I stuff the last bite of mine in my mouth and mumble, “I know.”
While she clears the final few fries from her plate, I decide this is as good a time as any.
“We need to talk.”
I read suspicion in her eyes when she turns them on me.
“About?”
“Us.”
She has trouble swallowing that final bite and grabs for her water to wash it down.
“What us? There hasn’t been an ‘us’ for just about all of the years we’ve known each other. Save for maybe a month or two. Any ‘us’ there may have been has long been washed out by over a decade of simply working together.”
Something about the way she formulates her response so readily makes me wonder if she thinks about what we were to each other—however brief—more than she’s willing to admit.
“That’s a load of bull, and you know it. There’s always been more.”
I grab our plates, set them on the far end of the coffee table, and turn my body toward her. I’m purposely confrontational. Bree is wired like I am in a lot of ways. She responds to any perceived threat with a full-frontal attack. The best way to get her talking is to poke at her armor.
Her body language screams disbelief even before she speaks.
“Did you hit your head or something? I was married for chrissakes.”
She makes a good play for disbelief but I’m not buying it. I never really did, I was just safer with her hidden behind the identity she’d woven, so I could justify what I’d done.
But I’m done giving myself that out, and I’m done accepting hers.
“Were you? I can’t remember ever meeting him, or you talking about him much. He was just a name you may have mentioned.”
“Ted Dillard, and we were married. For seven years, in fact,” she spits back. “If you don’t believe me, check the album on the bottom shelf.”
She points at the low bookcase underneath her TV. I spot the album and get up to grab it. The first page is a wedding picture of Bree wearing a sundress, her hair falling loose over her shoulders, holding a simple bouquet of daisies. With his arm casually around her shoulders stands a tall, blond-haired man with a boyish face, in dress uniform. Both are barefoot standing on the sand as they smile for the camera, a blue ocean in the background.
My gut sours, but then I notice the tension on Bree’s face, the tightness of her smile, and the way her shoulders are pulled up almost to her ears.
So maybe she was married, but she wasn’t happy about it.
“A military man,” I comment, putting the album back in its spot and reclaiming my seat beside her on the couch.
“Armed Forces warrant officer. Helicopter pilot at Fort Carson.”
“Fort Carson?” That’s in Colorado Springs, a good five-hour drive from here, if you’re lucky. “That’s quite the commute,” I point out, keeping a close eye out for her reaction.
“Worked for us.”
If her noncommittal response is intended to satisfy me, she’s sorely mistaken. It just makes the whole thing reek more like a marriage of convenience. What convenience though?
Fuck, my years of guilt-induced hands-off when it came to Bree are coming back to haunt me.
“Not being together?”
The Bree I knew from back then was enthusiastic, attentive, and grabbing every opportunity to get close. I can’t see her as satisfied and happy when her man is a fucking five-hour drive away.
Besides, he doesn’t look her type. Despite the military background, he looks too soft for her.
“We both had a career path when we went into it,” she hurries to explain with a shrug of her shoulders. “Both of our expectations were open and clear.”
That last comment is meant as a dig at me and I’ll grant her that. I turned like a damn leaf in the wind on her and deserve it.
“Really? That’s pretty advanced for someone you can’t have known for more than a month or so?”
A triumphant smirk tugs at the corner of her mouth.
“Ted and I have known each other since elementary school. We grew up in the same neighborhood. Went through high school together before we headed off to college.” She leans closer and very clearly articulates, “He showed up for my mother’s funeral.”
Christ. She doesn’t pull any punches.
I have no excuse for not showing up. Zero. Thought I had one back then, a new client who kept me pulling double shifts—seeing that we were short-handed at the time—but in the end I was avoiding her. Afraid if I showed up, saw her in pain, I’d lose what little resolve I had. I convinced myself it was better, for Bree, if I stayed away.
“Whatever happened to wanting a family? Or your dream house with a view of the canyons?”
Low blows, and I know it, but it’s the only way I know to open up the old wounds so we can get at the truth.
The impact is instant as pain shows in the form of shining eyes and shocked mouth.
“Dreams change.” She averts her gaze and speaks so softly I can barely make out the words.
Raw. She sounds raw.
It’s exactly what I was aiming for, but now that I’m here I can’t bring myself to pull her story from her.
Instead, I cup her face and lean in to brush my lips against her slack ones.
“They don’t have to,” I whisper back.
Chapter Nine
Bree
I should be shocked at the feel of his mouth on mine.
Yet it’s like coming home.
His gentle persuasion at the seam of my lips is still so painfully familiar. How is it possible that in all the years, after what were only a few months of being together, the memory of them is still seared into my being?
His taste and his touch wake a craving I used to be insatiable with, and nothing or no one since has been able to fill that hunger.
Oh, I’ve tried, but somehow none of the modest number of men, who saw more than one date, were able to erase the memory of this.
My body responds as if it’s the most natural thing to open my mouth to his tongue and slip my arms around his neck. His hair is shorter now and I don’t have much to grab onto so my nails scratch restlessly over his scalp.
He used to love that, having my fingers in his hair and, apparently, he hasn’t forgotten that either as he moans deep in my mouth. I try to shift, wanting to get closer, needing to feel the pressure of his chest against my breasts, eager for his touch.
Instead, he pulls his mouth away and leans his forehead against mine. Already we’re both panting like racehorses, and I wonder if he feels as overcome by that same insatiable need we used to share.
“Still my Tygrys,” he whispers before lifting his head and looking down at me.
The golden swirls seem to move in the blue of his eyes and I can’t avert mine.
“Why?”
I’m not sure where the question comes from or exactly what it is I want to know—maybe all of it—but it hangs between us for endless seconds as he searches my face.
“I thought I was doing the right thing, but I was so wrong.”
His voice is raw, tormented, like the look in his eyes I would sometimes catch but quickly dismiss as a figment of my imagination.
With his fingertips he traces my face, eyebrows, cheekbones, down my nose, and to the small groove bisecting my upper lip.