Second Time Around

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Chapter 1

What is it with him? Why is he looking at me like that?

I glance across the assembly hall, and he’s staring at me as if I’m some hot chick he’s just spotted in a bar. A total stranger, but one he fancies. He’s undressing me with his eyes, the way men who know exactly what to do with a woman do. Men who know they can get away with it too.

I start to sweat. My heart flutters like a bird inside my rib cage. Down there, oh God, in my crotch, I can feel myself getting hot and slippery and aching and tense.

I can’t believe it. He’s my ex-husband. I shouldn’t feel like this.

A server hovers at my elbow with a tray of glasses and I grab a glass of sparkling plonk and take a long swallow from it. The wine’s pleasant, but I barely taste it. Even the alcohol doesn’t register, I’m so shaken…so…so aroused.

Get a grip, Willa. Stay in control. It’s James and you’re bound to feel a bit weird seeing him again after three years. But there’s nothing to get in a tizz and go to pieces over.

Yes, that’s right. It’s just surprise. Nothing more. Physical signals a bit scrambled. Bound to happen when it’s a man you’ve been intimate with.

But he never used to look at me like that, not even when we were first married. Or even when we were high school pupils here, boarders at exclusive Walton Wood College and two randy teenagers just crazy-mad for one another.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here? School reunion, not my thing really. Everybody playing at one-upmanship, my career’s better than your career, my marriage is better than your marriage, my kids are better than your kids.

Yes, stupid to come here when my marriage foundered and even the career I thought I wanted isn’t turning out to be as spectacular as I’d hoped.

And I really don’t like feeling out of control like this!

It’s all James’s fault. For being different. For being…new somehow.

Oh hell, he’s coming across again. What shall I do?

As my ex-husband weaves across the hall, amongst my former classmates and teachers, his blue eyes narrow and assess me. By the time he reaches me, he’s covered every inch of my body, and he’s retracing the journey, flicking back to hover explicitly at my breasts, at my crotch. Blushing harder than I ever did in school, I want to toss my head and look away, outraged. But I can’t. I just can’t. It’s like he’s hypnotized me.

My mouth drops open when he quirks his lips, lifts his drink to me in an insolent toast, then takes a long swallow in a way that makes my sex flutter as his Adam’s apple works in his long tanned throat. Is he ever going to speak, or just keep on staring me down, making me hot?

“Enjoying yourself, Willa?”

“Yes…sort of. I’m not sure…”

I sound like an idiot. God, I’m never like this. What is he doing to me?

He takes another sip from his glass, eyeing me over it. “That’s not like you, love. You always know what you feel. What you want.”

The word want makes me shudder. Right down there again, in my pussy.

What the hell’s happened to the man who was my James? He was my childhood sweetheart. We dated here at Walton Wood, and wed later, when we’d got our degrees, and had what I thought was the whole world at our feet. Now I feel as if some kind of Stepford Husband scenario has happened in reverse. And the mild-mannered, so often too-tired-to-fight-or-fuck man I married has turned into a dangerous stranger, a new breed of steely, threatening cyborg. Sort of like the Terminator, but with emotions. Lots of emotions, and most of them sexual confidence and charisma.

Opening my mouth to retort…something…anything…I snap it shut again when a group of circulating reunion guests pitch up beside us. It’s all “Hello,” “How are you?,” “What are you doing these days?” between James and I, and the newcomers. Under other circumstances, I’d be interested, nosy even, genuinely wanting to know how people have fared, especially one of our teachers, the cute but quirky Mr. Laurence, who seems to have been in the wars, poor man, and now walks with a stick. He had us all laughing with a surprisingly funny math joke, and even though James seemed to be laughing along, when I glanced at him, he was smiling at me. Only at me. His eyes were steady, steel in the blue, and the way they speared into me made me tremble in my smart pumps, and a fresh rush of blood made my face and ears and chest turn rosy pink.

I’m sweating now, when I look at him, and I can’t think straight. I thought I was over him that way. We grew apart. I can’t still want him, now we’ve split…or can I?

And yet like a hunter, he’s watching me, sizing me up. As the chat goes on, I try glaring at him, to make him stop, but he only gives me that smile, that goddamn smile!

“Drink, madam?”

The server, superefficient, is at my elbow with more drinks. I have to hand it to my old classmate Caitlyn, her catering firm’s really organized this shindig to perfection. As I reach for more Chardonnay, I make a note to seek her out and congratulate her on a job well done. At least her future’s turned out well, she’s met her goals.

But just as my fingers almost make contact with a glass, a hand catches me by the wrist, gentle but unyielding. I know that touch, even after three years of not feeling it, and I forget about my former classmates, I forget about wine, I forget about everything. There’s nothing in the world but the heat in those strong fingers, and a contact that’s intimately familiar, yet totally new.

“Don’t have another,” James says very quietly, making me face him. His words don’t carry beyond the air between him and me, and I realize our companions have drifted away, as if sensing our tension. “We need to get out of here,” he goes on, “I think it’s time we talked.”

I feel like a whirlwind inside. How dare he? He doesn’t have the right to order me around anymore. Not that he ever did. To my shame, it was me who always did the ordering, and far too damn much of it. I realize that now, but it doesn’t stop old, hard-dying instincts from making me flare at him.

“I don’t think we have anything to say, James,” I say airily, while the whirlwind picks up speed inside me, emotions spinning round and round, fueled by the mad, unexpected hormones pumping and sluicing through me.

I want sex all of a sudden. Sex with my ex. It doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t make the ache between my thighs less keen, the state of my nipples less peaked where they fight against the lace of my bra, suddenly too tight. The reunion party slips out of phase slightly and I see James naked again, in our shared bed, his thick cock risen and rampant.

The sex was good, I can never deny that. Always satisfying. Plenty of orgasms. Even though James forever avoided confrontation with me, and that in turn made me confused, annoyed, desperate to goad him, he was nothing if not strong, and enduring, between the sheets.

“Please, Willa, come on.”

The words are old James, steady and nonconfrontational.

But the tone is new James, all unyielding, dark and deliciously threatening. My world shifts around me and I allow myself to be led.

Old classmates watch us as we cross the room.

And why not? New James doesn’t look like old James either.

Gone is the conservative suit, the understated shirt and tie, and the floppy banker’s hair. Now he’s in black jeans and a leather jacket, with a black silk shirt beneath, stark, uncompromising and macho. His hair is short, a bit spiky in the front, and his face is bronzed and healthy looking, rugged. He looks every inch the outdoorsman he’s become in the last three years, rather than the rather pale, harassed junior executive he was before we parted. Keeping track of him, I know his garden-design business is thriving. He’s doing far, far better for himself now than in the kinds of jobs I pushed him into to further our status as a “golden couple.”

He’s golden in his own right now. It’s in the way he walks and in his gilded, sun-bleached hair. He doesn’t need me anymore. He doesn’t need my ambition for him. He never did.

“What do you want, James?”

I finally face up to him in the lobby. He’s still holding my wrist, the grip light, but I can’t seem to shake him off. I can’t make myself want to shake him off. And how is it he seems taller now than he did? A grim thought needles me. Did my constant drive forward diminish him somehow? I have a horrible feeling it might have done. It seemed like the right thing at the time, but with hindsight, I can see that free of me, he’s flourished. He’s proud and strong and utterly male and sexy.

All I ever really wanted but was just too blind to see.

I open my mouth, to say I know not what, probably an attempt to be more amenable, perhaps show him that I’m trying to grow too. But he places the fingers of his free hand over my lips for a moment, and the touch of them makes me shake, literally shake.

James seems to note this. His fingertips smooth across my mouth, and insanely, I’m tempted to kiss them. Too late, he’s drawn back.

“Well, I’m pretty sure I want to fuck you, Willa,” he says conversationally, then he pauses, does a thing with his tongue around his lower lip that looks positively obscene, “but before that…well…you’ll have to come with me and see, won’t you?”

My world reels faster, harder.

“But, James,” protests old me, still trying to shake loose, and trying to cling to some semblance of control and normality, even though I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I don’t want it! “We can’t just walk out on the party. People will talk.”

James smiles, wide, his white teeth dazzling against his tan. He’s relaxed, unfazed by the kind of crap that he used to just accept from me. He was always too weary of it to fight it then. But now he’s like a dynamo, humming with energy.

“So let them.”

He’s still not letting go, and the Willa of old, who just won’t quit, gears herself to struggle and assert herself. But then the rapid tap, tap, tap of high heels behind me makes me turn, anxious, intrigued, grasping at a moment of respite. Whoever it is, she’s in a tearing hurry.

It’s Caitlyn, the caterer, and she’s dazzling eyed and happy, a broad smile on her face. She looks literally illuminated. What’s all that about?

“Where are you going, Caitlyn? Are you leaving the party already?” I ask, aware of James watching me, not her. “Is something going on?”

“Yes…yes, it is,” she hurls over her shoulder, dashing for the open doors and the large chauffeured car I can see beyond it. “But I can’t explain because I don’t know what it is yet.”

Suddenly, I want what she seems to have. An adventure, something sexy and new and mysterious. And I want it with my ex-husband, with James.

“Look, James, let’s go and have a quiet chat somewhere. Drinks maybe, and a bit of dinner? The restaurant at my hotel is quite good. Then perhaps afterward…”

He looks at me, still smiling that devastating but secretive smile. The one that tells me my efforts to steer the situation are meaningless. He tugs lightly on my hand.

“Yes, let’s go somewhere. But never mind drinks and bits of dinner. We need to get a few things straightened out first.”

I’m totally disorientated. This is a man I’ve known for years, and yet he’s a stranger. His touch makes me all wound up and twittery as if I’m with a movie star or some other celebrity, or just some man I’ve fancied for years and years but never actually met before.

I don’t think I’m “me” at all, either.

For the first time in our relationship, I follow him silently. Almost meekly. He looks over his shoulder, and winks, his smile slow and knowing as he heads for the stairs.

At first I think we’re heading for the dorms, empty now, out-of-term time, but within seconds I realize where we’re going. It’s the old music room, one of our favorite haunts from our time here. It was never used much, even back then, as they’d just refurbished a much larger room, with better acoustics, as a music laboratory.

It’s small, shabby, with stained wooden paneling adorned by a selection of dog-eared posters. A few rows of chairs, some askew now, facing the wrong way. There’s an air of forlorn neglect about the place, dim and dusty—but somehow, against the odds, a strange electricity too.

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