housekeeper while you take honeys out to lunch.”
“Hey, did I ever say we’d be like that?”
“No,” Christina said with a straight face. “You’re a total feminist, not a macho bone in you.”
Grant’s eyes widened. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
Lying on her bed, in his black clothes and duster, looking like he’d just robbed a train and ridden home to his woman, Grant was more macho than this feminine room could take. The lacy pillows didn’t stand a chance. He was getting them very dirty. Bailey wouldn’t be happy.
No, Bailey would understand. She’d married a Campbell.
“I mean I don’t want you to buy me,” Christina said. She loosened the bandanna around his neck. The top buttons of his shirt were undone, showing a sliver of liquid-dark skin.
“Okay, I won’t give you a penny. You can sleep in the basement and eat crusts of bread, and I’ll eat off gold plates upstairs.”
“In your trailer.” Christina touched the hollow of his throat. “Yeah, that would work.”
“Fine—you go work and earn a ton of cash, and then I’ll stay home and drink beer. Sounds fair to me.”
“You’d get fat and slobby.” Christina poked his stomach, which was rock-hard. “Then I’d have to go find that tennis pro. I like a man who can move.”
“Oh, I can move, sweetheart.”
Grant swiftly pushed her into the bed, coming over her to cover her mouth with a long kiss. He slid hands down her body as he kissed her, but quietly, soothing. Warming her.
Christina held on to him and lost herself in the kiss. She tasted his tears and his grief, felt his body tight with emotion.
She loved him so much. Even when they’d fought all during the years, Christina had loved Grant with everything she had.
They went on kissing, and when the kiss drew to its end, they simply touched, gliding fingers over each other’s bodies. Sometimes they kept to the fabric, sometimes they dipped beneath their clothes to brush bare skin.
They seemed to have a tacit agreement to not take it to full sex. They needed comfort right now, to simply be in each other’s company. The frenzy of love-making would come later.
The sun sank, bathing them in darkness. Only then did Grant rise from the bed and skim off his clothes. He slowly stripped Christina, dropping her shirt, shorts, and panties to the floor, and then lay down with her again.
Grant slid inside her without haste. Christina was slick, wanting him, a groan leaving her mouth as he spread and filled her.
The feeling of Grant inside her was so right. He belonged with her. Their hearts and bodies understood—their heads were what needed to catch up.
Grant went slowly at first, Christina running her hands over his taut, wonderful body, finding every hollow of him. She pressed his hips as they rose and fell, and under her touch, he went faster, then faster still.
The fever didn’t hit until the end, when they were grappling, crying out, sliding against each other. Grant groaned, “Damn,” at the same time Christina was lifted by intense joy, the two of them coming against each other.
Then breathlessness, quiet kissing, winding down.
Grant slept, his head pillowed on Christina’s shoulder. She contemplated his closed eyes, lashes black against his skin, his bed-mussed hair, the curve of shoulder, the rise and fall of his chest. Relaxed, worn out, but with a little pucker between his brows that wouldn’t smooth away.
Christina’s tears dropped to Grant’s cheek and rolled down to be lost in shadows.
Grant woke as twilight was settling in and got up to take a shower, pulling the sheet over Christina’s naked body. She kept sleeping—worn out, the little sweetheart.
In Christina’s very clean bathroom, Grant washed away the day and their lovemaking and re-dressed in his jeans and shirt.
Grants emotions had been shot high and slammed back down. Worry for Christina, heartache when she explained about the false hope of a baby after they tried so hard, anger when she said Ray might be the father, and then grief over the whole situation. Then, at the end of it all, making love to the woman he wanted to be with.
If Grant and Christina had been able to conceive during their relationship, would they have married and even now be settled down and happy? Maybe living in a little house like this, taking the kids to school and church, teaching them to ride?
Or would they have fought as much and broken up anyway? Who knew?
Grant put that speculation aside. He couldn’t live by what might