Molly O'Keefe - His Wife for One Night

He sighed, but the twinkle didn’t diminish. “You’re probably right.”

“See—”

“But I don’t care,” he said. “I want you to come up to the roof with me.”

She’d had just enough to drink to know that going up there wasn’t a good idea. She was sad and nostalgic and turned on by the sight of his hand around the bottle of wine.

But she was Mia and he was Jack, and the years and memories between them were a hard knot of grit and rock that neither of them could forget or gloss over.

There was a lot they needed to talk about. His dad, Walter. The ranch and the rough winter they’d had. The financial problems that only seemed to get worse every time she turned around.

“Come on, Mia,” Jack said, that twinkle turning into something far more persuasive. “Let’s go.”

And that was it. Five years after marrying him, she was throwing her hat in with the devil.

The problems could wait.

Tonight wife, she reminded herself. Tomorrow divorce.

JACK SWIPED a key card and opened the door to a secluded rooftop patio.

“That kind of seems like cheating,” she grumbled.

“You expected something else?”

“A little breaking and entering, yeah,” she said, following him to a cold fire pit surrounded by single and double chaise longues.

“I’ve changed my ways,” Jack said, and she snorted.

“You don’t believe me?”

“I’ve known you my whole life, Jack. And you don’t change.”

“Well, neither do you,” he said. “Pick a seat, any seat.”

Mia didn’t play coy. She took one of the doubles, setting down the plate of food he’d given her to hold and he sat down next to her.

His was a living heat, an electric presence, and her body woke up with a tingle and a start.

The Swiss Army knife he pulled out of his pocket looked as if it could launch rockets. He popped open the wine.

“You sure you should leave the party?” she asked. “I mean, it’s kind of your shindig.”

“I did my part. Oliver can handle it from here.” He handed her a glass of wine, her fingertips brushing his and as stupid as it seemed—as high school and clichéd—a zing ran through her blood, warming her from her toes to her hair and everywhere in between.

“Besides,” he added, “this might be my last night with my wife.”

He said it as a joke, but she didn’t laugh.

“You’re going back next month,” she said, glad it didn’t sound like an accusation.

He nodded. “One of the drills broke and we need to see what happened. Might be a problem with the mechanism, in which case all the pumps might malfunction at some point. Or it could be tampering by the militia.”

Something in Jack’s voice sounded beaten and she’d never heard that when he talked about his work.

“Aren’t you excited about going back?” she asked.

“Excited?” He smiled down at the food. “That’s not the right word. Resigned, maybe.”

“Because of the militia?”

“Because nothing ever changes there,” he said. “We do work and go back a few months later to do the same work all over again. I’m just…tired. I think.”

“You need a break,” she said. “You could come home—”

“Home, as in the Rocky M?”

She nodded, and he laughed. “That’s your home, Mia. Not mine. Never mine.”

He turned to her, put his hand on her wrist and her body burned at the contact. “Even with a divorce,” he said, “if something happens to me, you’ll still have power of attorney. And when Dad dies, the ranch will go to you.”

She gasped, turning to face him head-on. “Jack, come on, that’s your land. Your family’s land.”

“You think I care?” he asked. “It’s always meant more to you than me.”

“But with your parents gone—”

He shook his head. “The memories are bad, Mia. Except for you, nothing good happened there. It’s yours. It’s why we got married.”

She snorted before she could help it. The wine, the emotion, the anger she wanted to pretend she didn’t feel—they all coalesced into something sharp and painful.

“It was about your mom,” she said, knowing that was the truth, even though she’d spent years trying to pretend it wasn’t. “About getting back at her. Beating her at something.”

“She had no right to try to kick your family off the ranch after your dad died,” he said through his teeth.

“She lost it,” Mia agreed, remembering those months when her life was being shredded at the seams.

“And Dad certainly wasn’t about to stop her.” He shrugged. “What else could we do? Getting married was the right thing.”

The truth was she didn’t really need to marry him. Her sister, Lucy, and mother, Sandra, had already made plans to leave the ranch. To move to Los Angeles where Lucy would have more success with her jewelry and Sandra could mourn the death of her husband away from the home they’d created on the Rocky M.

And Annie Stone, at the spread nearby, had heard about Mia’s troubles and offered her the foreman job on the spot. Mia would have been fine. Perhaps not happy, an employee on someone else’s property instead of the land she’d grown up on, but she would have survived.

But Jack had proposed marriage and her heart had answered.

“Eat something,” he said, digging into crab cakes with gusto. She grabbed a skewer of beef with satay sauce and leaned back against the cushions.

“I could get used to this,” she said.

“Yeah, well, it beats your cooking.”

“Slander, Jack. I’ll have you know I’ve improved.”

“Really?” he asked.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, and his eyes glittered, traveling quickly down her body as if he hoped she wouldn’t notice the trespass.

She noticed, all right. And she liked it.

“I think—” he cleared his throat and went back to staring at his food “—the last time you cooked for me, you burned the pot you tried to boil water in.”

“I was twelve, and the last time you cooked for me—”

“Was the night we were on top of the Methodist Church during that rainstorm. I gave you all my beef jerky,” he said. “And went hungry. So, don’t go complaining.”

They drank and ate under a canopy of stars.

The roar of the ocean and the faint hum of the party a few floors below wrapped them in a cocoon, insulating them from the world.

Her body was flush, warm. Alive for the first time in ages. Five years of marriage, thirty years of friendship and her body still tuned to him like a radio. There were so many things they needed to talk about—his father being top of the list—but she didn’t want to fight. There would be plenty of time for that tomorrow.

The stars, the wine, the heat in her body all said tonight was for something else entirely.

Jack grinned at her over his shoulder, some kind of relish stuck to his mouth. She used her thumb to wipe his face. So very, very aware of the rough growth of his beard, the soft damp heat of his lower lip.

They were lips that had touched hers once, when the judge told Jack to kiss her. A kiss that was desperate, grateful and scared.

She wanted him to kiss her again, as a woman.

The air between them was humid, and his eyes clung to hers. All those things she thought she should say about safety and being careful were chased away by the look in his eyes.

Every coherent thought scattered like startled birds.

“Why didn’t you divorce me before?” he asked.

“Why didn’t you divorce me?” she asked right back.

“When we got…married,” he finally said, the word seemed sticky on his tongue and she went so still, listening to him, she couldn’t even breathe, “we never talked about divorce. I didn’t know what you wanted and I didn’t…I didn’t want to make your life harder or cause you trouble. I always thought that if you filed, I’d sign. No question. But you…never filed. And then life went on.”