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JACK SHRUGGED into his suit jacket as he stared down at the aerial shots of the militia compounds surrounding the villages where he and Oliver were digging their wells in Darfur.
The compounds had been built up. More than before, despite the cease-fire. Going back next month wasn’t going to be easy.
As if it was ever easy.
Mustering up enthusiasm was impossible.
“Jack?”
“Hmm?” he said, distracted by the desk full of papers. Christ, if Oliver could just do this meet and greet by himself, at least one of them could get some work done tonight. “Jack!”
“Mia!” He spun. “Sorry, I got—” Jack had some expectations of how Mia would look, stepping out of her bedroom. And he’d be lying if he said those expectations were high. She was a rancher on a hardscrabble pocket of land two hundred miles from here—and she worked that land hard.
Ranching life didn’t leave much time for shopping. Or dress wearing.
So the version of Mia standing in the doorway to her bedroom was both expected and a sharp, shocking surprise.
“Distracted,” he finished lamely.
The dress, black and simple, was still wrinkled and didn’t fit. Too long at the knee and too tight at the bust. Probably her sister, Lucy’s. Mia looked uncomfortable just standing in the high-heeled shoes with the sexy bow on the side; he dreaded thinking of her walking in them.
That’s what his head noticed anyway.
His body was busy noticing other things and nearly roaring in approval. Her skin, God, her skin was like caramel. And the rustic gold bangles she wore at her wrists made her look like an Incan princess. Her hair was long and loose, the curls riding her back and he wanted to touch those curls, feel them clinging to his fingers, twining around his hand.
But her body…oh, man.
Growing up, he’d thrown a lot of punches against the mouths of boys who’d been too vocal in their admiration for her young body. And he’d gotten used to not looking at her below the chin, out of respect. Friendship. Because he knew how much her curves bothered her. Embarrassed her.
She didn’t seem embarrassed now.
The black dress skimmed her breasts, revealing the pillowy tops, the perfect round contours, the mysterious black valley that divided them. And he knew, as awkward as she might feel in that dress, not a single man would notice.
Because all they would see was her beauty.
“I’m going to have to punch out a lot of guys tonight,” he murmured, and she smiled.
“I doubt that.” She smoothed the front of the simple dress. “It’s wrinkled.”
“Putting it in a duffel bag will do that,” he said.
“Oh, and suddenly you’re Mr. Fashion?” She narrowed her eyes, the years melting away under their teasing. “That’s not even your suit, is it?”
“Of course it is,” he said, running his hands over the too-big jacket. “I’ve just lost some weight.”
Mia stepped forward and pulled the tie from where he’d stuffed it in his suit jacket. She flipped up the stiff edges of his collar and settled the tie around his neck. He lifted his chin, standing willingly under her ministrations. She’d tied his tie on his prom night with Missy Manning, on his graduations from high school and college. The day they got married.
It was the only time in his life, other than the day of their wedding, that Jack actually felt like a husband.
She was close. So close he could see the freckles across her nose, the small scars along her chin where she’d fallen into the barbed wire when they were kids.
Her lips…
He blinked and looked back up at the ceiling.
What a marriage, he thought. He must be the only husband who’d never had a wedding night.
Sometimes he got the impression that Mia wanted something physical between them. She’d watch him a little too long, her eyes dilating, her breath hitching—principal signs of animal attraction.
But he’d told himself since he was twenty years old and she’d been fifteen that nothing would ever happen between them unless she started it.
And she never had.
“Well,” she sighed, patting his tie. “It’s a little crooked, but no one will notice.”
“It’s great, Mia,” he said through the tension in his throat. “Thank you.”
“We’re a fine pair,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Let’s go cause a scandal.”
And just like that, this night, this torturous night that he’d been dreading with every fiber of his being, was fun. An adventure.
He offered her his elbow and she slipped her hand, small but so strong, up next to his ribs and then around his arm. He felt the pressure of her fingers, the weight of her palm, through his skin and down into the muscle.
“Let’s go,” he murmured and opened the door to the night.
They crossed the moonlit path from their cabana suite to the glittering main part of the hotel. A crowded patio surrounded by bougainvillea jutted up over the cliffs overlooking the ocean. She stopped, staring off at the water, the oil drills in the distance, the Channel Islands sitting like fat coins on the horizon.
“The islands are so pretty,” she said.
“They call them the North American Galápagos,” he said. “Because there are over one hundred and fifty endemic species. Plants alone there are—”
“You don’t say, Professor,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.
“Sorry.” He ran a hand over his forehead. “I’m—”
“Nervous?” she asked and he turned to face her. Luminous in the moonlight. If only they could stay out here all night.
“I hate these things,” he said.
“You do suck at them.”
His laugh cleared the adrenaline churning through his stomach. He sighed, and they stood in silence, staring at the islands. The blinking lights of the oil drills.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said, and suddenly Mia pulled her hand away from his elbow, creating distance where he didn’t really want any.
“We need to talk,” she began. He hung his head.
“Not Dad again, Mia—”
“I think it’s time for a divorce.”
Jack blinked, his mouth suddenly dry. The apprehension exploded in his stomach again, darker, uglier this time. “Us?”
Her smile was slight, her eyes unreadable. “Yes, us.”
“Why?”
She sighed, her breath fanning his cheek. She smelled like toothpaste.
“Is there…someone else?” he asked. He hadn’t thought of that, not really. There was no time for him to meet anyone else and it had never occurred to him that Mia might.
“Someone else?” She laughed. “Someone besides my childhood friend who married me as a favor and who I’ve seen all of five times in the five years we’ve been married?”
He couldn’t read her anger. Did she want more for them? Then why the divorce?
“I want…I want a real marriage,” she said, lifting her chin. “Your mom is gone. She can’t hurt my family anymore. And I want a family. A husband who lives with me. Works with me. Builds a life with me. Loves me.”
He stiffened, unable to process what she was saying. She wanted a family? Kids?
“And that’s never going to happen with you, is it?”
“No,” he answered. She turned away, staring off at the ocean, her jawline as set in stone as he’d ever seen it. The idea of going back to the ranch was laughable. It would be like volunteering to go to hell. His work was on the other side of the world, his life was far away from where he’d been raised and abused by his parents.
“Why?” he asked, because what she wanted didn’t make sense to him. “My parents had a ‘real’ marriage. I don’t know why you’d want that.”
“My parents had a real marriage, too, Jack. And they were very happy,” she said. “Not every relationship is like your folks’.”
He didn’t say anything, because frankly, while he understood her hypothesis, he hadn’t seen enough proof to support it.
“It was always going to end this way,” she said, and he kept his eyes on her profile, wondering where this was coming from. “We knew that. It’s not like we were ever going to have…something real.”
“You’re one of the most real things in my life, Mia.”
She closed her eyes, a strange anxiety rolling off her.
“We’ll always be friends,” she finally said. “Divorce, just like the marriage, won’t change that.”
“Okay.” He had to agree, because he supposed logically, she was right.
And there was no arguing with logic.
“We can get a divorce,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want,” she said, with a definitive nod. Her mood shifted and she was suddenly cheerful. Totally at odds with the loss he felt. “I’ll put together the paperwork,” she said.
He nodded, numb and off course. He wished he could go back to his work, those charts. Even with the errors, he could read them. They made sense.
“All right, then,” she said, pulling him into motion, leading him into the party. “I need a drink.”
MIA’S HEAD BUZZED. Her stomach churned. A glass of wine on a belly full of nerves and no food wasn’t her greatest idea. But she needed something to ease the worst of the pain.
Divorce.
A million times in the years she’d known him, she’d thought about telling Jack how she felt. Maybe if he knew, things would change. But right now, this moment, was why she never did. Because in her heart of hearts she’d always known Jack McKibbon could never return her feelings. Never.
His wounds were too deep, his brain was too big and his heart was just a bit too cold.
And she was always going to be little Mia Alatore.
She took another sip of her white wine and tried to ignore the whispers that buzzed around her like horseflies.
It wasn’t hard to guess who the dean’s wife was. Mia would put money on the tall redhead staring at her from the corner of the room with enough malice to cut steel.
But the rest of the women at the party were staring at Jack, who, even in his ill-fitting suit, was the handsomest man there. Tall and broad, rough around the edges, he was so different from the slick men surrounding him. Like a wild animal surrounded by domesticated cats.
She’d bet that most of the women in the room wouldn’t mind seeing Indiana Jones without the suit. Herself included.
Maybe she should try to get that wedding night before it was too late.
She snorted into her wineglass.
“Mia?” A vaguely familiar young woman with bright eyes and a slightly plastic smile stepped in front of her. “I’m Claire, Devon Cormick’s wife.”
“Hi.” Mia shook hands with the woman. That’s why she was familiar; they’d met three years ago at her first of these cocktail parties. When she’d actually felt like a wife. When hope had made her excited to be on Jack’s arm.
“Devon’s going to El Fasher with Oliver and Jack in March to fix the drill.”
“Next month?” Mia asked, before she could stop herself.
Claire blinked, the plastic fading from her expression. Replaced by a baffled concern that looked, to Mia’s jaded eye, like pity. “You…didn’t know?”
Mia took a deep breath. “No. I didn’t.”
She finished her wine and handed the glass off to a passing waiter and without a second thought, picked up another.
She was going to get drunk, and right now, with the pain lancing her body like a thousand arrows, it seemed like a great idea.
“Mia,” Claire said, “I’m not sure what the situation is between you and Jack and I certainly am not going to speculate—”
“Really?” Mia asked, not believing it for a minute. She could feel the speculation from every single person in the room like hot air suffocating her.
Claire stiffened, her eyes shooting out sparks. “No,” she said. “I’m not. But Devon and Jack are the only two on the team with wives and…”
Realization sunk in. Claire wanted someone to commiserate with. Someone to hold hands with and pray, to pore over the newspapers and pull apart embassy reports.
I have to do this? she asked herself, bitterness making her feel a million years old. She wanted to find her rusty, beat-up truck in the employee lot and head back to the land she loved and that loved her back. I have to live all of this again?
“I’m just so scared for him,” Claire breathed, and Mia couldn’t mistake the fear in the woman’s voice.
A fear she knew too well.
“Stay away from the internet,” Mia said, staring into her wineglass, sucked unwillingly into the past. The first trip Jack took to Africa, Mia had been glued to her computer and the unsubstantiated reports had given her ulcers. “Try to stay busy. Focused on something other than your husband.”
“That’s it?” Claire asked. “No internet and get a hobby?”
Mia nodded, remembering the crushing anxiety all too well and knowing that there was nothing Claire could do to really combat it.
“Unless you can convince him not to go?”
“That didn’t work with Jack, did it?” Claire asked softly.
Mia finished the wine in her glass, gulping it down without tasting it—wishing the rest of her body could go as numb as her taste buds. “I didn’t bother trying,” she said.
She and Claire made difficult small talk—it was all too obvious that Claire wanted to ask about Mia’s relationship with Jack. Hash it out, woman to woman.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Finally, Claire made some excuse about needing a bathroom and left.
Thank God, Mia thought, stepping onto the balcony where it was quiet. A cool breeze blew off the ocean and her skin chilled. Her nose went cold and her eyes stung.
Jack was leaving. Again. It had become so common; he didn’t even bother to tell her anymore.
“There’s my girl,” a happy British voice said from behind her and Mia turned to see Jack’s partner, Oliver.
Mia wasn’t what anyone would call a hugger. But the sight of Oliver, his bright, bald head, his dashing dinner jacket with gold buttons, drove her right over the edge and she pushed herself against his barrel chest.
“Whoa there, Mia,” he said, stroking her arms. “Are you okay?”
“You’re going back,” she said against his chest. “Next month.”
“He didn’t tell you?” Oliver whispered, and at her silence he swore.
“The government and JEM signed a cease-fire.”
“That doesn’t comfort me, Oliver.”
“We’ll be fine, Mia. You know that. We have lots of security—”
“And you don’t take risks,” she said, finishing the line she’d heard seven times over the past four years. Jack and Oliver had the same script.
She stepped away, already regretting the show of emotion. Wishing she could take it all back.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” She flashed him a bright smile. “Great. Just surprised. How are you?” She squeezed his big shoulder, a far more Mia-like greeting.
“Bored to tears,” Oliver said. “And wishing I had a wife to liven things up at these parties.”
“Well, don’t do anything drastic,” she said, proud that her voice was light. None of her grief or bitterness leaked out.
But Oliver’s piercing eyes saw through her. “You and Jack make quite a pair,” he said, sipping at a glass of tonic water. “He’s about to bite off every single hand that’s here to feed us and you look like you’re going to cry or start a fight.”
“Jack doesn’t like these things,” she said with a shrug. “And I’m not so hot on them, either.”
He watched her carefully and she watched him right back. If she was here to be the loving wife, she’d better get her act together.
“You know that first summer when Jack and I worked together and I heard he was married, I thought it was a joke. We’d worked side by side twelve hours a day for a week and he never said a word about you.”
“Are you trying to start a fight?” she asked.
“No.” Oliver leaned against the banister, looking like a man settling in for a long chat. A chat she had no interest in. “But when I asked him about you, he wouldn’t shut up. I heard about when you were a baby and your family first moved to his ranch. I heard about how you followed him around as soon as you could walk, snuck into the bed of his truck when he drove away to college.”
“What is your point?”
“He said you were his best friend.”
Her throat tightened up and she angled her face toward the wind, the breeze cooling her burning eyes.
And that’s all I’ll ever be.
“What’s going on, Mia?” Oliver asked. “I’ve never asked. I figured whatever relationship you two had worked for you—but something is wrong. It’s all over your faces.”
It was hard, but she didn’t look away or flinch.
The tension inflated inside her like a balloon, and she couldn’t get a deep breath. But she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.
“You don’t let anyone in, do you?” he finally asked.
Just Jack, she thought, and that didn’t end so well.
“Don’t be dramatic, Oliver,” she said.
“I’m not, I’m simply putting my underused and underappreciated sensitive people skills to work.”
She laughed, the tension escaping. The relief was so great she couldn’t stop laughing.
“That’s more like it,” he said, grabbing two more glasses of wine from a passing waiter. “Now, let’s have a party.”
By the time Jack found them, Mia was doubled over with laughter listening to Oliver’s story about Jack eating bugs as the guest of honor in a family’s hut.
“He was picking legs out of his teeth for two hours!” Oliver said, and Mia screamed, imagining it.
“Oliver is exaggerating.” Jack’s familiar low voice sent goose bumps down her arms and over her chest. Her laughter died in her throat, the tension back in force.
Her stomach was never going to be the same.
“Don’t listen to him, Mia. You have my word,” Oliver said, putting his hand over his heart, “every syllable is the truth.”
Jack sighed and leaned against the balcony next to Mia. Static leaped between them, small currents zipping along her skin letting her know just how close he was.
And how far away.
“This night is miserable,” he said, tilting his head back.
“Because you don’t hang out with the right people,” Oliver said, winking at Mia. “Did you make anyone mad in there?” Oliver asked Jack.
“Probably,” she said.
Jack looked at her. “How much have you had to drink?” he asked.
“Are you going to scold me?” she asked.
“No.” He raised his hand and one of the ever-present waiters appeared. “I’m going to join you.”
“I’d better do some damage control,” Oliver said. “You two have fun.”
The silence left in Oliver’s wake was thick and heavy, and she wanted to collapse under the weight. The sheer volume of all the things they weren’t saying.
“You remember fun?” he asked and she knew he was looking at her. Her skin felt raw under his gaze.
She nodded.
“I think the last time I had fun was your high school graduation.”
“Come on, isn’t Africa fun?”
“Fun?” He laughed, but it wasn’t joyful. “No, Africa is hard work and a bureaucratic nightmare.”
She wasn’t all that shocked to hear it. His emails had been increasingly rant-related.
“But your high school graduation?” His eyes twinkled. “Remember?”
She would never forget. “You drove all night from Cal Poly only to get me out of bed and drag me to the roof of the high school.”
And at dawn he drove her home and left—back to college—without once talking to his family. Without even stepping foot in the house.
“Oh, like I had to drag you,” Jack said with a laugh, and her body shook at the sound. “You jumped into my truck. And, if I remember correctly, you led the way up to the roof.”
“Only because you showed me.”
“That was probably a mistake. I spent a lot of sleep less nights in college sure you’d fallen or hurt yourself.”
“I never went up on those roofs without you,” she said.
“Really?” he asked, looking down at her in surprise.
Jack had this thing, growing up, whenever he got a chance to get into town, he would sneak around Wassau, finding his way up onto the roofs of every public building. The high school, the grocery store, the two churches.
He could walk from Second Street down Main Street without ever touching the sidewalk.
When she started following him around like a lost dog and he realized he couldn’t shake her, he took her to the roofs with him.
A whole other world existed up there. He had little forts with sleeping bags and food. Flashlights and books. Sometimes, he’d told her, he slept on those roofs.
His home away from home.
He had a thing for adventure, even then.
She just had a thing for him.
But once he was gone, the roofs were just roofs.
“I can’t believe you never got caught,” she said.
“Mom found out,” he said, his smile fading.
“Really?” she breathed. “I never knew that.”
He nodded. “The second night I did it,” he said. “I was fifteen and Dad took me into town while he had a beer at Al’s and I fell off the grocery store, came home with my clothes all torn.”
“What did your mother do?”
Because tearing clothes and climbing buildings weren’t something Victoria would let pass, and Victoria had been fond of punishment. Jack shot Mia a dubious look, which hid more pain than she could imagine. “What she always did.”
She didn’t say anything, didn’t offer any sympathy, because he hated that. Always had.
And she respected his wishes. If he didn’t want to talk about Victoria’s temper, about the abuse, that was his business.
Besides, the night was a big enough bummer as it was. Scandals. Affairs. Divorce. Painfully high heels. They didn’t need to stroll down memory lane with Victoria McKibbon.
“You hungry?” he asked, standing upright as if jerking himself away from his thoughts.
“Starving.”
“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
TEN MINUTES LATER, Jack made his way toward her with a bottle of red wine under his arm, two glasses sticking out of his coat pocket and a heaping plate of food in his hands.
The twinkle in his eye—that twinkle that she’d recognize if he was eighty years old and disfigured in some terrible accident, that twinkle that led her heart places it had no business going—was like a siren song, leading her astray.
Get ready, that twinkle said, because I’m coming for you. And I’ve got a plan.
In the past that plan usually involved a ladder and a rooftop scheme.
Her heart lurched at the sight of him. At the memory of who he’d been to her.
“You want to go on the roof?”
“Do we need a ladder?”
“Nope.”
She blinked, looking around the glittering party that was all for him, and saw just how far he’d come from the roofs of Wassau. And how much she didn’t belong here.
“Jack,” she whispered, “I’m sure you have plenty of people here you need to schmooze.”
He sighed, but the twinkle didn’t diminish. “You’re probably right.”
“See—”
“But I don’t care,” he said. “I want you to come up to the roof with me.”
She’d had just enough to drink to know that going up there wasn’t a good idea. She was sad and nostalgic and turned on by the sight of his hand around the bottle of wine.
But she was Mia and he was Jack, and the years and memories between them were a hard knot of grit and rock that neither of them could forget or gloss over.
There was a lot they needed to talk about. His dad, Walter. The ranch and the rough winter they’d had. The financial problems that only seemed to get worse every time she turned around.
“Come on, Mia,” Jack said, that twinkle turning into something far more persuasive. “Let’s go.”
And that was it. Five years after marrying him, she was throwing her hat in with the devil.
The problems could wait.
Tonight wife, she reminded herself. Tomorrow divorce.
CHAPTER THREE
JACK SWIPED a key card and opened the door to a secluded rooftop patio.