Kate
A deafening sound shoves me headfirst out of a dream, and I splat onto our bed with a muffled groan. I reflexively grab either end of my pillow and press it against my ears, mumbling something incoherent about annoying alarms though my throat’s so dry it comes out as a croak.
I clear my throat, licking my lips to wet them, and try again. “What the fuck is that?”
Jackson makes the racket stop and cuddles in next to me, rubbing his broad, warm palm over my bare back. “Time for our date.”
How is it morning already?
With a groggy brain and bleary eyes, I pry myself from the pillow and come face-to-face with my enthusiastic husband grinning at me. The room’s pitch-black, and the fire we fucked in front of before bed still has the orange glow of embers.
“What?” It’s the first of a long list of questions I have for him, and the only one I’m awake enough to enunciate right now.
“Two a.m. date,” he answers as if I’d previously agreed upon this date. I didn’t even have a drink with dinner, so unless he asked while I was preoccupied with lava cake, this is a surprise.
I burrow myself deeper into the blankets in protest.
“Come on, Kit. I think you’ll like this one.” He gently brushes hair away from my face and kisses my forehead.
As a testament to my love for this man, I groan and peel back the sheets. I’d follow him anywhere, even into a surprise date in the middle of the night on my first child-free weekend ever.
From my reluctant perch on the edge of the bed, body swaying from exhaustion, I yawn loudly in protest. “I hope you know this is the first time I’ve been able to sleep without the threat of small children waking me up.
And now I have you…and you’re looking at me the same way Rhett does when he bursts into the room with a ridiculous dream he’s itching to share. ”
“Promise when we go home, I’ll leave you be for an entire night and stand guard outside the door in the morning to keep the kids away.”
His arms stretch overhead, pulling the skin taut across his muscles. He’s all abs and meaty ribs and broad shoulders. It makes me a little wet between my thighs. I quickly reach for my duffel bag, wanting to slip into some underwear before I leave a wet patch on the bed.
“Put on your bathing suit,” Jackson says.
I spin to face him, confused. He’s sliding a pair of black swim trunks over his powerful thighs, tucking his dick into the pouch sewn inside. He looks up at me as he ties the waistband string tight. His eyes locked on mine, he shakes his head. “Trust me, Kate.”
Without a doubt, my cute floral bikini—high cut and cheeky—is still damp.
And the only thing that’ll make this middle-of-the-night wake-up call any more miserable is being forced to squeeze into a wet, cold bathing suit.
So I pluck my spare bikini from the bag.
I’ve had it for years and it does nothing flattering for my boobs, but the hot springs are closed and it’s two a.m. so, realistically, nobody is going to see me.
I clothe my naked, tired body in that red bathing suit, then try to massage out the weird patterns on my stomach from the rumpled sheets. Knowing it’s likely to be brisk outside, given we’re in the mountains on a spring night, I grab a sweatshirt and sweatpants to wear over it.
All the while, Jackson waits patiently with one hand on the door handle, two towels draped over his bare shoulder, eyes trailing up and down my body.
“You’re going to be cold,” I say, eyeing his torso.
He winks. “Not for long. Let’s go.”
I was right. The night air is frigid and the grass outside our cabin has sparkles of frost clinging to it. Pale moonlight brushes over the narrow pathway, and up ahead there’s fog lying low over where the hot spring pools are.
I shiver immediately, freezing and silently wishing Jackson would change his mind and take me back to bed. But he grabs my hand, and between that firm touch and his coffee-brown eyes, he’s the warmest thing in the world.
“Aren’t the pools closed at night?” I ask quietly.
Wind rustles through the tree canopy overhead, and I step a little faster. It’s eerily quiet around here. I’m used to being on a cattle ranch, where even in the dead of night, the animals are never entirely silent.
“They are.” Jackson looks over his shoulder with a mischievous smile. “Which means we’ll have it all to ourselves.”
I whisper-yell, “We can’t break into the hot springs.”
Around the next bend in the path, we come face-to-face with a rustic metal gate.
Jackson wiggles the latch in his fingers, bending down to get a better look at it, and it pops open a second later.
The air’s filled with the piercing sound of metal on metal, squealing so sharply I grit my teeth reflexively.
“If the gate’s unlocked, does it really count as breaking in?”
Eyebrow raised, I jab a finger at the sign indicating they close at ten p.m. “Yes, it does.”
“Okay, well then, guess we better make it quick. Come on, Kate. Don’t make me soak in here all by myself.”
Jackson swings the gate back and forth, wincing at the grating noise it makes as if he’s not the one responsible for it. I swear, if that man ends up with a migraine in the morning, he can take care of himself while I treat myself to Belgian waffles in the restaurant.
“You keep fucking with that gate, somebody’s going to hear you and come out.” I roll my eyes and push past him, already pulling my sweater overhead.
If we’re going to get caught, I’d like to have at least plunged into the hot water for a few minutes first. Make it worth my time.
Jackson’s the first into the water, and he hisses at the feel of it hitting his cold, goosebump-covered skin. Then he sinks until there’s nothing but his head showing above the water, obscured by a cloud of thick, billowing steam.
I set my clothes to the side and kick off my sandals, then gingerly walk across the stone pool deck and make an attempt at being graceful and ladylike when I hop in. The water prickles across my skin, stinging my frozen fingers and toes.
The warm steam rises in slow, drifting curls, immediately dampening my hair and coating my face in a thin layer of condensation.
I push through the water toward my husband, smiling all the way into his big arms. He pulls me in, letting me cling to him like a koala, and carries me toward the deepest section of the pool.
The water swells around us and I smooth a wet hand over his hair—messed up and standing on end from sleep. Speaking of sleep, every muscle in my body is so relaxed, I could doze off right here.
We wade away from the singular light on the pool house, where during the open hours, one would shower off before and after being in the springs. In the dark, it’s only me and him and the moon.
He calmly sets me down on a bench seat along the far edge of the pool and settles in beside me with a relaxed exhale.
“There,” he says triumphantly, finding my thigh in the dark water and giving it a light tap. “An entirely uninterrupted soak for date night.”
“I love this…even if I didn’t love being woken up in the middle of a great sleep.”
“I thought since we’re going home tomorrow, and I screwed you over this morning, that I should try to make it up to you.”
I pepper his jaw with soft kisses. “Thank you for this. All of it. We needed this trip.”
“I needed to see you in a bikini.” He fiddles with the long strings, flicking the small beads on the ends.
“You planned a romantic weekend away just to see me in a bikini?”
His touch moves upward, skimming my ribs before rolling the thin fabric of my top between his finger and thumb. “Money and time very well spent, if you ask me.”
I laugh softly. “You could’ve asked me to wear one at home for you.”
With a wet smack, his palm meets his forehead. “Now you tell me…. Still worth it, though. Getting out of the house, away from everyone—I like having you all to myself.”
I like having him all to myself, too.
We’ve talked, we’ve cuddled, we’ve had plenty of loud, uninhibited sex. It feels a lot like when we snuck away to elope years ago.
“Plus, you’ve been dealing with all my shit. You deserve a break.”
“First of all, I’m not ‘dealing with’ anything. I’m being a good wife—”
He leans in and nips my earlobe. “A very, very good wife.”
That sets my entire body ablaze. Every part of me burns with the need to feel his touch.
“When did you become such a flirt?”
“It’s that damn bikini,” he says, eyes lifting to meet mine, heat blooming in the quiet space between us. “Distracting as hell.”
“Oh yeah?” I adjust the triangles covering my tits, not because they need to be adjusted, but because I want to give the girls a little boost. Earn that stare of his. “Distracting from what?”
“Doesn’t matter.” He shakes his head, all the while fucking me with his eyes. “All I can think about is tearing it off and seeing if you’re as wet as I am hard.”
“Of course I’m wet, Jackson.” Shooting him a flirtatious smile, I drag my fingers through the water, doing my best to appear entirely unperturbed by the thought of him being hard right now. “We’re in a pool.”
“You know exactly what I mean, Kit.” His smirk makes my thighs clench.
“I’m not sure I do, handsome. Might need to show me how hard you are, so I can let you know if I’m equally as wet.” My fingers curl around the back of his neck to twist the short, dark hair there.
His face looks pained, and that’s how I know he’s stiff as a board beneath his swim shorts long before he takes my hand and guides my touch there. My fingers skate up his thigh, gliding easily across the swimsuit fabric.
My heart flutters.
Oh, he’s hard, all right. Sixteen years together, and I’ve still never gotten over how thick he is, nor the ache between my legs when I have to stretch to take him each time.
I palm his shaft through the thin fabric, eliciting a rugged groan from somewhere deep inside. And he tips his head back to rest on the pool edge, bucking his hips into my touch.
“Fuck, Kate,” he grits out, rugged tenor making more heat swirl in my lower belly. “See what you do to me?”