Born in the Valley. Tara Quinn Taylor
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his arm a squeeze. “You know I’m here if you need anything, right?”
“Yeah.” Bowing his head, he almost mumbled. “You talk to me, Bonnie. Like I’m a real guy…”
Bonnie replayed their conversation over and over as she drove home more than an hour later. She’d helped Shane, made a difference. And that felt damn good.
CHAPTER TWO
HE’D NEVER WORN pajamas to bed. Just boxers. It was one thing that hadn’t changed.
Keith was hard inside his shorts as he climbed in beside his wife almost a week after the fire. It amazed him, that ready reaction, which happened much more often than he would’ve expected after more than six years of sharing the same bed with Bonnie.
She hadn’t been there long. The sheets were still cool.
“’Night,” she said softly before he’d even settled in.
The next day was Tuesday. Keith had a governing-board breakfast meeting. And Bonnie was always up at the crack of dawn taking care of Katie and getting to work earlier than the rest of the eight-to-five world.
Still…
He opened his mouth to reply in kind, but then didn’t. With every casual good-night, he could feel her slipping farther away.
He lay down. Fought with himself for all of two seconds. Nudged her backside with his hips. The low, welcoming moan that came quietly from deep in her throat righted his world.
“You make me crazy, woman,” he growled against the side of her throat, kissing along her neck and collarbone. His hand slid beneath the short cotton top of her pajamas.
And the pressure of her butt against him increased perceptibly.
“What do you want?” he whispered in her ear, feeling her shiver. “Top or bottom?”
Wrapping her arms around his middle, she pulled him on top of her. A silent reply. There’d been too many of those in these last confusing months.
“I love looking at your eyes in the moonlight,” he told her. He loved how they glistened with the intensity of her passion.
Tonight she closed them.
Moving past the disappointment, he bent to kiss her, long lingering openmouthed kisses they’d perfected over the years.
Her mouth opened. But her tongue didn’t dance.
“Something wrong?” he asked, raising his head only far enough to see her face.
Bonnie lifted her hips against his groin, inviting him. As badly as he needed her, Keith was hesitant.
“Talk to me.” He couldn’t make out her expression. “Please?”
“I…”
“What’s wrong, honey?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, her gaze settling at about his nose. “I’m just tired.”
In almost seven years, tired had never made their lovemaking a silent affair. Not even in those first months after Katie was born and they were both doing double duty with full-time jobs and night feeding. Their conversation during sex was what made sleeping with Bonnie different from the few other women he’d been with.
She pulled him down to her, enticing him with her tongue along the edges of his lips, enticing him with other things.
Keith wasn’t sure he should finish what he’d started.
More and more he’d come up against this strange vacancy in Bonnie. This refusal to tell him what she was thinking. But this was the first time it had translated itself into their sex life.
“Bonnie?”
“Yeah?” Her voice was languorous, as though she was giving herself up to passion, as though she wasn’t even aware of the chasm deepening between them.
He was tempted to give up for tonight, to enjoy whatever communication remained between them.
“Why won’t you talk to me? Tell me what’s wrong.”
Her hands didn’t move from around his neck, her hips still pressing against him. “There’s nothing to tell.”
He wanted to believe that. “You seem kind of…distant.”
“I’m really just tired, babe,” she said, her voice full of the intimate warmth that had made him her slave from the very beginning. “I’ve spent the entire week reassuring parents. They needed to hear for themselves that there really was no danger to their kids, that Greg’s official report said the arson was a random act. And no one was satisfied until they’d heard it directly from me.”
She reached up to kiss him and his body started to respond again.
Keith rose on his elbows.
“So I’ve just imagined the distance growing between us these past couple of months?”
It was a subject he’d broached often.
“I’m right here, Keith. Loving you and Katie every bit as much as I always have.”
Keith stared down at her. That was the kind of frustrating nonresponse he received every time. Instead of giving him a real answer, she countered with something good and affirming.
And he knew from experience that if he pushed, he’d just get more of the same.
“I don’t understand.”
She pushed a lock of hair off his forehead, running her fingers through to the ends, which rested at the bottom of his neck. “Don’t understand what?”
“Why I’m battling this fear that things are slipping away and you don’t even seem to be aware of anything changing.”
Fear wasn’t an emotion he was all that familiar with. Certainly not one he’d ever admitted to before. It was probably only because he was still lying intimately on top of her, her arms around him, that he could own up to it now.
“Keith.” She held his face with her hands. “Things are not slipping away. You have my word on that. I’m right here. I’m going to stay right here. I love you very, very much. I don’t even want to contemplate what life would be like without you. Okay?”
Slowly Keith nodded, all the while feeling a sense of defeat. How in hell did you communicate with someone who refused to acknowledge the problem?
And how could he fix whatever was broken when he couldn’t find out what it was?
Or maybe she couldn’t acknowledge the problem because it was him? And it couldn’t be fixed?
Staring down into green eyes that looked almost black in the darkness, Keith knew he wasn’t going to be able to rest easy that night. “You’re sure there’s nothing wrong that you aren’t telling me? You aren’t sick or anything?”
“I’d tell you if I was sick, you know that.”
“And business at the day care is good?”
“Amazingly so, especially considering the fire.”
“What about Katie? Is there something wrong there you aren’t telling me about?”
“Of course not! I tell you everything about Katie.”
About Katie maybe. But then, Katie had always been a source of joy between them. Caressing Bonnie’s cheek softly, he remembered how Bonnie’s pregnancy had brought them so much closer when he’d already thought they were as close as two people could be.
The nights they’d spent creating scenarios of what it would be like to be parents, the doctor’s visits, listening to that heartbeat inside her, the hundreds of names they’d picked out only to discard each one and begin again. The countless times he’d rubbed her growing belly