“Shush, Rube, don’t cry. I’m sorry. Please, honey, don’t cry.” He fell silent and rocked her gently for a few moments, then offered tentatively, “Maybe we can make it work. Please, honey, don’t cry. Next you’ll have me crying, too.”
“You never cry,” she sobbed.
“Don’t count on it.”
But the more he spoke, the more Ruby sobbed. She’d been through so much that day—Jack leaving her, the dream, Thork and his death, coming to the lake house and being rebuffed by Jack. She just couldn’t take any more.
Finally Jack tried to silence her Sobs with a kiss. At first he just brushed his lips against her lips, then her eyes, her forehead, her cheeks, her lips again, all the time whispering disjointed words, “Rube… honey… please… don’t cry… so sorry…”
Then he seemed to lose himself in the process and gripped her head in both hands, holding her firm while he shaped her tear-wet lips to fit his. When his tongue entreated her lips to part, Ruby whimpered and complied. With an answering moan, Jack filled her mouth, and the gentle kiss changed dramatically from sweet and comforting to red hot and demanding.
With his mouth and husky love words, Jack conveyed all the pent-up hunger of the past lonely weeks. Openmouthed and wet, his lips clung to hers, moving rapaciously, deepening. Ruby forgot her sorrow for the moment and answered his kisses with all the love and passion she felt for this husband of twenty years.
Between searing kisses and hoarse whispers, Jack eased the spandex off her, laughing softly when he realized it wasn’t going to be an easy task. He smiled and held her eyes intimately when he saw the black teddy, recognizing it immediately.
“You fight dirty,” he growled.
When she lay naked, Jack knelt on the floor next to the sofa and examined her reclining body with passion-glazed eyes and tender brush stokes of his fingers. “You’re so beautiful,” he said thickly, touching the peaks of her breasts with a fingertip, then sweeping down over her flat belly, laying a large palm possessively over the down-covered vee.
“No, I’m not,” Ruby protested. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I have stretch marks and laugh lines and—”
He put a loving hand gently over her mouth to stop her words, holding her eyes warmly. “Yes, you are beautiful, sweetheart. Our children put those stretch marks there. I love them. And the laugh lines,” he said, his lips twitching with a grin, “well, I don’t really see them, but if they’re there, I like to think I caused them by making you happy a time or two.”
He stood then and, for just a second, Ruby panicked, thinking he intended to leave. But he added another log to the fire and began to take off his clothes, slowly, his eyes locked with hers the entire time in a smoldering gaze filled with regret, passion and promise.
The firelight played shadow games on his muscular shoulders and the ridges of his abdomen. He opened his belt buckle and began to unzip his pants, giving Ruby a seductive glimpse of the soft blond hairs that arrowed down over the hard planes of his stomach and beyond.
When he stepped out of his pants and then his briefs, he stood proudly in his savage nakedness, like a Viking god. His hard arousal proclaimed his physical want of her; his pleading eyes told of his emotional need.
“Oh, Jack, we’ve been married twenty years, and you still take my breath away.”
“Ruby! What a thing to say!” he exclaimed softly.
“It’s true.” And she started to cry again.
“Come here,” Jack demanded in a passion-raw voice from where he still stood in front of the fireplace. He held out a hand in entreaty.
Ruby closed her eyes for just a second, wondering if they were doing the right thing—making love before they’d had a chance to resolve their problems. On one last weak note, she said, “You told me earlier today that we could go upstairs and screw our brains out and it wouldn’t solve our problems.”
Jack laughed in a low, seductive voice.
“I changed my mind. Let’s screw each other’s brains out anyway and see what happens next.”