I smirk down at my beer. Just like Jim to tell me how it’s going to be and damn him all to hell, he knows I like his bossy side.
Lifting my pint, I take a long pull and set it down again before admitting, “I’m not dating David anymore.”
Jim’s eyes flare wide, and a slow smile curls his lips. He stares, then starts doing a little dance in his chair, popping his head from side to side. He puts his fists side out, drawing a big circle in front of his chest. “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I won. Suck it, Mr. Ordinary.”
This peacock routine is just for fun because Jim’s not like that. He’ll quietly gloat to himself that David’s out of the running, but he succeeds in making me laugh.
“Stop it,” I reprimand, batting down his arms. “You’re acting like a fool.”
“Because I got the girl,” he says smugly, nodding.
“You don’t have me yet.” My voice is prim, and I place my clasped hands on the table.
“Point taken,” he says somberly and then puts an arm on the back of my chair, eyes going serious. “So, what happened?”
“I called it off,” I admit to him. “The night you gave me the ring, and well… other things.”
He grins. “It was a good orgasm, right?”
“You know it was,” I say in exasperation. “But the minute we went back to that level of intimacy, it wasn’t fair to David because I wasn’t going to go there with him. When I let you touch me, I was committing myself to giving you a shot to put our marriage back together again and I’m pulling for you, Jim. I’m pulling for us. David has no place in my life right now when I want my marriage to be saved.”
Jim’s expression softens, his voice respectful. “I’m sorry if he’s hurt by it. But you’ve always had so much integrity, Ella. You did the right thing not only for you, but also for him.”
“Yeah,” I murmur thoughtfully. “I know that. And he appreciated my honesty, wished me all the best. It was about as smooth as a breakup could go.”
Jim leans to the side and pulls his phone out, holding it up for me to see. “I need to make a quick call to the hitman I hired to take David out.”
I tip my head back and laugh. Jim winks, then puts his phone down on the table, and from a glance, I can tell it’s blown up with texts.
“You’re a popular guy,” I say, nodding toward his phone. “And I can bet about half those texts are the guys from the Royals, wanting to hang with you tonight.”
“You would be correct, sweet and intelligent wife. They’ve been hounding me, but I told them that while I loved them and missed them, I had far more important things to do, such as hanging with my beautiful wife.”
“Did you really?” I ask in amazement.
“I really did,” he says, but looks disappointed at my awe. “Ella… I’m going to tell you something that might be hard to understand. While I know you didn’t feel it much of the time, particularly during the last few years of our marriage, you have always been my number-one priority. You’ve always been my greatest love. You’ve been my best friend, the person who makes me smile the most, and the only one I could ever tell all my secrets to. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, the best mother to our daughter, and if I had to pick one person to spend my life with on a deserted island, it would be you. So while I may have been off doing things I felt were critical to my career, spending more time away from you, I never did those things because they were preferable to you. They were necessary to my career, but never at the expense of making you feel invisible. The only thing I can tell you is that any time I’m away from you, I’m still thinking about you a million times a day. Maybe if I’d just let you know that, you would have been a little more secure in how I felt about you.”
Slack-jawed, I stare at my husband. Jim has never been a man of many words, preferring action instead. But damn if that didn’t make me fall deeper in love with him. It helps more than he could ever know that maybe I was more cherished than I had thought.