Page 11 of An Unfinished Memory

Thank fucking Christ. Relief brought the chill of the rain back, but I shared the heat of her warm body. I could’ve laughed when I realized what she was worried about. “Then you don’t have to worry.”

“What do you mean?”

I gently pulled out, but as I wedged back to tuck my still-hard dick into my jeans, I spotted her underwear. She’d taken every article of clothing with her, and my house had nothing of her in it. I finished pulling her lace panties off.

“What are you doing?” She drew her knees to her chest and adjusted her dress to sit on since I possessed her underwear and had no plans to give them back.

I didn’t answer the latter question but stuffed the garment into my pocket and zipped myself in. The cab of the pickup was fogged, the musky scent of sex filled the air, and I was hungry for more, but the rain was letting up.

The heavens had opened up long enough to give me the perfect window to fuck my wife.

My ex-wife.

Who’d walked out on me.

The complicated mass of emotions pushing against my sternum could wait. I had to straighten out her thinking. “I haven’t been with anyone since you, Sutton.”

She studied me for a moment, her eyes full of doubt, then surprise. “Oh.”

That was it? Eighteen months since she served medivorce papers, and all I got was anOh. Instead of letting the ever-present bitterness rise up, I’d hang on to her admission that she hadn’t had sex since then either. “We both needed this.”

She scowled and peered out the windshield. The fog on the glass let in the shine of the streetlights but continued to seclude us. The shadows settled under her eyes and in the wisps of her fine hair that had broken free from her braid during our frantic fucking. “It was a mistake.”

I grunted at the verbal potshot. Sex with me was a mistake. Wasn’t that hard on the ego?

She caught my expression, a spark of sympathy in her eyes. “It complicates things.”

Irritation clawed the back of my neck. “What things? That you and I like to have sex—together? We’re divorced. I hardly see you or talk to you. We’re civil at family gatherings. We fucked, and we liked it. There’s nothing wrong admitting it, and it doesn’t have to change things.” Having sex couldn’t drive her further away from me.

She dropped her gaze to her hands. How long had it been since we talked so closely? So intimately? Before our marriage ended, I would be putting away my sidearm and my gear while she chatted with me after my shift. Then I’d catch up with her when she was leaving for work, or, since she’d been tied to the ranch as the Knight’s Arabians and Cattle Company veterinarian, I’d talk with her if I was also there helping Eliot.

That was when we couldn’t avoid hashing over the same troubles again and again.

“And at the next family gathering, what are wesupposed to do?” she asked quietly. “Pretend this never happened?”

“We’ll act like we always do. You know I won’t blow up a party because you won’t talk to me.”

She lifted that gray gaze to meet mine. “I know, Wilder. You’re all about family obligations.”

I blew out a hard breath. And we were back to old arguments. If it wasn’t for my family’s trust binding me to the ranch, it’d be my deputy job. We signed papers that ended those arguments. What happened didn’t have to be more, right? We were exes, but we were fire in bed. We weren’t seeing anyone else. The idea got brighter the more I thought about it. “Maybe it can be only about sex.”

Sutton feathered her hands over the skirt of her dress and pulled her lower lip between her teeth. Hope, the fickle beast, rose inside my chest. She wasn’t saying no, and that little furrow in her brow said she was considering what I said.

“What do you mean?”

I put it as bluntly as possible. “We’re not fucking around, but we both like fucking. So let’s fuck.”

Her eyes widened, and yeah, I couldn’t believe what I suggested either. But the anticipation mingling with the evaporating rain on my clothing left me cool and calm in a way I hadn’t been for a long while. What would I do to keep having sex with Sutton?

A whole fucking lot after that orgasm.

“We can’t?—”

“Why not?” I leaned toward her, twisting like I was going to crawl over that lithe body again. I could, she wasn’t pulling away, but I didn’t need Crocus Valley’s finest knocking on my window. I’d busted enough car sex in my life to know how much fun law enforcement hadwith the task. I wasn’t going to be the literal butt of the local police department’s jokes. “Are you dating anyone?”

She shook her head, disbelief swimming in her eyes.

“Then let’s…keep doing this.” A thought sparked in my head, and my dick thought it was agreatidea. “I’ll follow you to your place and spend the night.”

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