Everything humans joining together should be.
It was perfect.
It was sex with Mike.
The man she’d loved from their first conversation.
Mike.
The man she said I do to three months after that conversation.
The man who’d destroyed what they had five years later.
Mike.
Christ, she missed him. Ached for him. Hated him and loved him.
And wanted him.
No matter how much he’d hurt her, she’d never stopped wanting him.
And now he was inside her again and everything in her heart, her soul, was thrumming with how perfect, how right it was.
“Mike…” She breathed his name, reveling in the way it fell from her. “Oh God, Mike…I love the way you fill me.”
Desire blazed in his eyes at her words. Pleasure etched his face. “We fit together, Button,” he murmured, cupping the side of her face as he withdrew from her sex in a slow backward stroke before sinking into her again.
That stinging burn filled her folds again, and once again she cried out in the pleasure both familiar and overwhelming.
Only Mike had ever made her feel like this; like she was the heart of a wild storm, the molten edge of a newly forged blade, a being created by a higher power for the soul purpose of existing in pleasure.
Only Mike had made her feel this way.
Was making her feel that way now.
With every stroke inside her, with every touch of his palm to her cheek, with every caress of his lips on hers.
The realization stole her breath.
Oh God, she truly was going to regret this.
It doesn’t matter. Not now. Now, it’s just about you and him and living and being…
“Make me come, babe,” she rasped, searching his eyes for an answer to which she didn’t know the question. “I want to come so bad it hurts. Make me come.”
His nostrils flared. His Adam’s apple jerked.
And then, with a guttural groan, he pulled back his hips and slammed into her. Hard. Fast. Deep.
“Yes,” she cried, scraping at his shoulders.
His hand on the back of her thigh tugged her knee higher. Her hamstring stretched, an exquisite pain of possession and domination.
He withdrew with a roll of his hips and thrust back into her again, again, capturing her lips, her chin, her throat with his lips as he did so.
His balls slapped against her butt on every powerful penetration. Her pussy contracted on his length with each invasion.
She arched beneath him, trying to take him deeper. Wanting him deeper.
Needing him inside her. All of him. Every inch of his pounding length.
A tingling heat swept over her flesh. The pit of her belly knotted. Tightened.
“I’m going,” she panted, meeting Mike’s strokes with hungry thrusts of her hips, “to come soon. Fuck, I’m going to…”
He crushed her mouth with his and drove deeper into her.
Impaled her completely and totally onto his length.
Her world splintered. Shattered. Filled with colour and ceased to exist.
She came, torn apart by her orgasm, by Mike’s body in hers. Remade by it with every powerful, constricting pulse.
And even as the force of her orgasm shuddered through her, she felt Mike’s strokes grow wilder, erratic. Faster. Savage.
Felt his body coil and thrum until it wasn’t just her cries of release filling the room, but his as well. A raw groan that ripped from his chest and heated the side of her neck.
“Oh God, Mike,” she gasped, arching into his slamming thrusts. “I can feel you coming. I can feel it pumping through your—”
The rest of her statement was lost to a keening cry as another orgasm turned her sex, her core, into a clenching spasm.
He held her, knee to their side, lips pressed to her throat, her shoulder, and emptied himself into her. Pumped into her. Over and over.
Until, as one—as it always had been—they slumped together on the bed, silent except for their matching ragged breaths and pounding hearts.
For a few moments—glorious moments Lena both remembered and craved—Mike stayed motionless on top of her. She trailed her fingertips up and down his back in lazy strokes, absorbing the incredible sensation of his sweat-slicked skin against hers, of his heat seeping into her body, of his cock—still thick and long despite being spent—still embedded in her sex. Oh God, how many times had they existed in this incredible post-sex perfection before?
So many times she had no way of counting. And like all those other times, it was as amazing, as wonderful and perfect, as the first time.
When he finally shifted, sliding off her body to lie beside her, she wanted to reach for him and beg him not to move.
She wasn’t ready for this to end.
She wasn’t ready for him to go.
For him to not be here with her when she woke in the morning.
She wasn’t ready to eat breakfast without his smile, his laughter, his witty running commentary on their network’s morning news program’s performance.
She wasn’t ready to have a shower alone. To drive to work without him in the car with her, sharing that unique silence that only couples who have shared each other’s lives for so long seemed to have.
She wasn’t ready to not feel his gaze on her profile as they watched television at night, or sat at a red traffic light together.
She wasn’t ready to not find his warm smile, to not see his eyes filled with love, desire, when she turned her head…
She wasn’t ready.
Christ, she wasn’t ready for him to not be in her life again.
What had she done?
Why had she done it?
“I feel like someone should say something ’round about now. Something flippant or dismissive about how incredible that was.”
At Mike’s statement, uttered on a breath that was part-laugh, part-sigh, she rolled her head to the side and looked at him.
He was lying on his back, his gaze roaming the ceiling.
She studied the hawkish line of his nose, the ridge of his brow. His eyebrows were dipped in a frown, as if he were struggling with a situation beyond him.
Of course he is. The pair of you just did something beyond stupid, given you’re one signature away from getting divorced.
“Mike,” she croaked. “Why did…”
She stopped, her stomach a clenching mess.
He rolled his head to meet her gaze. “Why did I what? Fall in love with you? Forget how much it hurt when you told me it was over? Ask Usain Bolt if he’d considered taking up ballet?”
Her heart thumped hard in her chest. “Did you forget?”
He shook his head.
She stared at him. A part of her mind registered the fact the tops of her thighs were damp with his seed; that they’d gone at each other like sex-starved teenagers while both still half dressed. The subtle wedge behind her back told her that her skirt was bunched up above her hips, her shirt draped over her chest, one boob exposed to the room, the other covered in silk. Mike’s jeans still covered his legs.
The rest of her mind, however, couldn’t do anything but linger on the fact they’d made love again.
A knife twisted in her chest.
She’d invited him here for that very reason: to fuck him. But she hadn’t intended this.
She’d planned to screw his brains out, make him her sexual slave, and then ask him to leave. Punish him for what he’d thrown away.
Now, the thought of him leaving…it tore at her sanity in a way she wasn’t prepared for.
Lena’s heart clenched. Christ, how was she going to make herself hate him again?
Think of the images, Bailey. Think of what he did with Naomi. Think of what she showed you. Think of what you heard…
What she heard…what she saw…what she was told…
Chapter Six
Stomach rolling, Lena turned her head and focuse
d on the ceiling, seeing image after image of Mike and their dog-walker instead.
The young girl, just turned eighteen when employed by them to walk their dog whenever they were both away on assignment, had confronted Lena with an iPhone full of them the day after the Instagram posts.
Not just the ones she’d posted to the social network, the ones where Mike was clearly naked in bed, stretched out flat in a tangle of sheets, arm rested over his eyes in his usual post-coitus repose, Naomi curled up clearly naked beside him, smiling.
No, those were only the images the world got to see.
Lena got to see the rest.
The ones of Mike wearing only a towel in what was clearly a hotel room.
The selfies of Naomi leaning against a balcony rail, wearing a robe with the Hilton crest on it while Mike swam in the pool below.
The ones of Mike wearing only a pair of boxer briefs as he played on the floor with their dog; Mike buying champagne at their local Bottle-O; Mike in their shower soaping up amongst the steam; Mike asleep in their bed with Naomi sitting on the end, naked, her hair a mess…
Those images, plus so many more, had torn Lena apart.
Images of Mike at cafes, images of Mike half undressed on the beach, Mike on what looked like a golf course; Mike jogging, eating eggs on their apartment balcony; Mike getting dressed in their bedroom; Mike playing with their dog in their living room…
In more than one, he was smiling towards the camera. More than one of them was taken in their apartment.
In a sickening number of them he was half naked.
Naomi had told Lena that she and Mike had been secret lovers for months. The images proved how often they were together, she’d declared, smug satisfaction in her face.
“Did you think he’d want to spend the rest of his life with a fat cow like you when he could be with me?” she’d asked as Lena had scrolled through the images.
The word fat had lashed at Lena. She’d never had an issue with her curves before, but then, she’d never had a slim, nubile eighteen-year-old call her fat before either. Especially not a slim, nubile eighteen-year-old who was apparently sleeping with her husband.
She’d jerked her stare up from Naomi’s phone and its offending images, her stomach rolling.
Naomi had smiled. Lena had never seen such a smug, venomous expression in her life. “Do you know how many times he’s told me fucking you is like fucking a bag of squishy jelly? Do you know how many times we met at a hotel so he can fuck the memory of your gross body out of his head?”
Fat cow.
Squishy jelly.
Fuck the memory of your gross—
Lena distinctly remembered her fear she was going to throw up. “I don’t believe…” she’d begun, the words a weak scratch.
Naomi had plucked her phone from Lena’s fingers, tapped and slid her fingers over its screen a few times and then held it up.
“Seven p.m. The Mecure.” Mike’s voice came from the phone’s tiny speaker. “Make sure the reservation isn’t under my name. I don’t want the media or Lena hearing about it. It’ll ruin everything if that happens. I couldn’t exist without you, Naomi. You’ve made my—”
Naomi had killed the recording before Mike could finish whatever he was saying. Had smiled at Lena. Had shoved the phone in her bag, tugged open the neckline of her shirt to revealed her not-even-close-to-squishy-jelly cleavage and leant closer to Lena. “His cologne is still on my skin,” she murmured, a dreamy glaze in her eyes. “Smell him there?”
And sure enough, the subtle scent of Mike’s favourite cologne, the cologne Lena had bought him for their fifth wedding anniversary, threaded into her breath.
“So you see,” Naomi had continued, fixing her shirt and smiling at Lena again, “it is me he really wants to be with. Didn’t you wonder why he bought you a dog in the first place when you were both too busy to walk it? It was so he could be near me. So he had an excuse for me to come to your home. Be in your home.”
Lena’s stomach had rolled again. Her head had roared.
Five years of trusting him, loving him, being healed by him, and suddenly she was the woman cheated on again.
But it was so much worse this time. This time, the man who’d cheated on her had made her believe she was his world. Had made her believe he would never hurt her.
“I’m sure you don’t want me to share these photos with world, do you? Surely, what I posted to Instagram was enough to get the message through to you. Mike is mine. Or do you want the world to laugh at you as much as we laugh at you every time we—”
Lena had spun on her heel and hurried away from Naomi before she did something she’d regret. Like slap her.
Or throw up on her.
She’d cancelled her lunch with Mike, the one she’d promised him that morning over the phone; a lunch she’d known he was going to spend trying to convince her he was innocent. A lunch she’d suspected would finish with her trusting her husband and believing his every word.
With a single text, she’d brought any chance of that to an end.
We’re over. Don’t contact me again.
To give Mike his credit, he hadn’t. But to this day, he still proclaimed—via his lawyer—to be innocent.
Surprisingly, he never asked for custody of the dog. But when it died a week after she’d kicked him out from what the vet called severe kidney failure, he’d sent her flowers and a card that simply read, Your pain, your grief, are mine as well. M. XO
“Mike,” she said, rolling her head to look at him now. Her heart thumped in her throat like a sledgehammer. Her stomach clenched. “Sometimes, almost every day since…since those Instagram images were posted, I’ve wanted to believe you were innocent.”
His jaw bunched. A shadow darkened his eyes. “Wanted to. But can’t, right?”
She swallowed. She had no idea what she was doing. Not now. Now, she seemed to be walking a tightrope over a chasm ready to swallow her and she had no recourse but to keep moving, regardless of how much she wanted to scramble back to the safety of the ground.
But that ground was a world lived empty. A world without Mike…
Christ, what was she doing?
“I called you once,” she said, meeting his gaze despite the pain she saw building in it, like a storm threatening to devour a spring afternoon. “A month after…after I asked you to leave.”
He studied her, silent. His Adam’s apple worked up and down in his throat.
“But I ended the call before the connection could be made,” she finished.
The memory of that moment tore at her now. She’d been watching him on the news, a month into his new position as N@9’s head sports anchor. He’d been on location in Melbourne, talking with the ex-captain of the Australian cricket team about the Aussies’ chances of beating the Brits in the upcoming Ashes tour.
Seeing him on the screen, hearing his voice, his playful laugh…her entire being reacted. Ached for him. She’d started to dial his number, missing him so much it hurt to exist. Needing to talk to him.
And then she’d seen something in the crowd behind him that had turned that ache to a cruel, mocking agony.
Naomi. Standing amongst the gathered cricket fans, watching Mike with hungry eyes.
So much for being set up, she’d thought.
She’d turned off the television and never watched him again.
A week later, when her lawyer informed her Naomi had been deported to the UK for overstaying her visitor’s visa, she’d tried to be happy in a gloating, smug way.
Instead, an empty hollowness filled the space in her chest where her heart used to be. She’d reached for her phone. Had dialed Mike’s number. And like before, ended the call before the connection could be made.
The images Naomi had shown her, the recording she’d played, had haunted her too much. If she called Mike, saw him, she’d only do something she’d regret later.
Ha. Like you have now?
Did she regret it, though? Lying here with him, bei
ng loved by him, it felt so wonderful. So right…
“What did you want to say to me?”
There was a guarded tension to Mike’s question. She didn’t blame him. Nothing about what was happening in the room they’d once shared could be considered relaxed now. And to think, a few minutes ago they’d been going at it like rabbits.
Making love, Lena. You’d been making love. With your husband. Your—
“I don’t know,” she answered, throat tight. “I think I just wanted to hear your voice.”
A dry snort fell from him, surprising her. “All you had to do was turn on the telly at nine o’clock to hear my voice, Button. ‘And now, here’s News at Nine’s sports report with Michael Bailey’, remember?”
A blush heated her cheeks.
The week she’d kicked him out, he’d found a new job with N@9.
And then three weeks ago, the network owner had offered her the job of N@9’s executive producer and she’d been unable to say no.
Lying beside Mike now, her emotions and thoughts beyond turbulent, she realized she’d said yes not because of the exorbitant income and perks attached to her contract, but because she’d no longer have an excuse to avoid him.
Apart from the fact he cheated on you, you mean?
“If you’d called,” he said, expression unreadable, “I probably wouldn’t have answered.”
Lena drew in a short breath. “Why not?”
He laughed, the sound as dry and mirthless as his earlier snort. “I’d spent four weeks being angry with you. Angry you didn’t trust me, angrier you refused to talk to me. Very angry. If I’d answered, I may not have been very nice to you.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Christ, how many times was she going to say that tonight?
He shifted onto his side and traced the backs of his knuckles down the line of her cheekbone, his eyes roaming her face. “The fact you wanted to hear my voice is a start. That you were ready to believe what I had to say…that would have been better.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “There was more. I missed…I missed you. I missed your smile. I know everything is fucked up, but can…can you smile at me? Now? Just to let me know you—”
Switching it On Page 6