Grace

 

I couldn’t believe it when the ping of an online reservation hit Brett’s phone before we were through to the bedroom, but he could.

His smile was triumphant, eyes glittering with glory as he turned the handset to face me. I didn’t need to read the text, but I did anyway, taking the phone from his grip with shaking fingers.

Thomas Heath. Master suite.

A seven night booking.

Seven.

Seven nights.

My mouth dropped open.

“He can’t be serious,” I stammered, but Brett nodded.

“Oh, he can,” he said. “He’s fucking serious alright. But not as serious as I am.”

“We should think about this,” I flustered. “We don’t know who he is, not really. We don’t know what he’s planning, what he’s thinking, what he’s capable of.”

“Not yet we don’t,” he countered. “But we will. By the time that cunt checks out this time around we’ll know everything we need to know and then some.”

I nodded, flutters of rambling objections threatening to burst and break out loud, but they didn’t. Couldn’t.

This version of my husband was the one I’d walked up the aisle to and promised my all. The one I’d counted on to stand strong at my side for better or worse. The one who’d given me shivers in bed at night and hunger for skin on skin that drove me crazy through the day.

“He’ll want to pay,” he told me, and I believed him. “He uses cash like a shield. It’s as much of a weakness as it is a strength. If not more so.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I wouldn’t mind a shield like that.”

The tip of his head made me feel like a fool, despite the way he brushed my cheek with his thumb. “It’s not about what’s in your bank account,” he said. “It’s about what’s in here.” He dropped his hand to my chest, his palm warm against my breast and my beating heart. “It’s about who you are. What you believe in. How much fight you’ve got in your bones.”

I placed my hand over his and drew a breath, that beating heart racing like a train.

“Kiss me,” I said, and he did. Fierce and fast, his mouth wide and his tongue violent as he walked me backwards to the bed. I’d barely recovered from the first orgasm when he tugged my jeans down for the second time. His tongue was as violent with my pussy as it was with my mouth when he dropped to his knees and ate me up, sucking and grunting like I was his greatest pleasure and my clit was his favourite dessert.

I was squirming with my fingers against his scalp when he reached out for our bottom dresser drawer, too wanton to question what he was diving for until the head of something solid pushed inside.

“You’ll need to take two of us,” he told me and my clit sparked wild. “We’d better start getting that pretty little cunt of yours up to the challenge.”

Fuck, how he worked me. Fingers, mouth and every toy in that fucking drawer. I took it all and begged for more, begged for everything with a voice that didn’t sound like me. And finally, when he presented my body with two toys at once, my ass clenching tight around a thick plastic shaft as my pussy strained to swallow up another, I didn’t feel like me either.

I felt like the woman in cuffs on plastic sheeting. The dirty bitch who’d unravelled for a stranger and given him her all.

But this time it was my husband. This time my body thrummed with love as well as lust. And it was delicious. Delirious. Disgusting in all the right ways as he grunted at the stretch of my straining holes.

“I can’t,” I hissed, even as I bucked and squirmed. “I can’t take it.”

“You were born to fucking take it,” he said back. “You’ll take it in the flesh next week and it’ll be every bit the filthy fantasy you’ve rubbed that clit off to every fucking day since he’s been gone.”

I came again right then.

And that night was the first night in bed that I didn’t rub my clit to the fantasy.

I didn’t need to.

It was also the first night in bed that I snuggled into my husband’s side and let his steady breath soothe my fears away without so much as a flutter of backlash.

It was the first night since the rumour mill hit us almost a year ago that I slept like a woman without a care. Without a nightmare. Without a rush of palpitations in the morning at the thought of this place going away.

Sarah saw the change in me before I said a word about it. And when I’d finished telling her about the return of my old husband and his challenge, her smile across the breakfast table said it all.

She leaned in close for a hug once the kids were loaded in the car, her kiss on my cheek sweeping back to my ear for the final sisterly whisper before she went on her merry way.

“I’ll solve the mystery,” she told me. “By the time Thomas Heath from London comes back here you’ll know everything from his shoe size to his favourite take out.”

I hugged her so tight I lifted her from her feet, just like old times, me the big sister and her the little one.

“I’ll miss you,” I told her, and she laughed.

“I won’t be a stranger,” she said. “Your life is far too interesting to watch from afar.”