Spiral of Bliss: The Complete Boxed Set

by Nina Lane

  After we say goodbye and end the call, I turn to my computer and hammer out a few emails to railroad associations. I should be working on a paper about feudal social relationships, but I spend two hours looking for information about engine restoration, the details of which I don’t understand anyway.

  By late afternoon, I’m ready to get away from my desk. I grab my duffle bag with the intention of going to the gym. Instead I find myself driving to Archer’s garage.

  He’s crouched beside a Harley, checking the tires. He glances up when my shadow falls over him.

  “Hey, man.” He stands and reaches for a greasy rag. “What’re you doing here?”

  “You want to go out for a beer?”

  “With you?”

  “Yeah, with me.” Discomfort flickers in my chest. “Who else?”

  “Uh, sure.” Archer tosses the rag aside and jerks his thumb toward the office. “Just gotta finish a few things.”

  I follow him into the office and sit on the worn sofa, noticing the half-eaten sub sandwich on the desk.

  “You remember those weird sandwiches you used to like?” I ask. “Swiss cheese and ketchup. Peanut butter and mayo.”

  Archer chuckles, his attention on the computer. “I was a weird kid.”

  “I was a ten-year-old expert on the Crusades and King Arthur,” I remind him. “That didn’t make for great small talk with other kids on the soccer field.”

  “You never had a problem with anyone.”

  Except me.

  The unspoken words hang in the air. Though Archer and I have patched things up, we’ve never talked much about the old slings and arrows that broke apart our relationship in the first place—the fight when I told him our father wasn’t Archer’s real father.

  It’s a memory still corroded with regret. I’ll never know how different things would have been if I hadn’t revealed the secret my mother wanted desperately to keep. If Archer hadn’t discovered he wasn’t a true West.

  Or if he’d known how often I’d wished I was the one with a different father—not because I was ungrateful for what Richard West had done for me, but because I’d never been able to deviate from my set path. Archer had spent his life veering off paths. Making his own.

  “Hey, I was doing some research on the steam locomotive.” Archer pulls a stack of papers out of a drawer. “Looks like I can order the parts from a dealer in Tennessee. He also put me in touch with an engineer who built one of the engines.”

  Relief rises in me as I take the papers. “That’s great, man, thanks. I didn’t know where to start with the engine stuff.”

  I look through the papers as Archer finishes his work, then goes into the other room to change.

  Again, not for the first time, I wonder if things would have been different if my brother had followed his mechanical inclinations toward engineering or a white-collar job that would have made our father proud. Then I think there was probably little Archer could have done to make our father proud—through no fault of his own.

  “Where should we go?” Archer comes out of the backroom, pulling a T-shirt over his head. “I could go for some food too.”

  “Pizza?”

  “Always.”

  We head out to my car, and I drive to a combination pizza parlor and arcade that has both classic and new video games. Wooden tables line the place, filled with teens and older, beer-drinking guys.

  I get us a table, and Archer goes to the counter to order. He returns with two beers and a bag full of tokens.

  “Challenge,” he says, sliding into the booth across from me. “Lowest overall score buys the tokens, pizza, and beer.”

  “Challenge accepted.” I click my bottle against his.

  When the pizza arrives, we divide it up and eat. Thankfully, our conversation isn’t as strained as I’d thought it would be. Archer and I can still talk about sports, cars, politics, and music, even if we have different opinions.

  “Hey, I’m taking Nicholas to the downtown fire truck parade next weekend,” I tell him, reaching for another slice of pizza. “They let the kids sit in the trucks at the end of the parade. You want to go with us?”

  “Sure, but only if I get to turn on the siren.”

  I grin. “I’ll make arrangements.”

  He grabs the jar of pepper flakes and shakes some onto his pizza. “Liv hear anything about the loan for the party truck?”

  I shake my head, still not liking the idea of her tackling a new venture right now—and not liking that I don’t like it. Much as I want to support everything Liv wants to do, I’ll be damned if our marriage is going to get derailed because she can’t keep her mind off one project or another.

  “I have a lead on another pickup they could use,” Archer says. “I’ll check it out before Kelsey and I go to Texas.”

  “Thanks. When do you leave?”

  “After the festival. Liv asked me to help out at the children’s stage, and Kelsey is organizing the art booths. What did you get roped into?”

  “Nothing yet. I’ll probably hang out with Nicholas.” I take another swallow of beer. Don’t know if it’s the alcohol or what, but I say, “So Kelsey said you want to marry her.”

  Archer’s jaw tightens. “Yeah.”

  “She’s independent,” I say. “Likes to run her own show.”

  “You don’t need to tell me anything about my girl,” Archer says. “I know her.”

  “She tell you why she doesn’t want to get married?”

  “Just that everything’s so great… which it is… that she doesn’t want it to change.” Archer shrugs. “Makes no sense. She drives into storms, man. She travels all over the country. Hell, all over the world. She studies tornados, which are always changing.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” I suggest. “When everything else changes, her relationship with you doesn’t. Security, you know?”

  Archer doesn’t respond. A shadow crosses his face, one I recognize all too well. The lingering sense that he’s still not good enough for a woman like Kelsey March.

  “Let’s do it.” Archer pushes his bottle away and grabs the bag of game tokens. “Pac-Man first. You’re going down.”

  We spend the next couple of hours moving from one video game to the next, breaking only for more beer before firing at asteroids, speeding down a NASCAR track, battling street fighters, and dodging Donkey Kong. I keep track of our scores in my notebook, which makes Archer laugh.

  We return to our table to finish the cold pizza. After I tally our scores, I push the notebook across to Archer with a grimace.

  “You win by eight hundred points,” I say. “Centipede put you over the top. I never did like that game.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” Archer tears the page out of the notebook and puts it in his pocket. “Souvenir. I can’t remember the last time I beat you at a game, so I’ll take what I can get.”

  We clink our bottles. I glance at my watch.

  “I should go in about half an hour,” I say. “I told Liv I’d be home by nine. She took Nicholas to a kids’ concert at the museum.”

  “So how’s it been?” Archer asks, chewing on a stale crust of pizza. “Parenting.”

  I wonder if he wants me to tell him it’s incredible, phenomenal, all that I dreamed it would be. In some ways, it is. In other ways, not so much.

  I pick at the label on my beer bottle and don’t answer.

  “Dean?”

  “Sometimes it’s great,” I finally admit. “Other times it’s tough. Or it’s even great and tough at the same time.”

  Archer remains silent, like he’s waiting for me to continue.

  “I mean, Nicholas is amazing,” I say. “And Liv is an incredible mother. It’s fucking insane how much I love them. There’s stuff that’s beyond anything, like Nicholas saying Daddy for the first time or taking his first steps, or watching h
im laugh. Times like that I feel like even if I had a million hearts, it still wouldn’t be enough.”

  I continue picking at the label. The noise of the video games drifts from the arcade.

  “But?” Archer asks.

  “Man, it’s rough sometimes.” I shake my head. “When he’s tired or cranky and can’t tell you what he wants. Or when Liv and I can’t do things the way we used to. Or when Nicholas won’t sleep. One time last year he got sick overnight, like burning up with a fever and having trouble breathing, and he ended up in ICU.

  “Longest night of my life. I started imagining what might happen to him, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. It was so fucking terrifying. Then when we knew he’d be okay, I almost hit the floor with relief.”

  I concentrate on peeling the label off the bottle, not sure where this is all coming from, but not regretting that I’m telling my brother.

  “I fell in love with Liv fast,” I say. “Hard too, like bam. And I figured that was enough, like I didn’t need or want anything else for the rest of my life. I’d won the lottery. All I needed was her.

  “Then we had Nicholas, and suddenly there are two people in the world I can’t protect from everything bad. I can’t fix all their problems, right all the wrongs done to them, always make it better. And no matter how often I tell myself it’s not rational to want all that, I still do. I always will. But I have to live with the fact that I can’t. And that sucks, man.”

  I sit back, sweeping the litter of paper on the table into a pile. Then I shake my head, embarrassed by the confession.

  “You remember when Liv had the miscarriage?” Archer asks. “And you had it in your head I’d upset her in some way?”

  Shame scorches my chest. “I remember. Sorry, man. I was messed up.”

  “Yeah. But I got it. Why you’d think that, I mean. Why you expected me to screw up or didn’t trust me. I worked hard at baiting you my whole life. I wanted you to think the worst of me because it was what I thought of myself. Until I met Kelsey.”

  I glance at him. He’s staring at his bottle, his forehead creased.

  “It’s the same thing,” he says. “I thought she was all I’d need. But I want more. I want to give her everything, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “But what do you do when the woman you love doesn’t want everything?” Archer asks.

  “You wait.”

  “Wait?”

  “Until she’s ready.”

  “Well, how do you know how long that’ll be?”

  “You don’t, man,” I say. “But you wait anyway. You wait for as long as it takes because you know there’s no other choice.”

  I get up from the booth and take out my wallet, dropping a few bills onto the table.

  “And I promise you, Archer,” I say. “The wait will give you the biggest damned prize of your life. And you’ll know you’d do it again, a thousand times over. You’d wait longer than an eternity for her. That’s how worth it she is.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  OLIVIA

  YES!

  I’m making a comeback, baby. I’m like Cher in the 1990s. I’m Martha Stewart after she got out of prison, and Justin Timberlake after he left NSYNC. I’m the Boston Red Sox in the ninth inning of the 2004 World Series.

  I am on top.

  Or, in this case, being on the bottom is just fine with me too. Not even work or a fancy job opening can deter Professor and Mrs. West from getting their groove back, good and hard. With apple pie.

  I hum a little tune as I get breakfast ready a few days after our hot kitchen encounter and Dean’s continued lessons, which have me on edge pretty much all the time now. Between that and remembering how it felt to sit on the counter and let him drive into me, my breasts jostling, his cock slamming into me again and again… I shiver. My heart thumps.

  Oh, yeah. I still got it. Hot mama. Yummy mummy. MILF.

  “B’nana!” Nicholas calls from the table.

  My little fantasy breaks apart. “Just a sec.”

  I grab a banana and slice it in half, removing the peel as I bring it to the table and set it on Nicholas’s plate. Dean left for campus early this morning, which is sort of a bummer since Nicholas is scheduled for daycare this morning. I could have dropped him off, then come back home and…

  “Oat,” Nicholas remarks, digging into his cinnamon oatmeal.

  A bolt of embarrassment hits me as I gaze at my beautiful, innocent son.

  Good heavens, what kind of mother am I for being anxious to drop my kid at daycare so I can get sexy with my husband?

  This isn’t an issue they’ve covered in Mommy and Me class.

  I sit down and help Nicholas scrape up the last of his oatmeal before I get us both ready for the day. After running errands in the morning and working the afternoon shift at the café, I grab a takeout salad for dinner and head to City Hall to meet with the festival planning committee.

  Things are falling into place, with Edison Power still reviewing my package for a high-level sponsorship, the food vendors secured, and the art booths organized.

  I have a short list of things I’m going to ask Dean to help with. I’m happy about the idea that he and I will be doing something together that will benefit the town. We’ve always worked together for each other, our son, our marriage, and we restored the Butterfly House together, but we’ve never worked together for a greater cause, as it were.

  It’s close to eight by the time the meeting wraps up, and I drive back to the Butterfly House. The porch lights are on, but the house is dark.

  I go inside and turn on the kitchen lights. There’s a white covered box on the central island, with a note beside it.

  I smile and pull the lid off the box. Nestled in tissue paper is a black lace baby doll edged with purple ribbon, sheer thigh highs, a black G-string, three-inch black pumps, and… a long beige raincoat.

  I stare at the items in confusion for a second before shock hits me.

  Omigod. I’m supposed to put these on and go meet Dean at a hotel bar wearing nothing else.

  How wrong.

  How wicked.

  How scandalous.

  Excitement ripples down my spine.

  I’ve never been scandalous before. Heck, I’ve never even been risqué, unless you count the time Dean and I got hot and heavy on the seventeenth-floor balcony of an LA high-rise. Of course, the chances of anyone seeing us at that height were slim, but still, it was definitely a sexual adventure.

  And while Dean’s and my sex life has always—mostly—been fantastically satisfying and explosive, we’ve never swung from the chandeliers, experimented with exotic sex toys, played kinky games…

  Well, then. Maybe we should start.

  My heartbeat kicks up a notch. I can’t imagine it.

  Olivia West—thirty-three years old, the mother of a toddler, a respectable businesswoman and owner of a birthday party café, planner of the Mirror Lake Bicentennial Festival—getting kinky with her husband.

  On the other hand… Why not?

  Adventure awaits, right? This is certainly an adventure.

  I grab the bag and hurry up to the bedroom. I take a quick shower and rub lotion all over my body before slithering into the skimpy panties, black stockings, and baby doll, which pushes my breasts together into a plump, deep cleavage before draping over my hips to the tops of my thighs.

  Nice.

  I brush my hair until it shines, leaving it loose around my shoulders because that’s the way Dean likes it. I apply more dramatic makeup than usual—smoky eyeshadow, red lipstick, black mascara—and slip into the black heels.

  I go back downstairs to put on the raincoat. As I belt it around my waist, a wave of anxiety crashes over me.

  No way. I can’t do this. What if I get a flat tire or a speeding ticket and have
to deal with a police officer? Even if I do make it to the bar safely, I can’t sit there in a raincoat, knowing I’m half-naked underneath.

  Or can I?

  I take a deep breath and check my phone. No message from Dean, but a text from Kelsey appears. N’s playing drums w/Archer. Movie later. He’s having a ball. Enjoy your night w/o worry.

  I send her a quick thanks and tuck the phone into my purse. I give myself a firm nod in the mirror. Sure, I’m a mother, a businesswoman, festival coordinator, member of a mom’s group, et cetera… but I’m also a wife.

  More specifically, Dean West’s wife.

  As I drive downtown to the Wildwood Inn, I remember the storm of emotions rolling through me when Dean and I got married. Excitement, overwhelming love, joy, pride, astonishment—and a deep, abiding certainty that every part of my life had been leading me right to the moment when Dean closed his hand around mine and told me he would never let go.

  But I’d already known that. I’d known since the instant his fingers brushed the sleeve of my ratty gray sweatshirt the day we met. Once Professor Dean West takes hold of you, he doesn’t let go.

  I pull into the hotel parking lot and spend about five minutes gathering my courage before I get out of the car. It’s a little chilly out, so at least the coat isn’t completely out of place.

  I walk to the hotel entrance, making sure my belt is double-knotted and the coat is buttoned up to my neck. The doorman smiles at me and opens the door.

  My stomach tightens with nerves. The lobby is hushed and quiet, a few guests sitting in the carpeted area near the oak staircase. Across from the reception desk, voices rise from the bar—an elegant, Old World-style room with stained-glass windows, plush chairs and couches, and glittering lamps.

  I am not accustomed to frequenting such stylish places alone—much less wearing nothing but sexy lingerie under my coat—but I straighten my shoulders and enter the bar like I know exactly what I’m doing.

  I look around quickly, hoping to spot Dean seated in one of the intimate, shadowed booths or at least waiting for me at the bar. He’s nowhere to be seen.