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 have—it all coalesced into something sharp and painful.
“It was about your mom,” she said, knowing it was the truth, even though she’d spent years trying to pretend it wasn’t the case. “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 that she hadn’t really needed 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.
Annie Stone, at the spread nearby, had heard about Mia’s troubles and offered her the foreman’s job on the spot. Mia would have been fine. Perhaps not happy, an employee on someone else’s property, not the land she’d grown up on, but she would have survived.
But Jack had proposed marriage and her heart had answered.
“Eat some of this food,” he said, digging into crab cakes with gusto. She grabbed a skewer of beef with fancy 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 at her, and his eyes glittered, traveling quickly down her body like 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. “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—”
“That rainstorm the night we were on top of the Methodist Church. And 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 beneath wrapped them in a cocoon, insulating them from the world.
Her body was flushed, 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. Tomorrow there would be plenty of time for that.
The stars, the wine, the heat in her body all said tonight was for something else entirely.
He grinned at her, 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 that he hadn’t bothered shaving—the soft, damp heat of his lower lip.
They were lips she’d kissed once, when the judge told him to. A kiss that was desperate, grateful and scared.
She wanted to kiss them 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.
All coherent thoughts 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 seeming 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.”
It sounded so reasonable when he said it. Life went on.
“That’s how I felt too,” she whispered. “I wasn’t going to thank you for everything by divorcing you if that wasn’t what you wanted.”
It wasn’t the total truth, but he didn’t need the total truth. He needed to believe he’d been a hero and she needed to keep her love a secret.
“I wanted you to be safe,” he said. “You and your mom. Lucy.”
“And you did that, Jack. You helped make us safe.” She smiled, gratitude a full balloon in her chest. “Thank you.”