Cold Dark Heart by Julie Kriss

Nine

Andie

Miles wasn’t homewhen I got home. He was still at Jonathan’s. He’d texted me Jonathan’s address, so at least I had that much. I decided to leave him alone with his friends for a few hours.

The house was quiet as I stripped off my clothes and took a shower. When was the last time I’d had the house to myself? It was so rare. After my shower, still wrapped in a towel, I lay on the bed, my eyes closed in a few decadent minutes of not having to do anything at all. With Miles having dinner at his friend’s, I’d probably make a grilled cheese sandwich and grab a pickle out of the jar in the fridge. That would be the extent of my cooking tonight.

I let my thoughts spin back over my day, and then—let’s be honest—I let them land on Damon Blake. After spending a lot of time in close quarters with him today, I could admit that he was hot. Something about his quiet, badass competence was sexy. It hadn’t escaped me how he’d shut down Dave in that meeting with just two words: Would it? They were the only two words he’d needed to speak, and Dave had shut up instantly. It had been bossy and alpha, and I’d liked it.

He was rough around the edges, but he had those sexy gray eyes. He also moved with an easy, lethal grace, like someone who has had a lot of training. Terry had been DEA, and he never moved like that. He was nothing like Damon at all.

Damon had called me hot. You’re a hot, single woman, he’d said, tossing the words out casually. But I’d never been called hot before, and definitely not by a man who looked like Damon did. And Terry’s abandonment was still so new that I hadn’t really thought of myself as single. A hot, single woman? Was that how he saw me?

Did Damon get a lot of women? He probably could if he tried. Was he a relationship guy, or a one-night-stand guy? Maybe some woman had broken his heart in the past, which was why he seemed closed off, like me. But with Damon, there was something simmering beneath the surface. I wondered what he was like in bed, what kind of sex he liked. Fast and hard? Or slow? Did he have some kind of kink he liked?

That thought gave me a shiver, a delicious thrill that moved through my body. It had been so long since I’d had a shiver like that. Years.

Terry had been only my second boyfriend. Yes, it was the truth: At thirty-five, I had only slept with two men. A woman’s sexual exploration gets cut short when she gets unexpectedly pregnant and marries the baby’s father. To me, my sex life with Terry had always seemed perfectly fine, considering we had such a rocky start. Pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a baby are life-changing things, but they aren’t exactly sexy.

Still, we’d had years since then to get it together, and I’d thought we had. We didn’t have a sex life that was particularly wild or crazy, but it was as regular as we could make it, and usually we were both satisfied. Until the relationship had started going sour, and our sex life had gone sour along with it. Then it had died altogether, something I was thankful for now that I knew Terry was screwing God knew who.

So my overall experience with sex was pretty pathetic, but it hadn’t mattered. Or so I believed until Terry left. I was a mother and a wife and a part-time bookkeeper, not a woman who devoted her life to wild sex. And since Terry left, I had been so buried in hurt and stress that I hadn’t thought about sex at all.

But I was thinking about it now. In my few minutes alone on my bed, wrapped in a towel, my skin tingling, I was thinking about Damon Blake. I was thinking about what his hands would feel like on me. What his skin would taste like. I was wondering what turned him on.

It probably wasn’t me. But there was no harm in wondering.

When was the last time I’d done anything just for myself? When was the last time I’d indulged in being a healthy adult woman with a sex drive? I didn’t even own a vibrator—I was too worried Miles would find it, and Terry would have made fun of me. I didn’t watch porn. I didn’t even ogle any good-looking men I saw on the street, because I was a married woman. Now I’d missed all those years of ogling for nothing.

I was so pathetic I didn’t even let my thoughts become selfish and sexy. Where had I been all this time?

What would it be like if Damon was in the room right now? If he unwrapped the towel from my body and let it fall open? I pictured his hands on my skin, moving over me, and I shivered again.

I was in the middle of a pleasant, very dirty fantasy—it involved Damon and me on a beach, at night, naked—when my cell phone rang. Assuming it was Miles, I reluctantly let the fantasy go and answered.

It wasn’t Miles. It was Terry.

My lustful mood, the pleasant warm blood pulsing in my veins—all of it dissipated with the sound of his voice. “Hello, Andie.”

“What do you want?” I asked him.

He sighed, as if I was being an unreasonable shrew. I knew that sigh; he’d used it in many of our fights over the years. “Well, I was just checking in. I thought we could have a civilized conversation.”

“About what?” I sat up and realized I was still wearing only a towel. Even though Terry couldn’t see me, I felt naked. I pulled back the bedcover and slipped under it to cover myself. “Did you sign the divorce papers?” I asked.

“Yeah, I did. My lawyer added an addendum. You have to sign that part back.”

Alarm froze my spine. “An addendum? Saying what?”

“It transfers the ownership of the Wild from me to you.”

This made no sense. I was running the Wild right now because Terry had left and there was no one else to do it, and I needed the money. I didn’t own it and didn’t plan to. “Why?” I asked him. “Why would you do that?”

“Because it’s my job to support you,” he said in that argumentative tone that drove me crazy. “I’m being nice.”

“If you’re being nice, send me money. Not a bar I don’t have time to run.”

“See, Andie, that’s your problem,” Terry said. “I saved up money to buy that bar, and I bought it. Now I’m giving it to you, for nothing. And you’re complaining.”

The back of my neck had gone tight, and my shoulders were tense. I hated—hated—this tone of his voice. He knew it. When he used this tone with me, which was often, it was because he wanted to make me mad. That way, when I flew off the handle, he could point to what a lunatic I was. She goes crazy at the smallest thing! I can’t say anything!

I gritted my teeth and tried to sound calm. “Fine, I’ll take a look at the addendum. Anything else?”

“Yeah. I got an email from Damon Blake. Seems like he finally turned up for the security job.”

“Finally?” I asked. “When was he supposed to turn up?”

“Weeks ago.” Terry was back to complaining again. “I mean, he was packaged out, what else did he have to do? But he took his sweet time. Anyway, I don’t think you should hire him. Just tell him to get lost and send him on his way.”

I blinked. “You think I shouldn’t hire him?”

“Well, what do you need him for? Think about it for a minute, Andie. The Wild is doing just fine.”

I had the beginnings of a headache starting behind my eyes. “If the Wild doesn’t need a security guy, then why did you hire him?”

“It was an impulse. I felt kind of sorry for him. I thought I could give him something to do. But we don’t need him. Just send him on his way. He shouldn’t give you any trouble.”

My mind spun. First of all, I hated that he’d used the word we when I was now running the Wild all alone. And secondly, Terry was really getting on my nerves. Which meant that whatever he wanted me to do, I suddenly wanted to do the opposite.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel good with a security guy there. I like him.”

“You hired him?” Terry sounded amazed.

“Why not? We had that break-in. I don’t want to deal with the drunks myself, or make Jimmy do it all the time. It seemed like a good idea.”

“Andie. I know Blake better than you do. He has some things in his past that are definitely shady.”

“I know. He told me about them. It doesn’t bother me.”

“It should, because he was a fucking drug dealer.” Terry paused. “Wait a minute. Are you hot for him?”

I’d think that Terry was psychic, but this was just his usual refrain. He’d used it on me plenty of times when he wanted to make fun of me. Why do you talk to the UPS guy so much? Are you hot for him? Why did you make small talk with the waiter? Are you hot for him, Andie? I bet you are. That’s hilarious.

According to Terry, it was always hilarious when I found a man attractive.

And suddenly, I was mad—really, really mad. I wanted to hurt Terry more than I ever had before. Yes, I am hot for him! I wanted to shout. I’ve met him twice and he’s nicer to me than you ever were! I want to fuck him for days, and I’ll bet he’s better in bed than you!

But I had to keep control. The final papers weren’t signed yet, and if Terry got it in his head that I was sleeping with someone new, he could make problems over the custody arrangement for Miles. Maybe he wouldn’t get away with claiming I was an unfit mother, but he could put me through a lot of expensive misery if he tried.

“I’m not hot for anyone,” I said calmly. “But I need help at the Wild, and Damon is willing to take the job. So I hired him. And since the Wild is my bar now, you don’t get a say.”

There was a long pause. “Fine,” Terry said, as if he had needed to make a decision. The asshole. “Where’s Miles? Put him on.”

“He’s at his friend Jonathan’s right now, but I’ll tell him you called. I’m sure he’ll be happy about it. I’ll have him call you when he gets home.”

“Fine,” Terry said again, and then he hung up.

When I put the phone down, my hands were shaking with rage. Not because of Terry’s attitude, or because he’d made fun of me, or because he’d left me in the first place after too many final years of a lousy marriage that had stolen a precious part of my life.

No. I was angry because in that whole conversation, the very last thing Terry remembered to ask about was his son.