“I’m not sleeping with you,” I say immediately.
His mouth twists into a frown, but he doesn’t fight me. “So, the living room?”
My head is spinning. I hold out a hand as if that’s going to steady me. “Jack, what is going on? You disappear for ten months and then reappear with two suitcases, a home nurse, and an entire family? I’m not ready for this.”
“I know.” He drops to his knees by my chair and places Anna in my lap. “Like you said before, it’s a lot, but, baby, I’ve missed out on ten months of loving both of you, and while the physical stuff can wait, I’m not going to miss out on the emotional stuff. Besides”—he shoots me a wink and a flash of that deadly dimple—“as I’ve already told you, my heart doesn’t work right when I’m more than a few feet away from you.”
After a thorough clean of the house, Jasmine leaves. The place smells like lemons and cinnamon and is shinier than a Christmas ornament. Jack watches intently as I bathe Anna, feed her again, and then put her to sleep.
Once she’s down, I tell him that I have work to do and go to hide in the bedroom. When I reappear an hour later, I find Jack rummaging in the garage.
“What are you doing?”
“Looks like I was going to fix the porch before I left.” He holds up a plank of wood. “Thought I might get to it.”
“It’s thirty degrees out.” I wrap my robe tighter around me.
“I didn’t notice.” Jack is wearing a short-sleeve T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and sweat appears to be dotting his forehead. As I look around, I realize that the place is spotless. All the wood and tools and boxes are neatly organized and stacked.
“Anna’s asleep,” I remind him.
Jack’s face falls. “Right.” He stretches, arching his back. The shirt pulls up to reveal a sliver of bare skin, a thin line of dark hair disappearing into the waistband of his jeans. My gaze lowers and sticks. There’s a definite bulge in his jeans. A big one.
My mouth grows dry. I remember having that large shaft in my hands and in my mouth. I remember the musky scent of him. I remember his strong hands lifting my hair away from my face, cupping my cheek and holding my throat. I remember his voice, hoarse and gravelly, telling me that I look like sin formed into flesh with my lips stretched wide to accommodate his girth.
A sound—a pained, hungry sound—breaks the silence. My eyes fly to his. Rich, thick desire paints every surface of his face. His eyes smolder. His skin is tight across his cheekbones. His jaw is flexed. He shoves his tongue against the inside of his cheek—as if trying to prevent himself from saying something that I might not like.
“You should go inside.”
“Why?” I ask stupidly. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want to stand here and be ravished by his gaze.
“Because you told me that we weren’t sleeping together tonight, and if you keep looking at me like that, I’ll be fucking you on your garage stairs, in your kitchen, on the hallway floor outside of Anna’s room, and then, maybe, when we reach your bedroom will we sleep.” With that threat—or promise—he turns on his heel and stomps out the back door into the cold, blustery night.
I don’t sleep well. How could I with Jack’s words lingering in my head? I kept replaying them all night long. I wake up restless, as if my skin’s too tight and hot around my frame. I try to find something other than sleep pants, but I’m still carrying weight from my pregnancy, so all I have are the jeans I wore the other day or sweats.
Unhappily, I pull on the faded gray sweatpants. I find a semi-decent blue sweater at the bottom of my drawer and tug that over my head. When I look in the mirror, a frumpy mom stares back at me.
I curse and pull off the sweater. My T-shirts are lighter but more form fitting, and even though they show my belly a bit more than I’d like, they don’t make me look like a potato sack. I stuff my legs into the jeans that I wore to the grocery store and top that off with a pale pink T-shirt.
The look Jack gives me when I walk into the kitchen makes my little efforts worthwhile.
“What are your plans for today?” he asks.
I check the wall calendar. “Anna has a swim class today.”
Jack rises from his chair. “That sounds interesting. I’ll get my trunks.”
“No!” God, I don’t want him to see me nude. My body is all messed up right now.
“Why not?”
“It’s a women-only swim class. You’ll make everyone uncomfortable.” And by everyone, I mean me. All the moms there will stare at him and I’ll get jealous and probably do something stupid, like hump his leg in front of them to mark my territory.