The Siren, KATHERINE JOHN [positive books to read .txt] 📗

and was no longer paying any attention to me. I hadn’t thought of it in so long, but I now remembered how he used to do that when we were married too. I’d think I was going to a nice dinner with my husband and end up dining with a vigilante cop or a rumrunner from the prohibition era. It was maddening.

“He didn’t shoot him,” Cole said, turning the gun over in his hands as though it were made of precious stones. “They’d been partners, Bad Billy and Wildman Sam.” Cole’s voice took on a gravelly Western drawl as he transformed into Bad Billy. “But I found out that Sam had double-crossed me and was working with the long arm of the law to bring me down, so I knew I had to kill him.

“A duel was too much of an honor for a man that snitched on his best friend. So I tricked Sam. Invited him to have a drink with me at the saloon we frequented. As Sam settled with his whiskey into his favorite chair before the fire, I confronted him—asked him point-blank what he had done, gave him a chance to come clean. Because that’s what a gentleman does. But Sam didn’t come clean. No, he looked me in the eye and he lied. So I took this gun.” Cole gripped the gun in his palm and raised it. I flinched, but he was so lost in his story he didn’t notice. “And I brought it down on Sam’s temple.”

I stepped aside as Cole brought the gun down hard on an invisible Sam, disconcertingly close to where I stood. “Beat him with it until the blood oozed from his ears. And then I tossed his carcass on the street so that everyone in Westboro would know Sam was a man who wasn’t worthy of a duel.”

“Wow,” I breathed. “That’s crazy.”

“Anyway.” He tossed the gun in with the others, his normal speaking voice restored. “Gotta keep the humidity under control down here so the metal doesn’t oxidize. So.” He laid a heavy hand on my hip. “You wanted to revisit old times.”

It wasn’t a question, but again I wavered. There was so much water under the bridge. Yet I knew he was giving me a chance to come in from the cold, and I was more than tempted. I called to mind the good times: how hot we’d been for each other at first, the warm glow of the spotlight, the insulation of a thick blanket of money. Perhaps it was synchronicity that the man who’d been my undoing could provide me with a second chance.

I widened my eyes and bit my lip, the signature sex kitten look that had hooked him all those years ago. He pulled my pelvis to his and breathed into my ear, his scruff coarse against my cheek. “You always were a little whore, weren’t you?”

Oh. But it was just role play; he didn’t mean it. He flipped me around and hiked my skirt up around my waist, yanked my panties to the side and thrust himself into me. I cried out in surprise and braced myself against the island, my mind racing to keep up with my body.

This was my passport to a better life. I wasn’t a whore; he was my ex-husband, and he was gorgeous. I wanted this. I just wished it felt more pleasurable. I knew I should ask for a condom, but somehow the words didn’t come. I was on the pill anyway. And who knew whether I was even capable of bearing children; I’d only ever been pregnant the once, and it had failed.

But God only knew where his dick had been.

“We should grab a condom,” I managed breathlessly.

He didn’t seem to hear, hammering away like a carpenter on a deadline. A stack of framed movie posters leaning against the wall clattered to the floor. “Cole…”

“Shhhh…” He placed a hand on the back of my head, pushing my cheek into the smooth, cold granite.

I suddenly remembered that after the first rush of heady infatuation had worn off, I’d never truly enjoyed sex with him, even when I was in love with him. It was always about his needs, never about mine. My life in and out of the bedroom had been ruled by his mercurial moods, which had nothing and yet everything to do with me. He was jealous and philandering, clingy and cold. I was always walking on eggshells trying to guess which version of me he might need next, continually trying unsuccessfully to relight the fire of our beginning.

The personal shit storm I’d been through since our breakup had cast a rosy light over everything that came before, including our romance. But I realized as he pounded away that it hadn’t been great even before the things that came between us eventually drove us apart. There was a reason I’d had an affair—not just had an affair, but fallen in love—with someone else while we were married.

Even so, my life with him had been far better than what it had become after. I pictured my empty pool, the sagging garage roof. And if I were to be with him now, it would be different. I wouldn’t care so much. I wouldn’t be in love with him. I wouldn’t let him hurt me. And it wouldn’t be forever—just for a little while, until I got back on my feet. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to be back on the arm of Hollywood’s Sexiest Man. Sometimes the right thing wasn’t the easiest thing.

Maybe I was a whore.

He was pumping furiously toward ecstasy now. Pill or not, I didn’t want his sperm inside me.

No time to think. “Pull out to come,” I said. He didn’t stop. “Come on my ass,” I instructed, trying to sound sexy. Nothing. “Cole! Don’t come inside me!”

He jerked his dick out and finished himself off, covering my ass and the hem of my dress in warm ooze. I