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Chad replied leisurely, “I’m rested up. The seminar was only men and they didn’t even mention sex.”
“So you’re ravenous, and you saw me and remembered me?”
“I assumed I’d had you somewhere along the way, and therefore I was cautious until I validated who you actually are.” He watched her with his eyes halfclosed. “How many men have you driven wild since you last did that with me?”
She gasped like a virgin accused of dropping a swimsuit shoulder strap.
She moved inside her body in various ways. She was indignant. She moved her lips and she finally said, “Baloney!” And with the word, she could have just died of embarrassment. She might just as well have said, Golly! or something else equally juvenile.
She grabbed up her bag and started for the door.
He caught her arm. “Don’t be such a chicken.” His voice was so soft, so husky and sweet. His eyes were earnest; his big hand was gentle. He looked soberly into her eyes. She saw as the depths warmed and his crinkles deepened. He had the best mouth.
Since her eyes went to his mouth, he needed to show her why people have mouths, and he kissed her a completely unfair, remarkably sweet, loving kiss. He was really, really good. He really kissed her.
He did.
As he lifted his mouth with all those marvelous little sounds in that silent room, she raised weighty eyelids to look up at him. With some effort she coordinated her vocal cords as her kiss-swollen lips said, “Let’s go swim.”
He regarded her soberly for some time, then his smile started and his eyes twinkled. He replied, “Right.”
He went down to the hotel necessity shop, which sold all sorts of important things like condoms and swimsuits and candy and flowers. They didn’t miss a trick.
Jo was in the pool when Chad came out in his swim trunks. He looked like an American Greek god. He was actually Dutch and Welsh with a touch of Irish thrown in.
He dived into the pool effortlessly and his strokes were lazy and strong. He came to her and said, “Take a breath.”
She remembered that, and she vigorously backpedaled away from him. He laughed and swam, following her so easily. He was so at home in the water.
A surprising number of people don’t believe in swimming in the winter. Pools are generally closed. Yankees are unpredictable. The weather in TEXAS was so nice that it seemed like a Yankee summer day. The two paying guests played together like otters. They lifted themselves from the pool and went down the slide and they used the pool.
Underwater, he touched her here and there. He lifted her and threw her and made her laugh. Men’s muscles are just different. Their strength is awesome. He had no trouble following her in the water, turning her, lifting her. It was easy for him.
He laughed as she splashed him and wiggled and slid away. He could have held her, but if he had, he might have hurt her. He was stronger and had to be careful.
He finally captured her and took her under the water to kiss her.
In all that while, he gave her his entire attention.
How unkind of him.
It was like the time of their courtship, all those years ago, when she was new on campus and he was an assistant professor. But she became his wife. She was a woman of principles and would not go to bed with him without being married to him.
Since she had been married to one of the teaching staff, her schooling was free. She graduated with a degree in business and had taken her masters in business.
When she left him, he had asked if she didn’t want to stay on a little longer and earn her doctorate also. He hadn’t felt she’d used him. He was practical.
She hadn’t used Chad to get her education. It had been boredom that had urged her to take classes. She hadn’t gotten pregnant, although they’d used no barriers. Each month had been a disappointment, another failure, before she’d sadly accepted that she was barren.
While she had had his sexual attention, she hadn’t had his companionship. She’d been so lonely. She’d wanted his attention. He wasn’t around. He would never be around. Eventually, she had understood that and she had left.
So almost four years after their divorce, Jo played as she’d dreamed of playing with Chad all those years ago. At eighteen, at twenty, but at twenty-two the hope had dimmed. During the time she’d been working on her masters, she knew their marriage was doomed.
No miracle happened.
By then, she had faced reality. Her time with Chad would never be any different than it was then.
Looking at Chad soberly, she decided that she might just as well have one last fling with him. Their marriage was water lost over the dam. Why not enjoy the last of the trickle of her time with him? So she laughed, and flung herself into the water and allowed him to chase her.
Their time then was as she’d always thought their marriage could be.
And he took her back to their room. She was breathless from swimming, or something, and she was shy.
“How many men have you had by now?” Chad teased Jo as he dried his hair with a big towel. His eyes were confident. He asked, “Do you have notches on your bedposts?” He paused. “Add notches for these days with me.” Then his voice was smokily gruff as he told her, “Put my marks on top of the others.”
There were no notches. There had been no other man. She still hadn’t gotten over her love for Chad. She hadn’t even been tempted to try another man.
But she was ready for Chad.
She met him halfway and she loved him.
He had the newly purchased condoms and he was careful of her as he’d always been. He was gentle and kind with his ravening hunger for her. He controlled himself, but his breaths were harsh and his low moans were exquisitely thrilling. He loved her as he always had.
And it was not enough.
They had a night of love. Her hair was like driedout, raveled rope. So was his. Her body was well used. So was his.
She was limp and contented. She had forgotten the pleasure, the ecstasy, the thrill of being with him, of being part of him, of making love with him.
And he groaned, “Why did you leave me?”
Tears welled in her eyes. “You were never there.”
Agonized, he protested earnestly, “I slept with you every night.”
“But the days were long and empty.”
“People live all their lives with other people and see them seldom. Why did you need to be with me all the time?”
“I loved you.”
He frowned at her. “To need constant attention like that isn’t healthy.”
“Probably not.” She looked down at the sheet as she drew it up over her. She felt isolated. Just thinking of it all chilled her. It was past. How could she still be affected by those sad, empty times?
Two (#ulink_a514e94e-a73b-543d-ae79-75aae5df02b5)
Dallas and Fort Worth are separate big cities and different from one another. Dallas is glitzy and elegant while Fort Worth keeps an iron lock on being Western. There was a time when Fort Worth had been the gathering center for shipping cattle by train. Trucks had changed that.
The building of the shared airport had been a fascinating merger for the cities. Their sprawling populations were reaching out to occupy the area between the cities, and the shared airport was the obvious solution. It had not been easy for Dallas to share it with a “lesser” neighbor who was deliberately lacking in elegance.
Necessity makes for strange bedfellows.
Just as did the meeting between Jo and Chad.
Jo would look at Chad eating breakfast across the table in their room and she was stunned that she was with him again.
What were the chances of running into someone known in an airport? Actually, it wasn’t that unusual. But an ex-husband?
Incredible.
Of course, if one was a film star or multimarried perhaps, but Jo Morris? Ridiculous.
Chad was in the shower when Jo was startled by the discreet knock on their door. A knock? Who could possibly know they were there?
In their shared room, only one bed was rumpled and askew.
But hotels no longer had house detectives who checked on morals.
She squinted at her traveling clock and it was only seven-thirty. Jo inquired as to who was there. With the reply that it was breakfast, she put on her raincoat before she opened the door.
The discreet waiter didn’t even gasp at her dishabille. He conducted himself as if every person in the hotel was barefooted and wearing a raincoat in their room. She’d obviously been in some sort of rain because her hair was a tangled mess.
He said not a word but went straight to his work. He set the small table adroitly and with some skilled flourish.
She gave him a guilty-conscience tip.
He grinned as he thanked her.
She did not make eye contact. Her glances darted around and she blushed scarlet. But she was seriousfaced and silent.
With the size of the tip, he felt he had to tidy up a bit. And he moved chairs, retrieved and plumped night-discarded pillows. Did he emphasize that chore?
Jo moved her hands and said, “Never mind.”
The waiter grinned big and friendly before he reluctantly left.
She knew full well that the waiter thought she was a loose and easy woman. She was there in one of the giveaway rooms that cost outrageously but less than the others. And she’d come from the overloaded airport with a stranger. HARLOT must be written across her forehead in purple on the red blush that suffused her entire face.
Closing the door again, Jo scowled at the torn-up bed with its plumped pillows. Two of the pillows had been taken from the floor. Just as they had some years ago. She and Chad had shared one pillow. That was a clue right there. Then too, the other bed hadn’t been touched. How obvious.
There is nothing like a guilty conscience to rattle a seemingly free woman.
She straightened. She would never see the waiter again. She would leave this place. She would go back to her life and this would be a forgotten incident.
Chad came out of the bathroom, gloriously naked, drying his hair with a rough towel. He grinned at her and said, “I’m clean. Let’s roll around so that I can smell you instead of just me.”
She looked back at him in appalled shock.
He noted she was wearing a raincoat, over nothing, and he lifted his eyebrows a trifle as he smiled. “It’s raining inside?”
“That could be what the waiter thought.”
He then noted the set table. He said, “Great. We can eat first.”
She replied stiffly. “I believe I shall shower.”
“No. Don’t. You have such a wonderful woman smell.”
“I…smell?”
And he made savoring sounds as he tried to hold her. He rooted his nose around her throat and tried to loosen the tightly tied coat belt. He inquired, “Going out?”
“I had to put something on to open the door.”
“Good thinking.”
“He thinks I’m a harlot.”
Chad lifted his head back and looked at her. “He said that?”
“No. He smiled in that way.”
“What way?”
“As if he knew what we’d been doing.”
Chad looked at the one messed-up bed and then he looked back at his ex-wife. “A logical conclusion. The pillows are back where they belong.”
“He did that.”
Chad tried not to grin too widely. “Tonight we’ll mess up the other bed first.”
“I am embarrassed.”
He was surprised by her. “We’re married!”
“We are not. We are divorced!”
“Ah, that doesn’t mean anything to a couple. It’s just a technicality. We’re legal.”
“I believe you are tilted in your thinking.”
He laughed in a good throat chuckle. “You’ve always tilted me, one way or another. I had to leave the house so that you could get some rest.”
“You gave all your attention to the college, you just used my body now and then.”
“You’re lucky I had the distraction of a commitment to the college, or you would have never gotten out of bed at all!”
