The Secret Lives of Doctors' Wives. Ann Major
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she’d heard it, she tried to forget him.
Not a chance of that! Not when Alexis turned to her, bright-eyed and curious. “Are you in love with him, Mimi?”
“What?”
“Are you?”
When she shook her head, Alexis, who was clearly in the midst of her first crush, smiled and then gushed in a confidential tone, “Good. Because I am.”
Oh, God…Unwanted memories swamped Rosie—her arms laced around Michael’s young, lean back as they roared toward Mexico, the wind gusting against their skin; his long naked body on top of hers at that secluded beach with the palms after he’d taken her virginity. Last of all she remembered the compassion in his eyes as she’d poured her heart out to him in that bar last year after he’d ticketed her. When she’d finished talking, she’d leaned across the table and kissed him as if he were the only person in her whole life who’d ever really mattered. His answering kiss had been equally tender and hot and all-consuming.
Nobody else had ever made her feel as if she was the only one.
Rosie yanked the brush through Alexis’s hair and then washed her face, but she was too tired and upset to bathe her.
“Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, after a night’s sleep, we’ll bathe together,” she said, forcing a bright smile.
Alexis set Blue Binkie on the counter and squirted a blob of jewel-blue toothpaste on her brush, and for once didn’t argue, so Rosie got to splash cold water on her own face in relative peace.
“I want to sleep with you,” Alexis said when they were finished.
“Yes, I’d like that, too.” Rosie wiped a bit of shiny blue off the corner of Alexis’s mouth. “We’ll have our very own slumber party.” How Rosie had longed for such closeness to Carmen, Alexis’s mother, when Carmen had been young. But it hadn’t happened back then, and it still hadn’t happened.
Someday.
When they closed the bedroom door, Rosie gently tucked the little girl, Blue Binkie, several books that she demanded, and three of her favorite stuffed animals under the covers of her king-size bed. When Alexis rolled over, hugging her blanket and shutting her eyes, Rosie tiptoed downstairs, intending to turn the lights out, lock up and set the alarm.
Instead, she nearly screamed when she saw Michael sprawled on the couch, writing in his little notebook.
“I thought you’d left.”
He looked up, his eyes hard with suspicion.
“Cute kid,” he said, forcing a mildness in his low tone. “Real cute. Reminds me of you. I envy you. I never had kids.”
Quickly, she glanced at him and at her family pictures right behind him, and then away. Had he looked at them?
Deep breath. Deep breath.
“You have to go,” she said. “Now.”
“Why the hell are you so afraid of me?”
“Who’s afraid? I was just worried Alexis might wake up and get scared.”
“There’s no need to be afraid of me, you know.”
“Right. I’m not.”
“Besides, I thought we kind of clicked again last year.”
At the reminder, a ripple of tension raced down her spine. Maybe if she went on the attack, he would leave.
“Look, I was going through a rough time last year. You were pushy as hell. You took advantage. I made up my mind a long time ago…that you and I…weren’t right for each other.”
He slammed his notebook aside and sat up straighter. “Oh, right, blame me for what happened. Revenge fantasies cause you to chase your old boyfriend down with your Beamer, and then when I ticket you and prevent you from doing murder or whatever you intended, you reach under the table and grab—”
“Okay! I don’t need a replay!”
“What was I—a revenge fuck?”
“Oh…! Is that what you told everybody you know—that I threw myself at you?”
“It damn sure would have been the truth. What about the revenge part? Is that why you did it?”
She marched toward him, intending to pound his wide chest. But as soon as she entered his space, she grew jittery and halted. Suddenly she was too afraid of his power and her own vulnerability after all that had happened tonight. Besides, anytime she saw him, guilt about the past swept her.
He lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry I said that. And about what happened last year, I was a self-serving…er, pushy jerk…To let you feel me up right there in the bar. And then to kiss you back when you kissed me.”
Just when her blood came to a rolling boil again, he paused.
“To let me?”
“Rosie, be fair. The sex was your idea. You knew how easy it was for you to stir me up in high school,” he stated. “And you’d learned a lot since then. I was going through a rough patch with my wife, too.”
“Your wife? You…you dog! I can’t believe this!” Oh, yes, yes she could. After tonight, she could believe anything. Men were scum. “You were married?”
“Was.”
This was bad.
She gulped in a breath, almost strangling. She knew she should drop it, but she couldn’t. “You should’ve stopped at that first kiss—or at least by the second.”
“So should you. The truth is, you sort of pushed, too. I mean, your hands were doing all those things under the table.”
“But you were married.”
“Not anymore—thanks to you.”
“What? You’re blaming me? Oh…!”
“When Marie and I were making up, I’m afraid I told her about us.”
“Marie? Her name’s Marie, too? And what’s this us? There is, I mean was, no us.”
“I tried to explain that to her. Stupidly, I thought I should try to be honest when we started over.”
“And you were dumb enough to tell her about us?”
“Us. There! You said it, too!”
Images of what she’d done with Michael sprang into vivid color in her imagination. This was a nightmare. She couldn’t believe Michael had turned up the same night she’d seen Pierce again.
“How much did you tell her?”
“Too much.”
Everything. He’d told his wife everything!
Why had she picked Michael to sleep with instead of some stranger? The point had been to reassure herself she was still even capable of sex after the number Pierce had done on her. Period. She’d wanted no attachments. Who better than a man she knew she had to be done with?
Strangely, the sex with Michael had quickly become a compulsion. After a kiss or two, she couldn’t have stopped had her life depended on it. He’d made her feel too damned attractive, and she’d craved that after the way Pierce had discarded her.
A minute passed, and then another. The silence between them grew thick and heavy. Michael’s eyes were so intense they were giving her a bad case of the chills.
“Last year you were so upset with that doctor, you wanted to kill him,” he murmured. “You over the bastard yet?”
The question caught her off guard, and she spoke too abruptly and too defensively. “Yes!”