by Jess Dee
Before she could blink, his hands were on her shoulders, he spun her to face him, and his mouth met hers with demanding fury. He didn’t mess around. The instant their lips touched, his opened and his tongue sought entrance. He wasn’t backing off, wasn’t giving her a chance to refuse him. Powerless to stop him, she gave in.
Then instantly regretted it as his tongue ravaged her defenses, leaving them in tatters at her feet.
One kiss. One stupid, measly, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching kiss, and Bianca melted in a puddle in his arms. What was it about this man that turned her into a whimpering fool any time he neared? Either she whimpered from desire or from hurt or from confusion.
His kiss might be seeking, demanding and feverish, but it was also given in anger. Behind those killer lips, Rick was fast reaching his boiling point. His temper was flaring, his emotions bubbling just beneath the surface. His arms trembled as he held her, shaking as they always did when he lost his temper in a big way.
He was angry?
Rick?
The man who’d slept with three other women. Who’d put his penis in someone other than her. He was upset?
No way. No fucking way. It wasn’t his right to lose the plot. Wasn’t his place to be outraged.
Not when she was so mad, so enraged, so…so…goddamned jealous she could hardly bear to be touched by him.
With all the power she contained, she kicked him. In the shin. As hard as she possibly could. And immediately dropped to the floor as agony shot through her foot.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
She wasn’t wearing shoes. Not even thongs. She’d taken them off before her swim and forgotten to put them back on.
Balancing on one leg, Rick glared down at her, his shin braced in his hand. “What the fuck—?”
“Damn it, Rick,” she yelled, cradling her foot. “You just broke my fucking toe.”
“Me?” He pointed to his chest. “I broke your toe?”
If she wasn’t so pissed off with him, she might have laughed at the disbelief in his expression. It was almost comical. “No. I think you broke two toes, you bastard.”
“You kicked me.” His voice was almost as loud as hers.
“Be grateful I didn’t knee you in the goolies. That’s what you deserve.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And what? Once you’d crippled my balls, then you’d have accused me of dislocating your knee?”
She rubbed her throbbing toes. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“What do you think I’m doing here? Tracking you down. Pinning you to one place so that you’ll bloody well stick around and talk to me, rather than hiding behind anyone or anything that might be standing between us.”
“What if I don’t want to talk?” There she was again. The two-year-old Bianca.
“You can’t have it both ways, babydoll.” He gingerly lowered his leg to the ground, right in front of her, giving Bianca a close-up of the small lump that had formed on his shin. That was going to be bruised by tomorrow. “You can’t accuse me of not talking to you enough and then hide when I try to do what you want me to.”
She sniffed haughtily. “We’re getting divorced. I can do whatever I want, and I don’t need your approval anymore.” Just like he’d done. As soon as they’d decided on the divorce, he’d jumped into the sack with someone else.
“We’re getting divorced because you seemed to believe that was the only solution to our problems. But what if it’s not? What if there’s another way to sort this out?”
Damn it, did he have to be so tall? When she stood upright she had to crane her neck to look him in the eye. Sitting in this position would likely give her whiplash.
Just great. Whiplash and a couple of broken toes. Was it any wonder they were divorcing?
She dropped her gaze back to his injured shin. “We tried every other way. It didn’t work.”
“No, we didn’t.” She heard him sigh, heard a rustle of clothes, and then he was sitting on the floor in front of her, his legs crossed. “We just gave up on us. Grew apart, accused each other of being strangers and decided strangers couldn’t make a marriage work. We never sat down and thrashed out the problems.”
She chewed on her lower lip.
“Did we mean so little to you, Bee? Don’t our ten years of marriage warrant just a little more effort than dusting your hands of us?”
“We meant everything, Rick. Everything. You were my world. My reason for waking up in the morning. So when I woke up one day and realized the man beside me had become a stranger, had turned into someone I no longer recognized, my world fell apart. I spent months waiting for the man I knew to emerge once again from that stranger. He never did.” A nasty lump formed in her throat, burning the inside walls. But she wouldn’t let the lump reduce her to tears.
“And I spent months looking for an opportunity to talk to you, waiting for the signal that you wanted to talk about us and never found it.”
“I asked you to talk to me. I begged you. Repeatedly.”
He nodded. “You did. You….” His voice trailed off and he swallowed. “You left Post-it notes on the fridge, saying we need to talk. You left voice messages on my phone while I was at work, saying the same thing. Hell, I even got emails from you pleading for us to sit down. And every time I tried, every time I opened my mouth, you just had to make supper or change clothes or send an email or water the garden. Or you were too tired or too hungry or too hormonal, or too aroused. Jesus, Bee, how many times did you silence our conversations with sex? I stopped trying to talk because you wouldn’t listen. You didn’t want to hear what I was saying, and I didn’t want to push you for fear of hurting you.”
She dropped her head in her hands, rubbed at her eyes and tried halfheartedly to argue with him. “I listened to you, Rick. Whenever you spoke.”
“When I spoke about the small things. About the broken lawnmower or the late payments at the repairs shop or the speeding ticket I got in a school zone. We spoke about the easy-fix situations. We never spoke about us.”
Talking about which… “I never knew you hated your work so much.”
“I told you about it a few times. Even mentioned wanting to sell the place once.”
Bianca stared at him, askance. He had. He’d mentioned someone had made him an offer and he’d been considering accepting it. But she’d stopped him with a shake of her head. “The steady income is too good,” she’d said. “I’m not sure we’ll make ends meet without it.” And that had been the end of that conversation. She hadn’t explored it further with him.
“God.” She almost choked on the word. “You must hate me.”
He looked at her, appalled. “I could never hate you.”
“But I never listened, and I couldn’t see that. I just kept blaming you for everything. Blaming you for not bringing our problems into the open.”
“You frustrated me.” He pointed to the side of his head and gave her a half-smile. “I think I have a little bald spot, right there, from tearing my hair out.”
It was her turn to swallow. “I’ll listen to you from now on. If you have something to say, I’ll hear it, no matter how hard it is for me. I just might need you to give me a gentle nudge sometimes. Like when I make excuses, or tell you I’m too busy to talk now.”
He nodded, slowly. “I’ll take you up on that.”
“But…” Oh, God, how did she say this?
“But?”
“But my agreeing to listen doesn’t mean our problems are all solved.” Oh, no. Not even close. “We still have a mountain standing between us.” A volcano, really. One that had erupted on a regular basis over the last few years.
Chapter Eight
Rick’s mouth twisted—like it always did whenever she brought up the mountain. He took a deep, controlled breath. “I know it’s still there. Separating us. It’s not as if I haven’t thought about it while we’ve been apart. Obsessively. But… Before we talk about it, there’s something you need to know.”
Her heart s
ank. His tone of voice and the wariness in his eyes sent alarm bells screeching through her head. She kept her expression blank, kept her voice neutral, but inside her belly heaved. “And that is?”
“The women I…” He flexed his hands. “The women I slept with, it wasn’t just about sex.”
Now her stomach didn’t just heave, it turned upside down and inside out, and she was grateful she hadn’t eaten more than a couple of lettuce leaves for lunch. Otherwise the contents of her stomach would be dramatically displayed on the floor.
“Jesus, Bee? Are you okay?”
She stared at him wordlessly. No, she wasn’t okay. How could he possibly imagine she’d be okay after what he’d just said? It hadn’t just been sex for Rick. The encounters with those women had meant something to him.
“You’ve turned white.” His hands were on her cheeks, his eyes feverish with concern.
She pursed her lips and pronounced each word of her response very carefully. “I promised to listen to you when you spoke to me. That doesn’t mean I have to like what you’re saying.”
He smiled then and sat back in…relief? “But see, that’s just the thing. You will like it when I tell you. I promise.”
She didn’t bother responding. The conversation focused on Rick sleeping with other women. At this point she had nothing to say that would do anything positive for their relationship. Nothing at all. So she bit hard on the inside of her cheek and prayed the pain would dull the effect of his words.
“Sleeping with them wasn’t just about sex. It was about me discovering what it meant to make love to a woman.” His eyes shone with excitement.
Yesterday Rick had told her he’d had sex. Now he was talking about another experience altogether. Making love. Love. Not just finding a physical release, but discovering a very real, very binding emotion while in the process of having sex.
Bianca swore she felt any remaining color drain from her face. Felt all the blood flow from her cheeks to regions unknown. Maybe it all headed straight to her chest, and that was why her heart beat so damn haphazardly. It couldn’t deal with the deluge.
“I learned the difference between the two this year, Bee. Learned that sex and love don’t have to go hand in hand. I learned I could fuck someone and feel nothing at all, and I could sleep with someone and feel everything is right with the world. And I learned that I don’t want the sex without the love. I don’t want a meaningless night in the sack, because it’s just not enough.”
Bianca’s heart broke. Just like that. Rick, her husband of ten years, hadn’t just had sex with someone else. He’d made love to her. He’d discovered a binding, real emotion in the process and that woman had…had made everything right in his world.
Despite all Rick’s promises that he still loved Bianca, he’d made love to another woman.
Now it didn’t matter that her heart struggled to beat, because the will to live, to survive another day, eluded her. If she’d struggled to accept the fact that Rick had had sex with other women—which was a purely physical act, then coming to terms with the idea of him making love to someone else almost killed her. She closed her eyes, let the agony consume her, opened them, blinked, tried to focus then closed them again.
When she opened them once more it was to find Rick staring expectantly at her.
Was he waiting for a response? He wanted her to speak? Seriously?
“Er…” She scrambled to think of something, anything. She had to respond, because she’d promised Rick she’d listen. And even though she regretted that decision with every fiber of her being, a promise was a promise. “That’s nice?”
“That’s nice? That’s all you have to say?”
She pasted a lifeless smile on her face. “That’s lovely?”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “Jesus, Bianca. Have you been listening to a single word I’ve said?”
She nodded. “Of course. You told me that this last year you’d discovered the difference between sex and love, and that you, um, what? Made love to a woman who made everything right in your world?”
His hand twisted in his hair. “That’s what you heard?”
“You didn’t say that?”
He swore. “No, I didn’t say that.”
“Do you love her?”
“Who?”
“The woman who made everything right in your world.”
“I’ve always loved her.”
Bianca stood. Pain shot through her toes at the movement, but she was barely aware of it. In all fairness to Rick, she’d fulfilled her promise and listened to him. But enough was enough. She didn’t have to continue sitting here as he destroyed her life one sentence at a time.
She limped over to the door and held it open for him to leave. “Okay. Well, good. So I guess I’ll see you at the wedding?”
“Close the door, Bianca,” he whispered dangerously. “We’re not finished speaking.”
“Yes, we are. You’ve said enough.”
He sprang to his feet. “I haven’t said a tenth of what I came here to say.”
“The fraction you told me kinda painted the whole picture. I don’t need to hear any more.”
“You have no idea about the whole picture.”
“You fucked three women and fell in love with one of them. Picture complete. Now leave.”
He poked her in the ribs with his elbow.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you that gentle nudge you asked for.”
She poked him straight back. “There was nothing gentle about that. And I didn’t need it. I listened, I heard, and now you leave. Goodbye.”
“I fucked other women, Bianca.”
Tiny spots of red dotted her vision. “So you said. Now get out.”
“And not one of them was you.”
Dotted? The red almost blinded her. “Yes, I worked that one out on my own, since I wasn’t there for any of the momentous occasions.”
“You’re not listening again. I said I had sex with them. All of them.”
“I heard you the first time. And the second and the third. In fact, your words haven’t stopped ringing through my ears. Now get the hell out of my room and leave me alone. Forever.”
Rick took hold of the door and rammed it, so hard that she lost her grip and it slammed shut. “There is a difference between fucking and making love. A giant ocean of difference. The one is a meaningless act borne of nothing but frustration and the need to come, and the other is an expression of emotion, the ultimate admission that your heart belongs to another person.”
Bianca punched him in the stomach with as much force as she possessed.
Then winced as red-hot pain shot through her fingers.
Jesus Christ. His stomach was harder than a freaking rock. What the…? When had that happened?
The breath whooshed out of him, and he grimaced. He grabbed his stomach. “That…hurt.” Air hissed from between his clenched teeth, and his eyes squeezed shut.
“Good,” she yelled at him. “I hope it continues hurting long into tonight and well into tomorrow and the next day. The next year.” She shook her hand out, regretting it almost immediately as the red-hot pain knifed back through it. At this rate she’d cripple herself attacking Rick. “Now you know how I feel. Now you know what it’s like to be hit by the truth over and over and over again.” She clenched her hands into fists, considered smacking him again and decided against it—not for his sake, for hers. “I get it. Okay? I get that you slept with other women. I get that you fucked them. I get that you made love with one of them. I. Get. It. I’m not an idiot. You don’t have to repeat it.”
Rick grabbed her by the waist, lifted her up and pressed her against the wall, jamming her there with his body. It happened in the blink of an eye.
“You get nothing,” he snapped. “Not a damn thing. You haven’t heard me at all. You may have listened, but you didn’t hear.”
“Just like you,” she screamed. “You may have listened, but you didn�
�t hear a word I said yesterday either. Picking me up? Now? Really?”
God, she was so pissed off, she could kill someone. Rick.
He held his arms away from his body, stretching them wide to show her they were empty. “I’m not holding you now. Not supporting you. I’m trapping you here so you damn well hear me. So my words enter those ears of yours and reverberate through your brain until they make sense.” His face was scarlet. Ropes of muscle stood out on his shoulders, and a vein pulsed in his neck. “I fucked those women. End of story. I fucked them because I couldn’t make love to any of them. Could never love any of them. Could never feel anything for any of them, because every single damned emotion I have is tied up in you. Invested in you. You are the only woman I feel anything for. The only woman I love. The only woman I have ever loved. And you are the only woman I have ever made love to. Sex without you means nothing. Nothing! An orgasm with no feeling. An empty release. That’s it.”
His chest heaved against hers. “I fucked them, and every damn time all I could think about was how much I wished it was you. How much I missed you. How goddamned empty my arms were even while I had a woman with me.” His face turned even redder and his nostrils flared, but his breath slowed, as did his words. He spoke more calmly. “Jesus, Bee, I thought it would pass. I thought maybe the second woman I was with would be more meaningful. But I was wrong. My heart was just as hollow. And the third woman? She just confirmed what I already knew. I am nothing without you. I’m an empty shell.” His eyes shimmered, and tears spilled over the edges, coursing down his cheeks. “Even the worst days spent with you were better than my best days alone.”
Bianca gaped at him.
“I ache for you, Bee. I dream about you. I love you. Only you. Every day without you is a study in loneliness, and I… I hate it.” His breath seemed to stop. “I don’t want to live without you anymore. You’re my life.”
For the first time, Bianca was left speechless. She couldn’t think of a word to say. Her head refused to process everything Rick had just told her at any great speed. One sentence at a time, her brain seemed to tell her. It was all it could take.