staying late at the office and racking up marathons on his bike in spin class.
"It seems like a second ago that she was as small as Russ," Griffin said.
Russ. So small and so dependent. David squeezed his eyes at the raking pain in his gut.
"Dad." A sleepy Duncan squirmed in his hold. "You're hurting."
"Yeah, buddy," he murmured.
"You're hurting me." He wriggled again.
David loosened the arm that was clutching his oldest son. "Sorry."
"Watcha doing out here?" He butted his head against David's ribs.
"I wanted some fresh air," he said. "Can we keep that our secret? Not tell Mom?"
"Sure." Duncan's voice slowed. "Have a secret too, with Unc' Griff."
David didn't think he was awake enough to share what it was. "Okay, son," he said.
"We been peeing in the ocean." Oliver popped up.
"You're awake too?" David said, glancing down at his second boy.
"Nope. Jus' wanted to tell you our secret. Our man secret." As he settled back down, Oliver kicked David in the shins.
Wincing, he said, "Is that right?"
"Unc' Griff says there's stuff we don't tell girls."
"Peeing in the ocean seems to qualify," David agreed aloud, though from Oliver's sudden bonelessness, he figured the boy had drifted back to dreamland.
"For the record, there's also been some burping and armpit farting," Griffin confessed. "We had a contest."
"Sure you did," David said, unsurprised. "You and Gage never do anything without making it a competition."
"Yeah." Griffin sounded unhappy about it.
"Hey. I'm sorry. I didn't mean - "
"No apology necessary." Griffin stirred. "You want me to leave them with you?"
"I wish you wouldn't," David said. "And I also wish..."
"Another man secret, I get it. I won't tell your wife where you were tonight."
"It doesn't matter," Tess's voice said. In the moonlight he could see her bare, elegant feet. She was standing just beyond Griffin. "Because your wife already knows."
* * *
TESS SAT ON THE sand outside David's tent as Griffin carried Duncan and Oliver to No. 8. He'd promised to tuck them in and tell Rebecca she was in charge until Tess returned to the house. Why David was camping on her doorstep she didn't yet know, but she was going to get to the bottom of it. Her avoidance of speaking with him about any serious subjects had merely postponed the inevitable. Tonight she was going to strip every pretense away.
The half-moon cast cool light on the beach, but her husband was little more than a dark shadow inside the confines of the small tent. She nodded at it. "Where'd you get that thing?"
"Borrowed it from the Kearneys across the street," he said. Then he started crawling toward the open flap. "I should take it back to them."
"We should talk first." Tess shifted closer so that he'd have to push her out of the way in order to get out. He froze, as she expected he would. He'd been avoiding touching her for weeks.
"Fine." His sigh was audible. Then he started speaking in a conversational tone. "What did you and Rebecca see at the movies tonight?"
"I don't know. My mind was elsewhere."
"While I ate dinner, I watched an interesting program on the Nature Channel."
"Really?" She stared at him. Married for thirteen years, separated for several days, and he wanted to engage in small talk?
"Really."
"No, I mean you really want to talk about fauna or flora instead of our family?"
"It was on solar variation - which is neither animal nor vegetable, of course."
David had a dry sense of humor that some people mistook for dullness. She didn't. She knew exactly what he was up to, and it was all about dodging important matters. If she was going to get him on point, he was forcing her to flat-out ask him the tough questions.
Suddenly she felt cold, and she rubbed at the bare skin of her arms beneath her short sleeves. Though she wore jeans, she was shoeless, and she crossed one set of chilled toes over the other. She tried peering into the tent. "Do you have a jacket in there?"
"No." But then he moved, and she could just make out him stripping off his sweatshirt. He scooted closer to the tent entrance to pass it to her, and the moonlight revealed his bare skin.
The material was warm from his body heat. "But you - "
"I'm fine." He drew folds of SpongeBob SquarePants around his torso. "Put it on."
It was a mistake. Once she slipped the sweatshirt over her head, the scent of him enveloped her. You'd think she'd be accustomed to it, but thanks to their