his power of speech. "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And on that last word he started shuddering. Her body caught hold and used those tremors and the firming touch of his fingers to take her away....
"To infinity and beyond," David muttered as he dropped atop one sleeping bag, flinging his forearm over his eyes.
Tess lay beside him, quiet, reveling in the renewed closeness. Then reality struck, leaving her appalled.
"David." Her voice was faint. "God, David, we didn't use anything." They'd never been this irresponsible. Those two unplanned pregnancies had been due to birth control failure, not the failure to use birth control.
"It's all right," he said.
A hot tear slipped out of the corner of her eye and dripped to her temple. "Positive thinking in this regard has never worked well for us."
"I was snipped two months ago."
The sentence didn't make sense. "'Snipped'?"
"I had a vasectomy. And I've been tested since. When I ejaculate? No swimmers."
She stared in his direction, even though she couldn't see him any better in the dark now than she had before. "You...you did that without consulting me?"
His quick gesture she could only sense. "We didn't want any more kids, right?"
They hadn't planned on the fourth. A second hot tear escaped her eye. Without another word, she started feeling around for her clothes. The tent was so small they were easy to discover, and the wife in her even neatly piled David's when she encountered them.
That's who she was, of course. A wife. They might have briefly recaptured the initial excitement of their early relationship, but she wasn't nineteen any longer. No matter what happened when they were skin-to-skin, it didn't alter how he'd changed either.
She was the mother of four, and she'd gotten exactly what she'd come for. She'd stripped every pretense away to discover that David wasn't the same husband and father that he'd been in the past. He was unwilling, Tess understood now, to be that same man.
Where that left her, she didn't yet know.
CHAPTER TEN
GRIFFIN DECIDED the only redeeming feature of his new home office and the requisite laptop computer inside of it was that his mind-numbing solitaire hands dealt themselves. He'd put up with Jane bustling about the small space all morning, chattering about outlines, marking a whiteboard with a time line, setting up an internet cloud account so they could share the chapters she expected him to produce. All the while he'd tuned her out by pretending to reread the articles he'd written during his embed year.
He'd merely stared at the black squiggles on the white pages.
When the noon hour hit, he'd banished her.
Through the office's open window he could still hear her, though. Twelve feet away, she was sitting at the table on the deck with his sister and Skye. The three women were sharing a platter of fruit and cheese and watching over the small hoodlums who were his middle nephews. Rebecca, apparently, was still at summer school, and Russ was curled on his mother's lap.
"Oh! Look at that." Jane's voice rose over the whoosh of the waves spreading over the sand. "They're going up the cliff."
Worry tried to clutch at Griffin's gut, but he pushed it away along with the urge to rush to the window. It wasn't his problem if those damn kids of Tess's got into trouble. They weren't his concern. He clicked on an ace, moving it to the top row on the screen.
"I still think it's a peculiar thing to do," Jane added. "Somebody could get hurt."
"I'm going to post warning signs," Skye said. "It's really not safe."
"They're big boys," Tess replied, her tone complacent.
Complacent! With Duncan and Oliver scrambling up those sharp rocks? Griffin tried breathing through his sudden agitation, but then he gave up and leaped to the window for a view of the bluff. Oh. It wasn't his nephews climbing after all. It was Tee-Wee White and his firefighting compadres.
"Very big boys." Jane might have sighed a little.
Through the window screen, he sent her a sharp look. Her expression was impossible to discern beneath that straw hat once again sitting low on her forehead. He already knew what she was wearing: a sleeveless, tailored dress in ribbon-candy stripes and another pair of her ridiculously feminine shoes. They were high-heeled and toe-revealing, with little froufrou flowers made of matching leather stuck all over them. It was as if she'd strolled through a field, and the wildflowers had walked out with her.
Ridiculous. And she smelled like those wildflowers too. The faint scent still lingered in