Chapter 16 Isla
SIXTEEN
ISLA
The water in my shower is scaldingly hot, which is how I know I’m trying to rinse something out of my body that isn’t orchard dirt.
Nine days married. Nine days of my name on paper beside Jack’s. Nine days of waking up braced, as if at any moment, someone is going to knock on the door and tell me it doesn’t count.
There was a mistake, they’ll say. The state of Connecticut has figured out your grant-compliant nuptials were merely a ruse.
It’s a bad dream that’s kept me up at night.
But at least our applications are complete.
We finished them all. We made copies. We labeled folders. We sealed envelopes. We hit Submit so many times my finger twitched for hours afterward. And then, yesterday morning, Jack kissed the top of my head, grabbed his keys, and said he had to go do another job in the city.
Just like that.
He left me.
Technically, I know that he is, in fact, a man who has work to do. He has a whole company and a life that exists outside of my kitchen table. This marriage union doesn’t mean he has to orbit me every second, waiting for the moment I might crack.
I should be relieved that we’re done with the hardest part. I am relieved.
Still, as the water beats down my shoulders, I catch my mind circling the quiet he left behind. The house has been too still without him. Not empty, exactly. I’ve lived alone in it plenty.
I like solitude. I like the predictability of it, the way nothing surprises you unless you let it. But the last week wasn’t solitude. It was a siege.
Jack in my kitchen. Jack at my table. Jack leaning over forms, the chestnut hair beneath the blond growing longer every day. Jack handing me coffee without asking. Jack, every time I thought I might break, giving me something productive to do instead.
Now, he’s gone for one day, and my body keeps waiting for the next crisis to announce itself.
I rest my forehead against the tile.
As I breathe deeply, I think about how, for the first time in months, I’m not behind. I’m not scrambling or chasing a deadline that’s sprinting away from me with its middle finger up. There are still numbers I can’t look at without my stomach tightening, but there is also, finally, a pause.
Still, I feel wrung out. It’s like I’ve been carrying a full bucket for miles. Someone finally said, you can set it down, and now my arms don’t know what to do without the weight.
I turn the water cooler and rinse my hair one last time.
Unbidden, my thoughts slide back to the courthouse kiss. His hand at my jaw, steady and careful. My own mouth giving me away. Heat moving through me so fast it felt almost electric before it settled somewhere lower and far more dangerous.
It shouldn’t still matter to me this much. It was for optics, wasn’t it?
So why does my body remember it so well?
I shut the water off and stand there in the steam, listening to the house. The old pipes click. The windowpane gives a faint rattle in the frame. Somewhere in the distance, a car passes on the road, tires hissing on dry pavement.
Jack is gone, and I’ve fully lost my mind.
I wrap a towel around myself, then step onto the bath mat. My skin is pink from the heat, my hair dripping down my back. The fog has thinned enough for the room to come back into focus.
I dry off slowly because I’m tired and because, for once, I can. No one is banging on my door. No one is calling me about the shoddy roof repair.
I pull the towel away and let it fall onto the counter.
Naked, I catch my reflection in the mirror.
My body has always been work. A tool I’ve pushed too hard, then blamed when it gave out. Something I put on display at night under a name that isn’t mine, in a room with rules strict enough to keep you safe and sharp enough to remind you why they have to exist in the first place.
I’ve gotten used to being watched.
I reach for my lotion and smooth it over my arms, my shoulders, the soft hollow beneath my collarbone. I’m halfway down my left thigh when the bathroom door opens.
I freeze. For one heartbeat, my whole body goes cold, my mind snapping into instinct. I need to either grab the towel or bolt.
Jack stops short in the doorway. He’s still in his work clothes, jeans and a dark T-shirt, his hair damp at the temples. He carries the tension of a man who’s been using his body all day and hasn’t fully come down from it yet.
A delicious, electric intensity goes bright under my skin.
His eyes land on me and stay there. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t jerk his gaze away or blurt out an apology or shield himself from the terrible ordeal of seeing me naked.
He just . . . looks.
And for one long, strange moment, I don’t move, either.
My skin prickles at the heat of it because Jack’s gaze isn’t leering in the slightest.
I know what leering looks like. I know it intimately, in every variation, from the obvious to the subtle. I know it when a man is taking something from you with his eyes and telling himself you deserve it because you’re standing there.
This isn’t that.
His throat works. His chest rises and falls once, a little too deeply. His pupils are blown wide, and the look on his face is so naked it makes my stomach tilt. He’s appreciating my body in all its soft, rounded splendor.
He must have forgotten we were pretending. Because right now, he’s looking at me the way a man looks at something he wants. Badly.
I should snap at him. I should do something that puts a wall back where one clearly disappeared. Instead, I stand there with my lotion on my hands and my hair dripping down my spine and let him see me.
All of me.
It’s the first time in months, maybe years, that someone has looked at my body and I haven’t felt like I was putting on a show.
His gaze drifts slowly, over my shoulder, down my arm, and across the curve of my waist. It lingers on the softness of my belly, then my breasts. Eventually, those warm brown eyes lift back to mine.
I feel my composure slip. It’s not the way he’s looking at my bare skin that cracks me open; it’s the way he looks at my face.
Could it be possible that he’s really seeing me? Not as an obligation or as a Winslow carrying Mirabelle on her back. Not as a wife for a grant committee or a midnight ballerina moonlighting under a different name.
Me. The whole of me, at the very center of who I am.
Heat floods my throat. My chest tightens, sharp and sudden, like my body doesn’t know how to hold this much softness without panicking.
I swallow heavily. My voice comes out low and brittle as I ask, “What are you doing?”
He shakes his head, looks up. “Sorry, I, I thought you were gone. Your Jeep wasn’t out front, and I needed some clean washcloths. Thought they might be in here.”
“Reid is taking a look at that suspicious rattle. I left my Jeep at Honeywild, and Winnie dropped me back.”
The tips of his ears go red. “Ah.”
“I’ll, er, get you what you need.”
I rifle through my cabinets while he stands there rooted in the doorway, very deliberately not looking at me. When I find the towels, I don’t turn around until I’m sure my voice will behave. Then I hand him the stack of spare towels.
“If that’s all you need, then you should probably get out of here, Jack.”
His jaw flexes. He wets his lips.
I picture him crossing the room, hands finding my hips, my back hitting the counter while the plan and the timing and every good reason dissolve under the weight of want.
He doesn’t.
He grips the doorframe hard enough that the tendons in his forearm stand out, then steps back like it costs him something.
I leave the bathroom, heading for the single stretch of drywall that exists between his room and mine. Then I wait until I hear the door click shut behind him.
There’s a soft creak of hinges followed by the low rush of water starting up in the guest shower. The pipes shudder, changing in pitch. Then it comes—just barely—the low, involuntary groan he makes at the heat.
It’s the kind you let out when your body’s been aching, and the relief hits so suddenly it almost hurts. I know that sound well. I’ve made it plenty of times—after double shifts at the Luxe or backbreaking days on the ladder in the orchard.
Jack’s been working with his hands all day, so I know his shoulders must feel tight. His back and thighs, too. He must be standing there in the steam, braced against the tile, water sliding down that solid frame as it eases him apart inch by inch.
The image of him like that won’t leave me alone.
I don’t bother dressing before I lie down on my bed, skin still warm from the water, the towel bunched beneath me. I pull open the drawer and reach for the little silver bullet I’ve had hidden there for years. Typically, I’d treat it like maintenance and move on.
I’ve been single for years by choice. I took my broken heart seriously, and I got very good at handling things by myself, which means I haven’t had to trust anyone else with my body.
Tonight, though, I’m not chasing relief. I’m chasing fantasy.
Jack’s hands, rough and broad, spanning across my waist. That perfect mouth of his, coaxing my lips apart. If I let myself imagine what kind of cock my fake husband has. I bet it would be exactly as unfair as the rest of him.
I press the vibrator between my legs and close my eyes.
I go slow at first. Let the tension build and allow myself to feel it, every part of me I’ve kept wound too tight for too long.
I imagine him touching me like I’m something worth worshipping. His hips pinning mine, his voice low in my ear, roughened by need. I imagine his hands on my thighs, holding me open, taking his time.
I know it would be good. Jack’s had enough practice. I’ve seen him shirtless. Sat on his lap and felt what I felt. He’s big. He would fill me up, drive me into the mattress until I forgot my own name, kiss me until I was gasping, leave bruises in places only I’d know to look for.
And I’d thank him for it.
It doesn’t take long for me to come. When I do, it’s with his name in my mouth—a chant, a plea. Jack. Oh God, Jack.
I stay curled around the aftershocks until the water on the other side of the wall has gone quiet, until everything has. And then I go very, very still.