“That won’t fix what is wrong.”
“Why not? Windy, all I want in the world is to take care of you. Tell me how.”
“That’s the problem. Don’t you see? I don’t want to be taken care of. I want to take care of myself.”
“But you need me. You’re a mess without me.”
“No. I’m a mess when I am trying to balance you with the other things in my life. I am tired of having to apologize for everything I want, everything I care about.”
“Then don’t apologize.”
Windy shook her head. “I am not making this clear enough. What I am trying to say is that I am very fond of you, Bill, but I am not in love with you. And you’re not in love with me. With who I really am.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
Bill’s eyes narrowed. “This is about Ash Laughton, isn’t it?”
Windy frowned. Was he listening to her? “This is about you and me.”
“You’re in love with him.” He laughed. “You stupid fool, you’ve gone off and fallen for your boss.”
Windy was having trouble recognizing Bill. “Even if that were true, it would not change the fact that you and I are not going to be able to make each other happy.”
“Really? We made each other plenty happy the other night. Saturday. Remember that? Or were you fantasizing about him the whole time?”
“Please, don’t do this. I care about you and I am sorry I am hurting you. Can’t we end this amicably? This isn’t about sex and it isn’t about anyone else. It is just about the two of us.”
“Bull. You wouldn’t be moving on unless you thought you had something better in the works.” Bill’s model handsome face got ugly. “I feel bad for you, Windy. I don’t know what he told you, but you’re a fool if you think he’ll take you. I’ve read about him in the paper. He’s a local celebrity, he can have any woman he wants. He doesn’t need to tie himself down to a thirty-four-year-old woman with a kid and a closet full of emotional baggage. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but you’ve always been interested in knowing the truth.” He got up, grabbed his garment bag, and moved to the front door.
Windy followed him. “I’m sorry, Bill. Really sorry it had to end this way.”
He sneered at her. “Not as sorry as you will be. You think you hurt me? You’re the one who is going to be hurting. You’re going to regret this for the rest of your life. I can do better than you, but you’ll never do better than me.”
She gently closed the door in his face.
She locked it, put on the security chain, and walked, not numb anymore, not shattered, not like she thought she would feel at all, into the living room. Mostly she was aware of feeling sorry. Sorry that she had treated Bill shabbily, not because of Ash but because she had never been honest with him. He could not really love her, because she’d never even let him see who she was. She hadn’t let herself see. Until now. A thirty-four-year-old woman with a kid and a closet full of emotional baggage. He was right. That was what she was. And she was tired of pretending to be something else.
Tired of trying to do everything right and getting it all wrong.
On her hands and knees she pulled the brown cardboard box she still hadn’t unpacked off the bottom shelf of the bookcase and opened it. It mostly contained papers, back taxes, the documents about Cate’s money. But on top, Windy knew, would be the photos of her wedding to Evan.
She lifted the photos out, pictures jammed into an album but never glued in, because somehow she never had time, and then Evan died and she couldn’t look at them. Hadn’t in over three years. She opened the album now and saw two faces smiling up at her, faces she hardly recognized. Her and Evan, seven years ago. No, she corrected, nearly eight. Veteran’s Day weekend. This year would have been their eighth anniversary, she realized. Coming up fast. But she had started to forget about it, as other dates—Cate’s birthday, Brandon’s birthday—other people, became more important.
In the photo, Evan is looking right into the camera, pointing and laughing. And she, beaming, is looking at him.
That one picture captured their whole relationship. Not that Evan hadn’t loved her, he had, as much as he was capable of loving any living person. But he loved fun, loved being alive, loved experiences more.
After he died—left her, Bill was right about that, it was how it felt, like he’d made a choice—she had looked for the opposite of that, someone who would never give themselves up to anything wholly, who could always be counted on to keep their feet on the ground. She’d sought safety, started driving slower, talking quieter, stopped taking risks. She’d chosen Bill as the antidote to Evan, as if Evan had been some sort of poison that had to be driven out of her bloodstream by seriousness.
That had been her mistake, trying to drive Evan out. It was okay to still love him, love what they had had, and want something different. She had known it for weeks, but it had taken the past two days, this precise level of exhaustion and emotion, to make it all seem so clear.
Outside, it started to rain, the first real rain Las Vegas had gotten this year. Windy looked at the photos one by one, seeing a couple she didn’t know, two people whose lives seemed to be disconnected to her own. She had changed in those eight years, but not the way she had thought. She thought she was growing up. What she’d actually done was hide.
At the bottom of the box she found a tiny Zip-loc envelope, the kind she used for evidence in her lab. It had Evan’s wedding ring in it. It had once held hers, too.
No more hiding, working so hard to be a good girl. No more running away. No more trying to please someone else, be something she wasn’t, and doing a lousy job of it. Windy went upstairs, took a quick shower, put on her favorite underwear and an outfit she had not worn in over three years. She sealed the thank-you note Cate had written to Ash in a watertight bag, went into the garage, and pulled the cover off the bright yellow 1995 Ducati 916 motorcycle that had been Evan’s wedding present to her. Seeing the bike again, its gorgeous lines, was like running into a friend you hadn’t seen in years. Not realizing how much you missed them until you were reunited. God, she loved that bike.
She didn’t wonder if it would start, if there was gas in the tank. She just snapped on her helmet, pulled the bike out of the garage, and turned the key. It purred to life as though it had been waiting for her.
The cops watching her house turned to stare as she roared down the street, revving the engine as loud as it would go, drawing attention to herself, and not caring.
She had worked so hard to keep Evan’s voice out of her head all those years out of fear and guilt. But she was done with that. Now she heard him say, “I think motorcycles are the most fun in the rain.” And she said to herself, to him, “You know, honey, you might be right.”
Harry watched Windy roar off, and then the officers who had been guarding her begin to gather their cups and get ready to go. Like a magician, poof!, Harry was making them disappear. He was letting Windy think she had been granted her life. Letting her think there was a reprieve, that he was gone, that she was safe. She looked relaxed, ready to believe that the nightmare was behind her. That the body she found was his, that the Home Wrecker was dead. Believe she could start the next week with only burglaries and car thefts, easy crimes. Believe she would see her daughter again, laugh again, eat pizza again.
“Enjoy it while you can, Windy,” he said to himself. He would give her twenty-four hours to revel in it. Then he would be waiting to show her she was wrong and make her beg.
CHAPTER 84
Ash’s address was in a part of town she hadn’t been to, mostly industrial, and it took her a moment to realize that his place must be somewhere in the white brick warehouse she was standing in front of. There was an auto-body shop with two guys taking a cigarette break outside it, and a sign over a closed roll-down metal door that said FANTA-Z DESIGNS AND AIRBRUSH. She pushed the big lit-up button with the word LAUGHTON on it next to the industrial door. After a moment, she
heard a click and pushed it open.
“Up here,” Ash’s voice said at the top of a steel staircase. “All the way at the top.” He watched, spellbound, as she came up the last flight of stairs, wearing a tight black leather jacket, black leather pants, black boots, her helmet cradled under her arm. When he could talk he said, “You look like an action hero.”
She did not stop when she got to the door but kept going, walking right into his house, right into his arms, no hesitation. She brought her mouth to his and kissed him hungrily on the lips, said, “I broke up with Bill this afternoon” and he said, “Marry me.”
They kissed around the words, touching and smiling, wanting to make up for the time they lost, keeping their eyes open so they didn’t miss anything, kissing instead of breathing, and better. Her jacket came off and his hands touched her hair, the back of her neck, the line of her jaw, her nipples through her T-shirt, and her hands clutched his forearms and she wrapped them around her.
He said, I’ve never been kissed like this before and she said, This is a hundred times better than I dreamed it would be, and he said, I’m a little nervous about competing with Evan and she said, Believe me don’t be, this is the best kiss I ever had.
“Me too,” Ash said.
Windy pulled her lips away and leaned her forehead against his. She wanted this to be forever, something she was inside of, not something she was watching. She wanted to be able to be her, no apologies. She wanted him to know what he was getting into. “There are things about me you don’t know, Ash. Important things.”
“Like what?”
“I toss and turn a lot in bed. Wake up at night.”
He kissed her forehead, her cheek. “Me too. We can tell each other stories.”
She said, “I eat cookies in bed and make crumbs.”
“I sometimes stay up all night to finish a book.”
“I fall asleep with my reading light on.”
His hands slid through her hair, so damn soft, pulling her head back, exposing her neck to his mouth. He murmured, “I wear reading glasses.”
“Really?”
Ash looked at her. “Yes. Want to see?”
There was something about that image that caught Windy, something solid and yet sexy, Ash in bed in his reading glasses, a future of sitting up at night with him, reading next to him, years spreading out like a landscape. She could see it, see herself in it, not from the outside but there. And she knew she wanted it.
Her hands went under his sweater, pulling it off, then catching her breath at the sight of him without a shirt on. She said, “Sometimes I use all the hot water when I shower.”
“We’ll have to get a larger hot water heater.” He lifted her shirt over her head. The last barrier.
Their hands were everywhere now.
“Sometimes I can be immature.”
“Sometimes Jonah and I put on Bike Patrol uniforms so we can ride up and down the steps in front of the Venetian hotel on our mountain bikes.”
“You do not.”
“About every six weeks.”
“I sometimes leave my shoes in the middle of the floor.”
“I sometimes forget to refold my towels.”
“I forget to come home for dinner.”
Ash saying, “Oh,” as her fingers undid the top button of his jeans and her hands slid inside. “I, ah, know where you work. Cate and I can come find you. Even bring you tacos or Chinese food sometimes. Not on school nights, though.”
“I’m selfish and moody.”
“Me too.”
“I’m absorbed in my work, and my daughter, and I have no time or energy for anything el—” His lips were on the edge of her nipple, gently kissing it.
His head came up, a finger going to her lips, and he said, “That’s not true. You don’t have time and energy for things that are separate from your work and your daughter, but that’s not what I want to be. I want to be in there with you. I want all of it, not just the easy parts.”
They stepped out of their pants, wearing nothing but their underwear now, Ash in white jockey shorts that hugged his body in a way that made him look like a sculpture, Windy thought. Windy in a rust-colored silk bra and panties with beige lace edging that Ash would have slain dragons to protect and wanted her out of almost as bad.
He slid his hands over her rib cage, down her waist, cradling her behind through the little silk panties, discovering a tiny bow on them at the base of her spine.
She pulled away. “Look at me, Ash. Really look. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with a kid and a closet full of emotional baggage.”
Ash said, “And I am a thirty-seven-year-old man who moved every year as a child and is really good at unpacking. And who loves you, Windy. Every part of you.” He dragged her toward him and held her pressed against his body, hugged close. “You look like the best thing in the world to me.”
She said, her last protest, “You have lines on your ankles from your socks.”
“So do you.”
“Make love to me, Ash.”
And they tumbled together onto the wide chenille couch. Ash leaned on one elbow and pushed the cup of her delicate silk bra aside to kiss a birthmark he saw on her left breast. Windy said, “I can take that off if you want me to.”
“I want you to do whatever makes you most comfortable. I think you look beautiful just like this.”
Words Windy had been waiting more than fifteen years to hear. But words that made her scared again, scared she would disappoint him. “I know you’ve had a lot of experience and I’m afraid I’m not very good in bed.”
That got Ash’s attention. He said, “Then it’s a good thing we’re on a couch.” And, serious, “Windy, you are all I want in the world. I’ve never done this before, made love to the woman I am in love with. Just having you here with me, like this, just being close to you, is better then anything that has ever happened to me. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He kissed her on the lips, then on the stomach, his hand sliding under the silk of her panties and touching her there. She moaned and he stroked her harder, making her arch toward him, her hand coming over his to stop it.
She said, “You have to stop or I’m going to, um—” Was there a polite way to say this?
“Come,” he supplied. “You are going to come. That is the point, sweetheart.” And put his mouth where his hand was, and sucked her clitoris between his lips, and heard her shout his name. Her bitten nails dug into his shoulders as his teeth nipped at her and then dug in harder as he slid a finger inside of her. Windy looked at his handsome, angular face between her thighs, eyes closed, frowning in concentration the way she’d seen him at the office but now all of that ferocious energy focused on her, on her body, watched his lips pressing around clitoris, his tongue dart out and over her, and let go. Came.
She pushed her hips up, into him, and he felt her body tighten, then shudder, felt her climax on his tongue and heard her cries and then her hands were pulling him up her body, pulling his mouth to hers.
“Ash,” she sighed his name, holding on to him, burying her face in his shoulder. “My goodness, Ash. Holy moley.”
She felt him begin to shake, and realized he was laughing. “Holy moley,” Ash repeated, laughing out loud. Laughing in a way he hadn’t laughed since elementary school. “Windy, you are fantastic.”
Now they were both laughing, until her hand went inside his briefs, slid up the length of him and she said, in a much more serious tone, “Holy moley.” She pulled his underwear off and looked at him and Ash felt more insecure than he could ever remember feeling. She ran her palm from the base to the tip of his penis, cradling his balls in one hand and petting him with the other. “You are so beautiful. You take my breath away.”
“Mine too,” Ash moaned, her fingers circling around him, pressing him against the soft skin of her thigh.
“I want to feel this inside of me,” she told him. Her eyes on her hands, watching the way his body moved when she touched him.
“I want that too,” Ash assured her. “In a second.” He tilted himself off the couch and went to rifle through the pockets of a jacket draped over the kitchen counter, coming back with a condom. He started to open it but she took the package from him, made him stand in front of her, pulled his jockey shorts off, cradled his penis in her hand, and rolled the condom on, slowly, with her fingers. She was meticulous and it was excruciating and the sexiest thing anyone had ever done to him, this woman who could make him want to explode just with birth control. She smoothed her hand over it, then kissed him on the tip, slid onto her knees on the furry white rug, and pulled him down on top of her.
“Now,” she said, pushing her panties to one side. “I can’t wait any longer.”
Her legs came around his waist as he filled her, taking him in all at once. They made love like teenagers, hungry and clumsy and having the time of their lives, all over each other like they’d never done this before and had been dreaming of this moment forever. They threw themselves together, nothing off limits, touching and tasting, daring to whisper secret desires that got played out as realities, ending up somehow on the kitchen counter, neither of them sure how they got there.
Spent, entwined together, laughing as Windy, her head under a basil plant, said, “Wowie.”
“Is that better or worse than ‘holy moley’?” Ash asked.
They went into the bedroom and took a nap on top of the sheets and then started all over, using up Ash’s supply of condoms, Windy asking why he kept them in a jacket pocket instead of in his bedroom or bathroom, and him explaining that he’d never had anyone to his house before like this.
“The kinds of relationships I had were more about hotels,” he said. “Or actually, motels.” Coming clean.
“Sounds kind of exciting.”
“No,” he told her. “Not like this.”
They ate leftover Chinese food naked in bed out of the cartons and talked about nonsense and held each other. Windy made Ash model his reading glasses, him looking so good in them that her heart stopped beating.
Bad Girl and Loverboy Page 38