3
The next night, Mac stood on the balcony outside his and Keiley’s bedroom, smoking. He stared at the glow of the cigarette in his hand, a frown marking his brow before he drew the filter to his lips and inhaled.
The restlessness growing inside him wasn’t abating, and he knew why. It was the same thing that had drawn him to the balcony rather than into sleep, despite the lateness of the hour.
Keiley.
He stared into the night sky as he inhaled, drawing the acrid burn of the smoke into his lungs even as he lashed at himself for resorting to a crutch. Not that it did more than ease the restlessness in his hands anymore. It did nothing to ease the hunger that rose in his gut and had his dick so damned hard he could probably hammer nails with it.
And dumbass that he was, rather than relieving that hunger in the giving heat of his wife’s sexy body, he was out here smoking. Because he knew he couldn’t take her without putting the wariness back in her eyes that he had put there the other day.
A hard grimace had him grinding his teeth as he thought of the way Keiley had watched him that evening. With equal parts confusion and wary arousal. As though she were no longer certain how to approach him, or how to deal with his sexuality.
Not that he could blame her. Hell, he had taken her in the barnyard against a greasy tractor. When he finished with her she had been flushed and streaked with oil, and nervous.
That nervous uncertainty would be the death of him.
Maybe he should just lay it on the line. Tell her what he wanted and take his chances.
He vetoed that idea instantly. Keiley was a brave woman, but if he gave her a chance to think about it first, then he was a goner. His wife would deliberate actions for months before making decisions. She weighed angles the way a criminal attorney weighed evidence. Looking for every loophole, for every possible crack in the defense of her privacy.
Privacy was golden to her. A product of the hell her parents had put her through as a teenager. The social humiliation had been decimating to her when her father’s crimes had been revealed. She had been ostracized, criticized, and left to bear the burden of her mother’s suicide and creditors who had no mercy on an eighteen-year-old girl with no means of paying the astronomical debts her parents had accumulated.
And he was asking her to risk that private part of herself with another man. Because he craved it. Because the sexual intensity and excessive hungers that drove him demanded it.
She had learned how to handle gossip, how to handle desire. Could she now learn how to handle loving two men?
Like Keiley, Mac was a product of his parents’ actions and reactions. Unlike Keiley, he hadn’t faced a public crucifixion for them; rather, the results of those actions had left him darker, harder than most young men.
And like Keiley’s father, Mac’s father had begun his journey into hell. His strict fervor and railing against sex had driven Mac to acts that had only increased his father’s wrath. That had driven the man to drive his son to the edge of madness.
Joseph McCoy had been a nutcase. Mac swore his father had caused his mother to lose the will to live with his idiotic railing. Screaming at her whenever he imagined another man looked her way. Denigrating her supposed dark lusts, and accusing her of sexual crimes that had so humiliated the timid little Debra McCoy that she had finally given up.
But Mac hadn’t given up.
His father had first suspected him of ha**ng s*x at the tender age of fourteen. And he was. With a much older girl who had begun teaching him the ways of pleasing a woman without stepping over the line into hard-core sex.
The beatings had begun then. Mac still carried the scars from that first beating. And the mental scars from the lectures that followed. Lectures that had only driven Mac to push more boundaries, to break more rules. By the time he had graduated from high school he had already learned the delicate act of giving a woman anal sex. His first year in college he had mastered it. Then came his first ménage.
Sweet heaven, it had been good. He had watched his lover’s face as he shared her with an older, much more experienced man. A mentor who had seen the darkness in Mac when he first met him. Had seen it and understood the danger inherent in it if he didn’t learn how to direct it.
Ian Sinclair hadn’t been much older than Mac, but he had been much more experienced. A natural sensualist, a lover of all things female. He had taught Mac how to direct those hungers and how to still them. And Mac’s love for sharing his women had been born.
It was forbidden fruit. It was the most sensual pleasure a man could give a woman. It was an affirmation that he would never, ever become anything resembling his father.
And now, more than a decade after sharing his first lover, Mac had accepted his shortcomings. It wasn’t something most women could accept. He had married Keiley knowing she might not be able to accept it. And yet here he was, a cigarette in one hand, his cell phone in the other, contemplating pushing her that much closer to another man’s arms.
He was going to risk the destruction of his marriage and his life because he had been too certain she couldn’t handle the truth before he married her.
It was addictive, he admitted. Like a drug, watching a woman lose herself in a sensation that could come only one way was almost impossible to resist. He loved his wife, loved her with all his being, loved her enough that he wanted her every sexual limit satisfied.
Was it reason enough, he asked himself. Of course it wasn’t. He knew that if he were to ask any man he knew in his hometown if he would share his wife, then the response could become violent. But he knew men whose eyes would gleam in pleasure and anticipation. And other men who understood the pleasure of sharing a lover and did so with regularity and with strict privacy.
He knew one of those men was only a phone call away.
He stubbed out his cigarette, flipped open the cell phone, and hit the speed dial.
“Do you know how late it is?” Jethro answered instantly.