The sounds of deep sleep rumbled through the dark. She moved to the front screen door and looked out.
He was still stretched out on the porch where she’d left him. He’d removed his shirt and bundled it under his dark head to make a pillow. His lean muscular torso gleamed in the moonlight. He could have been a toppled Greek statue, if statues wore jeans. Those jeans gaped at his waist, leaving enough space between them and his bare skin for a hand to slide in. She knew that because she’d done it often enough in the past.
Cole sucked in a careful breath and wrapped her arms about her middle as goose bumps pebbled her arms. She wasn’t cold. She felt her hunger for him rising. This time she let herself feel it and many other things for a change.
His face was turned away so that moonlight played along the lobe of his ear and the slope of his cheek, and brought into relief the corded muscles of his neck. With his hair ruffled and eyes closed she could almost see the little boy he had once been.
She’d been a little shocked the first time she had watched him sleeping. They had been together for weeks but it was their first time to spend the entire night together. It stunned her to realize how innocent and vulnerable he seemed with his eyes closed. The man so vividly alive no person passed him without feeling it had let down his guard with her. He was the protector, a criminal’s worst nightmare, the first and last defense. But not then, and not now.
She pushed open the screen and came forward on bare feet to squat down beside him. She wanted to touch him but didn’t dare. Fascinated by every breath that caused his chest to rise and fall, she fell in love all over again with every separate bit of him, the hard places and the softer smooth ones. They had been playing games for days. Finally, he was real and mortal to her again. This was the man she once loved.
She also saw the shadow of sadness in the furrow of his brow. He never talked about that. Things she could only guess at, yet had once tried to protect him from.
A pang of regret shot through her. She had failed him. And now it was too late.
Cole returned to her room but didn’t go back to bed. The restlessness that had driven her to the brink of temptation could not be put back in the box so easily.
She moved to the window of her room, propped an arm on the jamb, and rested her head against it. She must be nuts. Nothing had changed since Scott came back into her life. Nothing had been said to change one unalterable fact.
Cole lifted her head to stare out across the field to where night escaped into the impregnable black of the forest. He had simply let her go.
Most divorces were messy. She’d seen it up close when her parents uncoupled when she was ten. There were fights and accusations, digressions, petty ugliness, strategies large and small. All done to wound the partner in the break. At the time, she had thought the fighting and screaming and ugliness was the absolute worst way for a marriage to end. Now she knew otherwise. Silence was worse.
Scott hadn’t bothered to fight with, or for her.
That’s what hurt the most, what she hadn’t thought she could forgive. She might have been the one who walked out, but he’d let her go. Because it was what he’d wanted.
The reason for walking out had dimmed after two years. But the knowledge that he wanted out had not.
That’s why she hadn’t tried to go back, couldn’t offer a reconciliation. After everything else, she couldn’t bear to hear him tell her face-to-face why and when their marriage had disintegrated to the point he no longer wanted her.
That’s what made the desire tugging at her now so hard to deal with. They might want each other again, for now, but there would come an after. And if she gave in to the reckless raw need raging through her and then he walked away? It might just stop her heart.
Cole wiped a tear from her chin, surprised to find it there. She wasn’t a crier. She never cried. So whatever was leaking out of her didn’t have her permission. And neither was she a quitter. She’d chosen to do this. She was just going to have to find a way. But how?
She thought about the weeks ahead, being forced to be constantly in Scott’s company. Look but don’t touch was already stretching her nerves to the limit. Even her anger was taking more and more effort to keep up.
She was tired of fighting. Tired of being on guard. This wasn’t going to work if she didn’t figure out a way to get past this constant aching need for him.
Hugo nudged his big head under her hand. She turned toward him. Blacker than the darkness, only his eyes gave away his presence.
“Love you, too.” But sometimes, like tonight, it wasn’t enough.
CHAPTER NINE
“That’s it. This is impossible. I can’t do this anymore.”
Cole wheeled away from the table of people who had been coaching Scott and her on their new undercover roles for the past three days.