by Amy Andrews
Tess murmured, ‘Of course not,’ not entirely sure what was going on.
‘I was just telling Mum that I got in late from the hospital and didn’t want to disturb you so I collapsed on the couch.’
Ah. Now Tess got the reason for Jean’s distress. And it was acute distress. She was crying, her movements agitated.
‘It’s still wrong,’ Jean sobbed. ‘You don’t care about being disturbed, do you, Tess, darling?’
Tess looked at Fletch. He was at his disturbing best. Shirtless and trouserless, his big, bare chest and long, bare, dark-haired legs exuding a masculinity that was almost overwhelming in the intimacy of the little circle they’d formed. He rubbed the back of his neck in a helpless gesture and the lines of worry and tiredness around his eyes and mouth seemed to deepen.
She wished like hell they cancelled out the scruffy sexiness of his tousled hair and unshaven jaw.
‘This is how people get divorced,’ Jean continued, worrying at the fabric of her nightgown, rolling it between her fingers. She suddenly clutched Tess’s arm. ‘Oh, no…you’re not getting divorced, are you?’
Tess felt her heart sink. Jean’s level of anxiety was distressing to watch. As fanciful as it might seem to them, she was worrying herself sick.
And for that there was just one thing she could do.
She took a deep breath and slid her hand onto Fletch’s knee and then up a little further to his thigh. ‘Of course not, Jean,’ Tess murmured, not acknowledging either his harshly indrawn breath or the tensing of his firm, bulky quadriceps. ‘Fletch and I are fine, aren’t we, darling?’
She looked at him then and smiled, sincerely hoping he could act better than she could.
CHAPTER FOUR
FLETCH was too stunned to say anything for a moment. His body, on the other hand, wasn’t as reticent. Her hand searing into his flesh took him back to the days when they hadn’t been able to stop touching each other and in an instant he was hard.
A decade ago she’d have sensed his arousal in a flash with that weird sexual ESP they’d shared. She would have smiled at him, moved her hand slowly up his leg and kept going until she’d hit pay dirt.
‘Fletch?’
He blinked as Tess’s voice yanked him back to the here and now. To the startling reality of the present—Tess hadn’t wanted him in a very long time and his mother was sitting right beside him.
His very distressed mother.
Grateful he was sitting down, Fletch grappled with what exactly the question had been.
‘We’re fine, aren’t we?’ Tess prompted, squeezing the firm, warm muscle beneath her palm.
Fletch saw the keep up look in her amber gaze as he fought against the automatic impulse to shut his eyes. Her little squeeze had shot straight to his groin like a blast from a taser. God, he was too tired for this. He’d tossed and turned on the couch for hours.
‘Of course we are,’ he agreed heartily as he picked up the thread of the conversation. He covered Tess’s hand with his own. ‘I really just didn’t want to disturb you, that’s all.’
Jean’s fretting eased as she patted their joined hands. ‘You’re such a sweet boy, darling, but, trust me, sleeping on the couch can be the beginning of a slippery slope. Look at Aunty Lynne, she and Joe sleep in different bedrooms now because of his snoring and they can barely stand the sight of each other. That all started at the couch, you know.’
Fletch glanced at Tess, his sexual frustration tempered by his feelings of helplessness. Did he tell his mother that both Lynne, his father’s sister, and her husband Joe had died in the last few years?
Tess saw the inadequacy in his gaze and squeezed his thigh again. This could not be easy for him. ‘Well, Fletch doesn’t snore,’ she said, diverting the conversation, ‘so I think we’ll be fine.’ She gave Jean a wry smile. ‘Now, how about a mug of nice warm milk?’
‘Good idea,’ Fletch said, leaping at the opportunity to escape the steady torture of her hand.
He reached for his trousers, desperate for some more cover. Tess’s foot anchored one leg to the floor and she stood to release it. But then her bare thighs were at eye level. And even though they were thinner than he remembered—ballerina thin—and skinny wasn’t something that had ever really appealed to him, his hard-on didn’t seem to care, especially given how a quick flick of his eyes upwards also put her knickers squarely in his line of vision.
He looked down and hurriedly stuffed his feet into the legs of his trousers. He rose quickly, not looking at her, dragging them up his legs and over his hips in one fluid moment, zipping the fly as he took his first stride away.
‘I’ll make them. Sit down,’ he threw over his shoulder as he headed towards the kitchen. And sanity.
Tess felt a blush creep up her cheeks and was grateful for the low light as she sank down next to Jean. She wished she hadn’t caught his heated gaze on her thighs or that brief glimpse of the bulge being contained by his underwear—but she had.
He was aroused?
Mugs clattered in the background and Jean chatted away beside her, oblivious to Tess’s internal conflict as she grappled with the incident. Had her touch, her completely artificial touch, on his leg done that?
It had been too long surely? Too much had happened between them. Too much angst. Too much sorrow.
Yes, Fletch had always been a very virile man and their sex life had always been firmly in the mind-blowing category. Nothing had seemed to dent it. Not shift work, pregnancy or living with a newborn.
Until Ryan’s death anyway.
And then it had all changed. She just…couldn’t. She’d barely been able to eat or string a sentence together for so long. Anything beyond that, anything requiring any kind of emotional energy or physical effort, had been too much.
And Fletcher had been understanding and patient.
But in the end it had defeated him.
Or at least she’d thought so. Until now. Seeing the evidence of his arousal had been startling. Was that just a normal male reaction to the proximity of a semi-clad woman or could he still really desire her after all these years?
It was a shocking concept.
A dangerous one.
The microwave dinged behind her and Tess dragged her thoughts away from her ex-husband’s libido. It certainly wasn’t something she was going to analyse. Now or at any other time.
‘Okay, three warm milks coming up,’ Fletch announced, placing the beverages on the coffee table.
Tess pushed everything aside as she picked
up her mug and pulled her recalcitrant thoughts firmly back to Jean.
* * *
After leaving his mother with assurances that he would be returning to the marital bed, Fletch did indeed head to his room. Tess had volunteered to settle Jean back to sleep and he needed a shower.
He hadn’t had one earlier as he hadn’t wanted to disturb her. Sure, he could have had one in the main bathroom but all his stuff, his toiletries and clothes, were in his bedroom so he’d put it off till morning. But after the events of the night, after his involuntary reaction to her, he was prescribing himself a cold shower.
A quick, cold shower.
In and out before Tess even knew he was there. His mother often took quite some time to settle once she’d been wandering—the darkness exacerbating her dementia—so he should be well and truly clear before Tess came back.
Not that he wanted to be thinking about his ex-wife as he shed his clothes and stepped into the shower. Or what had happened at her tentative touch. Things started to stir again and he turned the cold spray on full bore, sucking in a breath as the icy spray pelted his flesh.
He dunked his head beneath the shower head, squeezing his eyes shut. He absolutely didn’t need this.
Whatever the hell this was.
Some latent attraction? A vestige of what they’d once shared? Those endless hours in each other’s arms, making love like the world was about to end, like their skin was brushed with crack cocaine and they ju
st couldn’t get enough.
Fletch shook his head against images that usually only visited him in his dreams. It was dangerous ground.
He turned so the spray drummed hard down his back, hoping it would scour the memories from his pores. Praying they’d sluice off his skin and disappear for ever down the drain hole.
But the drumming in his head mocked even louder.
Tess. Tess. Tess.
* * *
Tess sat with Jean for a while after she’d fallen asleep, surprised that her ex-mother-in-law had gone down as easily as she had. Surprised but relieved. Many a night she’d spent with an Alzheimer’s patient trying to calm them so they’d sleep and it was rarely an easy task.
Tess was so tired when she entered the bedroom she almost missed the sound of the shower. She blinked as she stared at the closed en suite door.
Fletch?
She didn’t move for a moment as a sense of déjà vu swept through her. Walking into their bedroom, the shower running.
Of course, once upon a time she’d have pushed open the door—not that Fletch would have bothered with shutting it—stripped off her clothes and joined him.
Which wasn’t an option now.
But what the hell was? This was his room.
She was the intruder.
She clutched at her abdomen to allay the funny tightness building there. Her fingers hit warm flesh and she looked down absently at her clothes, or lack of them. She remembered how her bare thighs had burned beneath his gaze earlier. How his body had responded…
Her legs sparked into action. She could at least get into her pyjamas. She opened her carry-on case, which was all she’d thought she’d need for her whistle-stop foray back to Australia, and located the over-sized man’s T-shirt she wore to bed. She’d got into the habit of wearing Fletch’s T-shirts to bed during their marriage and, out of comfort, had continued the practice.
Not that they belonged to him any longer. Or any other man, for that matter. Her men’s shirts these days came to her courtesy of the men’s department at a store.
With the shower still obviously running, she whisked off the T-shirt she had on and threw the other one over her head. It came to mid-thigh and she felt infinitely more covered even if it was too broad across the chest, causing it to constantly fall off her shoulder and the V-neck to hang too low on her bra-enhanced cleavage.
She scrambled into the bed—Fletcher’s bed—getting under the covers this time, and waited for him, her eyes firmly trained on the en suite door. It didn’t matter how tired she was, that her eyes felt like they’d been rolled in shell grit, that the room seemed to tilt precariously every now and then.
Or that something had happened before that had the potential to be a real problem between them.
They needed to talk. About Jean.
Sitting with her before, Tess had come to a decision. A crazy one for sure, but the right one nonetheless. She and Fletch needed to have a conversation—no matter how difficult the subject matter. And the sooner they had it, the sooner she could get to sleep.
All providing she actually could sleep if he agreed to what she had to say.
The door opened suddenly and she took a deep, steadying breath.
Fletch’s breath hissed out as he spied Tess sitting up in his bed, looking exhausted but grimly determined and somehow sexy as hell with her huge amber eyes and one shoulder bare except for a narrow bra strap.
‘Oh, God, sorry, I thought you’d still be in with Mum…’
Tess didn’t drop her gaze to take in her fill of his bare chest or the long length of his legs not covered by the boxer shorts. But she was uncomfortably aware of them in her peripheral vision.
‘It’s okay,’ she said softly. ‘Jean went straight off to sleep. She was exhausted.’
The tension coiling the muscles in Fletch’s neck as tight as piano wire eased a little. Already the decision to ask Tess to stay seemed to have paid off. ‘Thank you. You’re great with her.’
His mother had never settled so quickly for him.
Unfortunately it wasn’t enough to fully dissipate the tightness in his neck. And after his reaction to her earlier, he doubted it ever would. Not while they were living under the same roof.
Still, keeping focused on the reason why she was there—his mother—and keeping as much distance as was possible inside the confines of his apartment, Fletch figured he could just about survive it.
Tess pulled the shirt sleeve up onto her shoulder. That helped.
It promptly slid off again. Oh, boy…
‘So…’ He hesitated. He didn’t know why. ‘Goodnight, then…see you in the morning.’
He turned to go but her soft ‘Fletcher’ pulled him up short. He turned back and quirked an eyebrow. ‘Yes?’
‘I think you should sleep in here with me.’
Fletch could have sworn he actually heard the synapses in his brain misfire. Certainly for quite a few moments he was struck completely dumb.
Well, this sure blew the distance ploy out of the water.
Tess watched as a range of emotions flitted across her ex-husband’s face. Did he think she’d suggest something so out there if she didn’t think it was absolutely necessary?
‘We can’t have a repeat of tonight, Fletch.’
Fletch shrugged. There’d been so many disrupted nights like this since he and his mother had moved into the apartment two weeks before, it seemed normal to him now. Still, the sentiment weighed heavily in his mind.
‘She’s not going to remember what happened in the morning.’
Tess raised her legs beneath the covers, tenting them as she propped her chin on her knees. ‘I know. But do you want her to go through the same distressing anxiety every time she wanders in the middle of the night and finds you on the couch?’
Fletch knew the short answer was no. Of course he didn’t. And Tess’s solution was, obviously, a quick, simple fix. But nothing had been simple between them for a long time.
They were bereaved, aggrieved and divorced.
That was a whole lot of baggage to take with them to a bed they hadn’t shared in nine years.
‘If you’re not on the couch,’ she continued, ‘there’s no reason for any distress.’
Tess projected a calm, measured professionalism, like she was talking to a relative of a patient, but on the inside the mere thought of what she was suggesting was making her quake. She hadn’t seen him in nine years and now she was proposing they share the same bed. Maybe she’d wake up in the morning and it would have all been a bad dream.
She was used to that.
Fletch hastily diverted his gaze from the bed, mentally sizing up the room. ‘I suppose I could sleep on the floor…’
Tess could barely hear him over the thudding of her heart, like a drum in her ears. She knew he was trying to do the right thing but did he really have to look at the bed like it was a viper’s nest?
Did he really think she wanted to share the thing with him?
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Fletch,’ she dismissed impatiently. ‘You can’t sleep on the floor for two months.’
Fletch lifted his gaze to meet hers. ‘So…to be clear. You’re suggesting that I sleep in the bed. With you?’
Not a suggestion he’d ever imagined he’d hear coming from her mouth ever again. The tension in his shoulders headed south to grab a stranglehold on his gut.
Tess heard the note of incredulity in his voice and shrugged. ‘Will it really be that difficult to sleep with me again?’
Fletch swallowed hard, the knowledge of his recent monster erection colouring his reasoning. ‘No.’ He gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘That’s what I’m worried about.’
Tess couldn’t help but be amused at the absurdity of it all and the rather sceptical look on Fletch’s face. He’d always been so decisive, so take-charge, it was a novelty to see him so completely flummoxed.
Her mouth kicked up at one side briefly before returning to a determined line. ‘We’re not te
enagers, Fletch. I’m not proposing reconciliation. We’re just two adults making the best out of a less-than-satisfactory situation. I’m sure we can control ourselves.’
Fletch heroically refrained from mentioning that controlling herself when they were in bed together had never been a forte of hers.
Or of his.
Not until after Ryan’s death anyway. Her control then had been savage. She’d stopped needing him, stopped wanting him, overnight.
But he’d still needed her. So very, very much. More than that—he’d needed her to need him back.
Fletch stood at the end of the bed, still hesitating as a decade of distance yawned between them. ‘I could put a roll or something down the middle of the bed,’ he suggested.
Tess surprised herself with her laugh. ‘How very Victorian.’
He laughed back. ‘I thought a fan of Georgette Heyer would appreciate it.’
Their smiles lit the room briefly then slowly faded. Tess sighed. ‘It’s almost three in the morning and I’m jet-lagged to hell and back, Fletch. I’m too tired for this conversation. Just get into bed.’
He nodded, coming to a decision. She was right. It was half past stupid hour. And they were adults. ‘Okay. Let me just check everything’s locked up one more time.’
Fletch went through his usual pre-bed door-checking routine. It was a particular nightmare of his that his mother would manage to find her way onto the balcony during one of her many night-time walkies and plunge to her death.
Still he lingered over it, his heart pounding loud enough to wake the whole building. Certainly loud enough to wake his mother.
He was about to sleep with his ex-wife. With Tess. And even though it wasn’t sexual, he felt like a virgin again, like he was sleeping with a woman for the first time.
Satisfied everything was locked up tight and unable to put it off any longer, Fletch made his way to his bedroom, quickly checking on his mother as he turned appropriately neutral opening sentences over and over in his head.