The digital clock on my nightstand leaves the illuminated numbers 2:03 a.m. seared into my brain as I look up to the ceiling.

She walked into this house and stole my ability to get a good night’s sleep. That woman, the unfamiliar wife of mine staying in the guest bedroom, has taken my God-given talent for letting my head hit the pillow and my brain shutting out like a light.

I sigh, loudly, hoping she’ll hear my frustration. It’s bad enough that I agreed to help her win her ridiculous title back, but now I have to live with the woman who wants to divorce me? The one I made promise to leave me alone forever after she was done using me for public relations purposes?

It’s fucking maddening.

Not to mention, I’ll never get a moment’s peace with her coming and going. I’ll be walking on eggshells, trying to determine when she’ll walk through the door. Trying to guess when I can leave the safety of our once shared bedroom to escape to my car without interaction.

I can’t lie here like this, chewing my fucking lip all night in dread, so I decide a midnight cookie binge it is. I may be a bearded construction worker slash amateur surfer, but my love for sweets could match any ten-year-old girl. Cookies, cupcakes, ice cream … it’s no wonder I have to run miles upon miles per week just to account for the amount of sugar-filled calories I consume.

The house is dark and quiet as I make my way down the stairs, through the open concept living room and into the kitchen. I make it halfway to the cookie jar before I see her, curled up on a stool with a mug of tea in her hands, staring out into the backyard.

Fuck. I haven’t even made it a whole twenty-four hours and there has already been one of those unwanted interactions I am terrified of.

My toe bumps the kitchen island and Imogen’s head whips around.

“Shit.” I rub my foot. “Sorry.”

I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for, the cursing or the interrupting her late-night kitchen run. Imogen and the Westons detest cursing more than I detest their upturned noses at foul language. Either way, I then mentally curse myself for even apologizing. She’s in my house, as it stands.

“Late-night cookie binge?” The tiniest trace of a smile haunts her full lips.

Even though I’m pissed that she’s here, the house somehow feels … alive again with her in it. Like it’s been waiting for her to return. It’s also at this very moment, that I realize Flapjack is curled up in her lap where she sits. So, it looks like yes, most everyone here has been waiting for Imogen to return home.

“You know me.” Sarcasm lights my voice.

“I brought some double chocolate chunk with me. They’re in the cookie jar. A peace offering.” Imogen directs her gaze back out the window, trying not to make too big of a deal that she brought my favorite treat.

Foolishly, hope blossoms in my chest. She brought my favorite snack with her when she moved back into our house. That sentence sounds so right.

And yet, I know it’s just a gesture to smooth over the fact that she returned because her father told her to. That she’s living here only to get what she’s due from the Weston family. I tamp down on that hope, extinguishing it as if it’s the last match in the whole pack.

But, I still go and grab one of those cookies. The treat starts to crumble in my fingers, and the moment the dark sweetness hits my lips, I’m practically groaning from the taste.

Once more, Imogen’s head whips around. Those eyes go wide and melt around the irises, like the greenest oceans in the world.

Lust.

I can spot it from a mile away on her, the expression my wife has given me so many times over the years is unmistakable.

Maybe I did groan, because why the hell else would she be looking at me like this?

“Thanks for the cookie,” I croak, her arousal stemming an arousal within me. The sweetness of the cookie still on my tongue and the body of the woman I’ve loved for so many years has me caught in a dance that I can’t find a way out of. This is how it’s always been with us; her passion ignites my passion and vice versa. It’s a spinning wheel that we’ve run on for so long.

How do we turn it off now? Now that we’re supposed to be done. How do we stop loving each other when we had no idea that we’d started? One day, I’d been me. And then the next, I’d been hers. There was no in between.

It’s like an alternate universe has appeared in the kitchen. In this small noise I emitted, and her reaction to it, we’ve turned the world on its axis. We’re no longer Theo and Imogen, the crumbling golden couple currently headed for divorce. No, we’re just us. Sitting in our kitchen at midnight.

I move toward the stool she has moved to the window, my feet completely ignoring the rational signals coming from my brain, telling me to stop. Imogen does nothing but sit there, her expression guarded but inciting me.

Her sharp intake of breath, once, and then twice. Her left eyebrow raises. A twitch near the beginning of her the right side of her collarbone. The flush of her cheeks, a sweet strawberry bloom.

These are all of the ways I know my wife is turned on. That she’s ready for me to take her, to undress her and move inside of her and give her pleasure. I know these things as innately as I know when I’m hungry or tired. They’re ingrained in me in a way that something only is after years of study.

Why, in just a split second, is she so openly aroused for me? The thought flits inside the back of my mind, but I keep moving.

My hand comes up when I reach her, one lone finger tracing the strands of white-blond hair that have fallen from her ponytail and frame her face. The perfect, polished jawline that I’ve kissed so many times twitches, Imogen’s sigh escapes her lips even though I can tell she was trying to hold it back.

She nudges her cheek into my palm, spurring me.

And then, the spell is broken when Flapjack jumps elegantly out of her lap and lands without a sound on the hardwood below.

I turn without another look at her face, retreating to my corner of the ring, my safe space in the house.

How the hell am I going to make it out of this marriage, out of this divorce, alive?