The Cowboy's Wife For One Night

Mia swore and knelt at his feet to pick up his dinner. Her curls gleamed like oil in the half-light and he wanted to touch them. Touch her. But he was cemented in place; the desert had a hold on him that he could not break.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she murmured, putting his sandwich back on his plate. “That was a poor choice of words.”

I’ll say.

“How long are you staying?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe not to you,” she said, her temper igniting in her eyes. “But I’m curious.”

So was he, frankly. For the first time in his life he didn’t have a plan. Or any forward momentum. He was inert and he couldn’t imagine any forces bearing on him that would inspire movement.

“Your father said something about the board of directors having a meeting—”

He laughed, dark and gritty. “What would he know about it?”

“He saw it on the school’s website,” she said.

He picked fuzz from the floor off his sandwich. If Sandra had still been here, she’d have had a fit. About the fuzz and the fact that he was going to eat the sandwich anyway.

The bread was soft under his fingers and it seemed like enough for the moment. As if holding the sandwich and talking to Mia was all his life could hold right now.

“The meeting is in four weeks.”

“And then?”

“Then…” He shook his head. “Then I’m not sure.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. He tried not to look at her, focusing on the hard crust of the bread, the drip of jam, because looking at her would give him another whole host of things he needed to do and deal with—desire, anger, grief and nostalgia—and the minute might collapse under the weight and take his life with it.

His overloaded life was why he stayed in bed all day. Bed he could manage. One blank moment followed by another. No demands. Nothing more than what he could hold.

“Your job, the drill—”

“There’s no more drill, Mia,” he said.

“Well, there, clearly. But you have others—”

He shook his head. He might be lost in his life, but he knew this. “Without Oliver, there is no drill.”

“But the university? Your job?”

“I’m on a leave of absence,” he said. It felt good to heave this stuff off his chest. The decisions he’d made in his hospital bed still made sense. The idea of going back to campus, to his job, made him ill.

“How long?” she asked.

“Indefinite.”

“Because of your hand—”

”Because I screwed up!” he yelled, and she rocked back.

Yes, you did, the voices cooed. Yes, you really did.

“Screwed what up?” she asked into the electrified silence.

He looked at her for a long time, seeing his reflection in her amber eyes.

Who the hell is that guy? he wondered in a panic. A stranger. A fool with a sandwich.

“Forget it, Mia. It doesn’t matter.”

“Clearly, it does.” She stepped in front of him when he tried to walk back down the hallway and he thought about pushing her out of his way. But she’d push back. It’s what Mia did.

“Look at you, Jack. You’re skin and bones. You lock yourself up in that room all damn day and you roam the house at night. It doesn’t take a genius to see you’re not sleeping. Doesn’t take a genius to see that something is eating you up.”

“You going to be my confessor?” he asked, his voice a wicked lick of sarcasm. Something awful was waking up inside of him, a beast he couldn’t contain. His hurt and anger over the way she’d left him that night in Santa Barbara, the way events unfolded from there, had created a two-headed monster who wanted blood.

“I would be your friend,” she said.

He licked his lips, his eyes on the hallway behind her shoulder. “Not my wife?”

She laughed, the sound finding every raw spot, every vulnerable hurt place inside his body. “You never really needed one of those, Jack.”

He practically threw the plate onto the dining table and stepped up to her, way past what was comfortable. He walked until he could feel her breath on his face. The warmth of her body against the cold shell of his own.

“Why’d you run away that night, Mia?” he asked, nailing her to the ground with his eyes.

She opened her mouth, but no words came out.

His smile was wolfish. And his fingers—suddenly hungry for heat and the sensation of the living—touched her cheek. His thumb landed on the corner of her damp, lush mouth and she gasped.

Again, the voices, those whispers of self-destruction, chimed in. We want her. Again. And again.

“I know why you left,” he whispered, and her eyes flared. “Because you’re a coward.” He was close enough to kiss her and so he did, pressing his lips to hers, stepping so close their chests touched and heat rippled over him.

Against her lips, he whispered, “And so am I.”