The Kiss Thief

“C’mere,” he called, sounding surprisingly—perhaps even shockingly—like a young Italian boy from the variety I grew up with. It was the way the word rolled off his tongue that gave me pause, but I shook my head, laughing to myself. Wolfe Keaton was as well-bred as they came. His late father was a hotelier and his late mother was a Supreme Court judge.

“What if we get caught?” My grin threatened to slice my face in half. I heard more whistling of admiration from the inside. He whistled like a street kid but waltzed like an aristocrat. I could never pin him down.

“We’re good for bail,” he drawled. “Get your cute butt over here, Nem.”

I looked left and right, ducked my head under the fence and tiptoed my way inside the barn. When I got in, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close. Wolfe enveloped me from behind in a hug, jerking his chin to one of the four stalls, the only one that was occupied. A gorgeous Arabian horse, completely black, save for her stark white mane and tail, stared back at me. Wolfe wasn’t exaggerating. She was breathtaking. And she blinked at me with her beautiful, tiny, and dense eyelashes. I pressed my palm to my heart, feeling it pitter-pattering in my chest. I’d never seen a horse so beautiful. Her eyes were calm and kind, and she bowed her head down, accepting the sheer admiration that must’ve shone in my eyes.

“Hey, girl.” I made my way to her, watching my pace, allowing her time to get used to me or change her mind. I put my hand to her muzzle.

“What are you doing here all alone?” I whispered.

“She looks in good health to me,” Wolfe said behind me, leaning against the opposite wall of the barn. I could feel him staring at me even with my back to him.

I nodded.

“That may be, but we need to figure out who this barn belongs to.”

“Do you like her?” he asked.

“Like her? I love her. She’s sweet and tender. Not to mention gorgeous.” I moved my hand to her forehead, dragging it to her ears and poll. She let me as if she’d known me her whole lifetime.

“Reminds me of someone.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re comparing me to livestock now.” I laughed, surprised to find out that I had mist in my eyes. I imagined she belonged to a young girl. She looked young herself. Maybe they’d grow up together.

“What should I compare you to, then?” He pushed off the wall, striding to me, my back still to him. I heard the hay crunching under his feet. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes and savoring his touch as his arms wrapped around my midriff from behind.

“People,” I whispered.

“I can’t compare you to people. There aren’t any people like you,” he said simply, his mouth on my neck now. Heat gathered in my belly, and I felt myself shuddering with pleasure that broke on my skull and rushed all the way down to my toes.

“It’s yours,” he snarled in my ear, his teeth grazing my lobe.

“What?”

“The horse. It’s yours. This barn is mine. All this land, three miles each way from the cabin, belongs to us. The previous owner had a barn. Took his horses with him when he sold it to my parents.” His dead parents. There was so much I didn’t know about him yet. So much he kept from me. “Before I married you, I didn’t want to give you a wedding gift. But after I married you, I realized you deserve much more than diamonds.”

I turned around, blinking at him. I knew I should thank him. Hug him. Kiss him. Love him even harder for his effort, which, I knew by now, did not come naturally to him. The idea of loving him so openly was startling. He held all the knowledge about every piece of my life, yet I knew nothing about him. Perhaps you don’t need to know a person in order to love them. You only need to know their heart, and Wolfe’s heart was far bigger than I’d previously imagined.

He stared at me, waiting for a response. When I opened my mouth, the most unexpected words came out.

“We can’t keep her here. She’ll be lonely.”

For a moment, he didn’t say anything, before closing his eyes and plastering his forehead to mine, his lips locking on my own. He sighed, warm breath skating between my lips.

“How are you so compassionate?” He mumbled into my mouth.

I clutched the collar of his jacket and drew him to me, kissing the corner of his lips.

“We’ll take her somewhere on the outskirts of Chicago where you can visit her weekly. Somewhere with lots of horses. And hay. And ranchers who’ll take care of her. And stay firmly away from you. Ugly ranchers,” he added. “With no teeth.”

I laughed. “Thank you.”

“What do you want to call her?” he asked.

“Artemis,” I answered, somehow knowing what her name was before I even really thought about it.

“The goddess of wildlife. Quite fitting.” He kissed my nose extra carefully, then my forehead, then my lips.

We drank our beers, and I ate brownies next to Artemis, sitting on the hay. I’d eaten in the last few days more than I had in the month before. My appetite was returning, and that was a good sign.

“I’ve wanted to become a lawyer since I was thirteen years old,” he said, and I stopped breathing altogether. He was confiding in me. Opening up. This was huge. This was everything. “The world is an unfair place. It does not reward you for being good, or decent, or moral. But for being talented, driven, and cunning. Those things are not necessarily positive. And none of them—not even talent—is a virtue. I wanted to protect those who needed protection, but the more I worked on cases, the more I realized that the system was corrupted. Becoming a lawyer in hopes to bring justice is like cleaning a ketchup stain on a bloodied shirt of a man who just got stabbed fifty times. So I went higher.”

“Why are you so obsessed with justice?”

“Because your father robbed me out of mine. I understand that your childhood has been sheltered. I can even respect your father for sending you to boarding school and distancing you from the mess he’s created in Chicago. But this mess? I grew up in it. I had to survive in it. It left me scarred and wronged.”

“What are you going to do with my father?”

“I’m going to ruin him.”

I swallowed. “And with me? What are you going to do with me?”

“Save you.”

After a while, I became drowsy from the beer and sugar. I propped my head against his chest and closed my eyes. He took out his phone and let me nap atop of him, very unlike my husband. Since he had no reception, I didn’t know what he was going to do with his phone, but part of me wanted to test the limit of his patience. To see when he was going to shake me gently and tell me it was time to get going.

I woke up an hour later in a tiny pool of my drool on his shirt. He was still messing with his phone. I glanced at his screen, trying not to move. He was reading an article offline. Probably a document he’d downloaded in advance. I stirred lightly to let him know that I was awake.

“We should head back.”

I took one glance at Artemis, who was sleeping peacefully in her stall, and yawned.

“We should,” I agreed. “But I love it too much here.” Then, without thinking, I tilted my head up and pressed a kiss to his lips. He dropped his phone, taking me in his arms and positioning me with careful precision on his lap to straddle him. I felt immediately more powerful and awake than I had been in weeks, linking my arms around his neck and deepening our kiss. I began to grind against his erection, without even thinking about what I was doing. I wasn’t on the pill yet—never got the chance to book that appointment—and I knew, now more than ever, that our first time was an angry fluke. Wolfe didn’t want children, and I certainly didn’t want to have them without his wishes. Especially not at nineteen. I’d just started school.

“I’m…” I said between kisses, “I…we need a condom. I’m not protected.”

“I’ll pull out.” He kissed his way down my cleavage, opening the buttons of my navy blue polka dot dress. I pulled away, cupping his face, still in awe that I could do so.

“Even I know that’s not a valid form of contraception.”

He grinned, his teeth a row of straight pearly whites. He was excruciatingly beautiful. I didn’t know how I was going to survive it if he took another Emily to his bed in this lifetime. We were no longer two strangers sharing a roof. We were entwined and entangled, connected with invisible strings, each of us trying to pull away, only to create more knots that made us closer. And he was so sophisticated and quick-witted, I didn’t know how I could keep him, even if I wanted to. Dearly.

“Francesca, you’re not going to get pregnant from one time.”

“That’s a myth, and one we can’t believe right now,” I persisted.

It’s not that I didn’t want to become a mother. It’s that I didn’t want to become a mother to an unwanted baby. I still held on to some foolish hope he’d change his mind with time when he realized that we could be happy together. Plus, there was something so horribly degrading about taking that Plan B pill that he had left for me. I felt like he had rejected me and what my body had to offer.

“When’s your period?” he asked. I blinked.

“On the first week of the month.”

“Then you’re fine. You shouldn’t even be ovulating right now.”

“How do you know this?” I laughed, raking my fingers over his chest, frantic for some reason.

“My brother’s wife…” He stopped, a mask of icy difference sliding over his face. He was not supposed to say that. I was not supposed to know that he had a brother, and that the brother had a wife. I blinked at him, desperate for him to continue. He swallowed, put my down carefully, then stood up, offering me his hand.

“You’re right. Let’s go, Nem.”

I took it, knowing we had quite the problem.

He didn’t want to let me in.

And I could no longer purge him out.