Page 63 of Unwanted Vows

“I did notice that,” she says. “And I understand that it might be easier to fortify one place rather than five or six. But eventually, we will all need to go to jobs or offices. Wealth doesn’t create itself.”

“At some levels, that could be debated,” I say. “But you are correct in saying that work such as ours is best done on site. Hopefully, by the time it becomes an issue, we’ll have this problem resolved. Meanwhile, Paul had pizza and juice. Have you eaten anything?”

She shakes her head.

“Come on,” I say, gently turning us around toward the table. “Food has a way of anchoring the stomach. An empty belly is an anxious belly.”

That must have struck Maddy as funny because she giggles, then says, “I’ve not heard that one before.”

I put a smile on my face and say, “Now you have. Come sit with me. Let’s just talk a while. What kind of pizza would you like? Should I warm it up for you?”

“Pepperoni,” she says. “And I like it cold.”

“Beer, wine or juice?” I ask. Because goodness knows, pizza just does not go with milk.

“Juice,” she says. “Maybe I should have grabbed some soda.”

“We still can,” I say. “There’s room service.”

She shakes her head. “Doesn’t seem fair to Paul. After all, I made him stick to fruit juice.”

I had the same. I would have liked a beer, but it was, after all, our wedding night. The ceremony might not have been grand, but I hoped to at least make the after party memorable for us both.

After the first bite or two, she ate the cold pizza with relish. “I guess I was hungry,” she admits, after the third slice.

I warm mine. I’ve eaten my share of cold pizza. It’s almost an obligatory food group for students in the USA. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy it, and the suite had a perfectly good microwave.

When it looked like she was slowing down, I cued up some soft music on my phone. It was an orchestral rendition of “Dance with Me,” the song we danced to that last night before I went to Africa.

She looked up at me, eyes as dreamy as if she’d drunk wine instead of fruit juice. I hold out my hand; she places her hand in it.

I pull her into a traditional waltz stance, and begin a soft sway with her. She moves closer, puts both arms around my neck, and we move gently to the music. Neither of us are in the mood for the acrobatics she exhibited nearly ten years ago, but I feel her relax.

I sing softly to her, “ . . . night is calling, and I’m falling . . .”

She sings back to me, just as she had back then, “Come fuck with me, let us live this fantasy. Let us be together, if only for tonight.”

It should have sounded crude, but it didn’t. On her lips, the words were the finest poetry. Wrapped in the music, it drew me like iron filings to a magnet. It feels like my pants shrank by at least two sizes, and my heart starts going like a trip hammer.

I was responding to her like a teenage boy crazed by hormones, or a tom cat to a lady cat in heat. Grandfather, marriages, responsibility . . . they all fall away from me, and I am entirely focused on her. I try to remember that I am a married man, I am taking over my grandfather’s misbegotten crime kingdom, but she is my entire world. Nothing else seems important.

I dance us in circles, spinning toward the bedroom door. I bend my head to kiss her, and find her mouth upturned to mine. She tastes of strawberries. Her hair smells like rosemary and honeysuckle. My skin is on fire with the feel of her. This is everything I remembered, and more besides.

“You are so, so bad for me,” she murmurs. “How did I ever fall down this rabbit hole?”

“I don’t know, Alice,” I say, playing into her current whimsy. “If I grin wide enough, will you shake me into a kitten?”

“That was the baby,” she says, giving me a tickly poke in the ribs. “And as I recall, it turned into a pig and ran off into the woods.”

I concede the point. She has ten years of reading on me, probably a lot of it in children’s books. “I bow to your expertise,” I say. “I’ve not had a lot of time for literature.”

“Let’s just make our own story,” she says. “I didn’t have you long enough to say that I missed you, but I did look for you.”

“You did?” I ask in surprise. “Not just because you were pregnant?”

“Before then,” she says. “I wanted to see if another week would match the first, and I wanted to get to know you.”

“What do you think now?” I ask.

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