I kick off my heels and stretch out on the bed, and his eyes grow hazy.
“Look, I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you,” he barks into the phone, his gaze still on me.
I’d intended to be patient, but watching Caleb lose focus is more tempting than I anticipated. I slide the skirt up, up, up, until he could just make out my panties if he tilted his head to the side.
He tilts his head to the side.
“We’ll have to continue this in the morning,” he announces into the phone, hanging up without so much as a goodbye and prowling toward me.
I smile. “You could have finished your call.”
He kneels between my legs and pushes the skirt up to my waist. “I have better things to worry about right now.”
I tug on his tie and pull him to me for a kiss. “Oh, really? What things do you have to worry about?”
“Where to start?” he muses, running a hand up my thigh before he rises again and crosses the room. “Actually, I thought we could do some reading.”
“Reading?”
The book he withdraws from his bag has a woman in a blue ballgown being ravaged by a barechested man in riding breeches.
I choke on a laugh. It’s The Desire of a Lady—the book about Lady Victoria. I take it from his hands, laughing out loud. “I can’t believe you even figured out the title.”
He grins as he climbs over me again. “It was surprisingly difficult. Devereaux is apparently a super common name among the British upper classes, based on the number of times it appears in historical romance.”
He takes the book from me and starts flipping through it. “No pointers yet,” he says, lowering it with a frown to glance at me. “So far, it’s a lot of Lady Victoria being told she’s impertinent and...ah, here we go. ‘His wicked mouth moved over her nipples—'”
He pulls my tank down until my bra is exposed and then he tugs at a nipple through my bra. “Like this, you think?”
My breath releases in a quiet gasp. “Maybe, or maybe it was…more? She probably wasn’t wearing a bra.”
Caleb’s wicked mouth turns up at one corner. “Ah, good point.” His fingers graze the lace he just wetted with his lips and pinch the nipple tight. I squirm beneath him, wanting more.
His head lowers as he drags the bra down and grasps my bare nipple in his teeth.
I inhale, sharp and surprised, and he hands me the book. “Here. You read. I keep losing my place.”
I glance at the page and pretend to read. “He tore off her clothes, then fucked her really hard, several times in a row.”
He raises a brow. “Lucie, that’s not what it says.”
I groan. “Fine. ‘His fingers slid beneath her skirts, to the—'”
His hands are already moving up my thigh. “Why’d you stop? I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do next.”
“It says he parts her spiral curls. It’s just…kind of a gross image. I’m picturing a vagina with long, flowing hair.”
“That makes this way less hot suddenly.” He leans over me, sliding his fingers beneath the edge of my panties. “Ah, but look how wet you are. It’s hot again. What next?”
“‘His fingers speared her—'”
His fingers, three at once, push inside me. I’m so deliciously full that it’s hard to breathe.
“‘And then he grasped his staff.’”
Caleb stills. “His staff? You mean, like, some kind of walking stick?”
In spite of his fingers still inside me, in spite of his erection pressing into my thigh, I laugh. “No, I think they’re referring to his genitalia.”
“I thought it was about to get really kinky.”
“You seriously thought he was about to use a walking stick on her somehow?”
His eyes gleam. “I can see a few ways we might use one. You have other holes.”
I swat him with the book. “You’re ruining this. Lord Devereaux never would refer to ‘other holes.’”
He moves lower on the bed and his tongue slides over me, slick and hot and eager. “So I’m ruining this, you say?”
“No,” I gasp. The book falls to the floor. “I think you’re turning it around.”
LATER, when the lights are off and I’m tucked tight to his chest, we talk about those times I snuck out to the dock to see him as a preteen, and he claims to have no clue that I ever had a crush, which I find difficult to believe.
He asks me how I wound up going to Ruth’s house in the first place, and I tell him things I never shared with Jeremy—the way my mother would claim she had ‘work issues’ each summer and dump me with my aunt when she was actually going on a trip with whatever man was around at the time. How she’d go to Disney or Yosemite or Mexico and promise me a souvenir if I kept it all a secret—a Belle dress from Disney, Hermione’s wand from Universal Studios—and then later claim it was stolen or that I hadn’t earned it, so she’d given it away.
He asks why I kept lying for her. I guess it’s a reasonable question. I only hesitate because that’s a worse story—I lied because I eventually grew as desperate to be away from her as she was me. I lied because once I hit my teens, she began to resent my youth and my appearance, and every time one of her boyfriends hit on me, she’d find a way to make it my fault.
I’m embarrassed, once it’s out—by how much I shared, by how gross it all is when laid bare. “It probably sounds pretty trashy compared to all your past relationships.”
He shakes his head. “It’s weirdly similar to my past relationships. At least the last one.” He pulls the blankets around my shoulders as the air conditioning kicks on. “Kate didn’t really know either of her parents. Her mom overdosed when she was little and she had no clue who her dad was. She grew up in foster care.”
“She grew up in foster care but got into Stanford?”
“She’s crazy smart. Probably to her detriment, since it allowed her to hide a lot of shit from me and from her employer for way too long.”
I’m not sure it’ll do me any favors to learn more about his smart, beautiful wife who went to Stanford and was super fun. But there’s a lot more here, a lot more he doesn’t discuss about the baby and how it affected him, and he might need to tell someone. I suspect he never has. “How did you meet?”
“We both went to Stanford undergrad and Wharton for grad school,” he says. “We were never in the same class, but we met at an alumni event in San Francisco. I don’t even remember which school it was for.”
There’s another internal pinch—she went to Stanford and grad school. I barely finished undergrad at a school no one’s heard of.
“And she moved out to the middle of nowhere for you?”
He stiffens again. “Not really. She moved because she was pregnant. It wasn’t planned, but…” He shrugs.
Was there ever a time when he was excited about the pregnancy? I’m not sure how to ask, and before I can try, he rolls me on my back.
“Why are we talking about this when we’ve got a bed and some privacy?” he asks, his mouth on my neck, his hand running over my hip.
I’m not about to argue, but it also feels a little intentional, the way he closed the conversation when he did.
WE SEPARATE EARLY in the morning—me back home and him to the airport—and I am still deliciously bruised and battered and swollen-lipped when Jeremy finally brings the twins home, hours later than they were due.
Sophie and Henry launch themselves at me as I walk out the door and I pull them against me, pressing my nose to their heads simply to breathe them in.
Jeremy drops their backpacks on the ground. “I figured you’d be doing a whole lot of nothing with them, so it didn’t matter when they came home.”
He wants me to be angry. He wants to feed on my anger like it’s a banquet and he’s starving. I won’t give him the satisfaction. I tell the twins to go inside. “That’s a violation of our interim agreement,” I reply calmly, once they’re out of earshot. “I wouldn’t advise doing it again.”
“Where were you last night?” he demands.
“What makes you think I was anywhere?”
He blinks. Only once. It’s his version of a long pause. “Sophie needed something. I called the cabin, and you didn’t answer.”