“Except the enormous cock you suddenly have hidden in your pants.”
“Nothing new there.”
She laughed and turned the gentle touch of their inseparable lips into another deep kiss. When she finally pulled away, she was breathless. “We’d better go if we want to watch the sunset on the beach.”
“Do you want to go to Galveston? Kelly has a beach house—”
“We won’t be alone if Kelly’s there.”
“Right,” he said, almost managing to hide his disappointment from her. But she already knew how to make it up to him. He reached for the door handle, but she pressed a hand along the door seal to keep him from escaping.
“Call me selfish, Owen, but I want you all to myself this weekend. Maybe if you weren’t so gorgeous and sweet and charming, I’d be willing to share you with Kellen. But you are, so I’m not.”
He looked at her over his shoulder, his face flushed with pleasure, and shrugged. “I see your point. Kelly’s probably too busy screwing Dawn to hang out with us anyway. He has a lot of years of sexual frustration to work out of his system.”
“So Dawn and I will both be walking funny for a few days.”
He laughed and opened the passenger door. “How about you let me drive?”
No one had driven her car besides her, so she hesitated before asking, “You don’t drive like a granny, do you?”
“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”
She held his gaze for a moment and decided there was no way this man drove like an overcautious senior citizen.
Her knees a bit wobbly all of a sudden, she sank into the passenger seat and took a deep breath when he closed her door. He was grinning ear to ear when he climbed behind the wheel, and after a few seat and mirror adjustments, he started the engine with the push start. The car roared to life, the big engine rumbling when he revved it.
“Nice,” he said before shifting into reverse and peeling out of the parking spot. He did several donuts in reverse, narrowly missing a curb, before screeching to a halt and shifting into first. Caitlyn clung to the console and her armrest to hold herself steady and blinked at him before bursting into laughter.
“Ah, the allure of an empty parking lot,” Owen said, doing several more donuts, this time in the forward direction, before finally turning into traffic.
He was a bit more cautious on the road than she was and spent most of the drive cussing out idiots while at the same time courteously letting other speed demons into his lane without cutting them off.
“So why do you drive a Jeep when you obviously love a fast car as much as I do?” Caitlyn asked.
“I tend to ignore curbs,” Owen said.
The smile dropped from Caitlyn’s face. “Now you tell me.”
“I promise I won’t damage your car. I only take curbs in the Jeep because I can.”
Traffic wasn’t bad for a Sunday afternoon—and good compared to the typical weekday bumper-to-bumper crush—so they made it to her home in record time.
She was laughing at what was probably whiplash from being slammed against the seat when Owen screeched to a halt in her driveway, but her wide smile—and the day’s fun—evaporated when she recognized the familiar Mercedes parked there.
“What the fuck is he doing here?” Caitlyn narrowed her eyes. “He’s supposed to be in Rome banging his coed all summer.”
“You have a visitor?” Owen asked, looking far more morose than he had for a single second that entire day.
“That’s my ex-husband’s car.” She hoped it had materialized in her driveway without its owner attached.
“We could, uh, just leave,” Owen suggested, suddenly looking way younger than her. Embarrassingly younger. Not quite college-freshman embarrassing, but definitely younger.
“He better not be in my house,” she said as she opened her door, climbed out of the car, and slammed it with the fury she always felt whenever Charles invaded her life.
It turned out he was in the house. She’d had the locks changed, but she still kept her spare key in the place they’d always kept it, so he hadn’t had any difficulty finding it.
“Breaking and entering!” she shouted at him when she found him lounging in the den reading some dusty work of literary fiction.
The bastard had the audacity to look even more gorgeous than usual with his newly acquired tan and stress-free expression as he lifted his head from his book.
“Ah, Caity dear,” he said. “I was hoping you’d turn up soon. I tried to call . . .”
He lifted his hands and shrugged. A lock of dark hair curved over his high forehead. The traces of gray flecking his otherwise perfectly maintained short hairstyle made him look more attractive, not less so. And those deep, inquisitive eyes of his still managed to make her feel exposed. Not her body—he’d never ruled her body the way Owen did. But her soul and her mind, those were the parts of her that he’d always understood best.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Rome?”
The small smile that twisted the corner of his mouth wasn’t even slightly happy. “Rome was magnificent, as usual. Remember when we went to the Colosseum and discussed what it must have been like there at the height of the Roman Empire?”
Of course she remembered. Fondly even. And she didn’t want to entertain fond memories of her marriage to Charles. She wanted to remember it as all bad so she could continue to despise his very existence. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him.
“You need to get out of my house, Charles. You have no business being here.”
He rose from the wing chair and set his book in his seat. He took a step toward her, looking all tall and stern and in control of himself. But not in control of her. Not anymore. Caitlyn forced herself not to take a step back.
“I made a mistake, Caity. She’s nothing like you were at the beginning.”
“You do not get to come here now and try to make amends, Charles. You tried to destroy me in the divorce. Tried to take my company, tried to force me from my home.” He’d definitely stripped her of her pride, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting that to his face.
“Those things were ours,” Charles said. “Not just yours. Ours.”
“Just because we were married when I built the business from the ground up and used some of the earnings to build my dream house—”
“Our dream house,” he interjected.
“My dream house, does not mean any of it was ours,” she spat at him. All her hard work had been responsible for their financial and business success. Her hard work, not his.
“That’s the definition of marriage, Caity. What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.”
But he didn’t have anything. And it still pissed her off that she had had to buy him out of both the business and the house—millions upon millions of her hard-earned money—when they’d divorced. She was still making fucking alimony payments because most of her money wasn’t liquid but was tied up in her successful business. She’d done that—all of that—with no help from him, and no one would ever convince her otherwise.
“Don’t you mean what’s mine is yours and you have nothing to offer me? Never had anything to offer me?”
“I didn’t come here to fight, Caity.”
“Stop calling me Caity!” It was much too intimate. She could still hear the way he whispered her name when they’d made love. Caity was what he’d called her when they came together.
“Um, Caitlyn?” Owen spoke from behind her.