groans. “Hey, I can’t see.”
“Exactly.” I slip my panties off and resume my touch-fest under the covers.
“Now, that’s not fair, Bean.”
“Sorry,” I pant. “Busy getting busy.” With each stroke, I climb closer to orgasm, though it remains frustratingly out of reach.
“Talk to me,” he murmurs. “Tell me how it feels.”
“Wet, hot, good.” My dirty talk has always been, shall we say, perfunctory.
“C’mon, baby. You can do better than that.”
My eyes drift down his torso to a most satisfying tent-in-the-briefs situation. “Tell me what you’d do if your hands were free.”
He takes a moment to answer. “Probably stroke my dick because it feels good and I know you love to watch.”
I close my eyes, imagining that. “Then what?”
“I’d kiss those perfect tits of yours—”
“They’re small.”
“Perfect weight for my hands. Perfect nipples for my tongue. Perfect all round for my teeth to drag on and drive my woman wild.”
I moan, not knowing if it’s because of the image or the words or the desire he never fails to stir in me. My fingers rub harder, brushing my clit, prolonging the sparking sensations.
“But I wouldn’t neglect that pretty pussy of yours. Oh no. I’d be comin’ for that next, first with my fingers. Mine would be rougher and bigger than yours. My fingers would know exactly what you need.”
My eyes flutter open, seeking out his burly body and evidence of what our game is doing to him. Every muscle is taut, and his cock looks so hard it has to be hurting him.