Merrily Ever After--A Novella Read online

  She let loose a peal of laughter and settled a scarf around the neck. It was a long, wide scarf that trailed on the ground even though she wrapped it around several times.

  They got up and stood back, contemplating their handiwork.

  He cracked up. “That is…pathetic.”

  “It’s not pathetic! He looks like a little kid playing dress-up.”

  That was the thing about Elise. She would get an idea in her head and become single-minded in executing it. But then life would throw a curveball—uncooperative snow, a bridesmaid showing up in a cosplay outfit—and she’d roll with it good-naturedly, which was not something you’d expect unless you really knew her.

  He knew her.

  He slung an arm around her shoulders. “You must be cold.” It was, objectively, freezing, and they’d both gotten their hands wet trying to dampen the snow.

  She shivered, as if the observation had reminded her body to do so. “I am cold.”

  “Let’s go inside and get you warmed up.” He waggled his eyebrows at her, and something sparked in her eyes.

  “You haven’t had enough?”

  They had had a lot of sex today, and she was teasing, but he took the question seriously. Answered it honestly. “Nope. When it comes to you, I’ll never have enough.”

  * * *

  “I’m super hot!” Elise called from the bathroom thirty minutes later. “Can I come out now?”

  Jay strolled over to the open door. After they’d come inside, he’d run her a bath—a really hot one—and told her to get in and stay there until she was heated. Overheated. He needed her nice and toasty for the next portion of their evening.

  She was leaning back in the tub, and her skin was pink. “When you said you were going to heat me up, I didn’t think this was what you meant.” She wiped her brow with a forearm. “Look. I’m sweating and everything.”

  He chuckled. “Okay. Come on out.” He grabbed a thick, white, fluffy towel from a hook on the back of the door and held it open for her. His dick hardened a bit as she stood and water rained off her, but he told himself to bank it. He tried to dry her off, but she wrestled the towel away from him. She would let him take care of her only so much. One thing he loved about Elise—maybe the thing he loved most about her—was the juxtaposition between how pliant she was in bed and how not pliant she was everywhere else. His wife was an infamous perfectionist. She liked things the way she liked them, and woe to anyone who tried to intervene to the contrary. She probably had a preferred way of drying herself off that he wasn’t privy to.

  But he liked to try to intervene. By sticking random ornaments on her perfect Christmas tree. By messing up freshly applied makeup with a kiss, that sort of thing.

  He enjoyed baiting her, in other words. It was just something they did.

  He tapped her on the butt as she twisted away from him. “Get dressed and come out to eat.”

  She appeared a few minutes later, hair wet and skin still pink. She was wearing men’s–style pajamas—pants and a button-up shirt—but they were covered with tiny pink polka dots. They should not have been sexy, and yet…

  He led her to the sitting area, where he’d laid out some food on the coffee table in front of the roaring fire. He’d ordered a collection of her favorite things from the caterer—lobster rolls, a cheese plate, and spaghetti carbonara. It had made for an amusingly random dinner last night and tonight. Even more so as they were eating leftovers of all that and of the finger sandwiches they’d had for lunch.

  She clapped her hands as she surveyed the feast. “I’m starving.”

  He moved to pour her a glass of sparkling wine from the bottle they hadn’t opened last night because she hadn’t wanted to tempt fate, given her earlier stomach trouble, but she held up a hand. “I think I’m just going to have water again tonight, actually.”

  “Really?” Elise usually loved her bubbly.

  “Yeah, you know, I took a bunch of Advil earlier, I should probably just give my liver a break this evening.”

  She often took Advil preemptively, in the days before her period arrived. “You feel okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Okay.” He had a bottle of sparkling water, too, so he filled her glass with that. She moved to sit on the sofa but he shook his head. “Sit by the fire. I want you to stay warm.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You have some kind of agenda here, don’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You always have an agenda.”

  He bit back a smile. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  She answered him with one of her tiny smiles that was all the more potent for being unexpected. “Nope. I love your agendas.” She narrowed her eyes. “As long as they involve deflowering me and not messing with my stuff. I hid that stupid bridezilla ornament at home somewhere you’ll never find it.”

  He chuckled and dug into his meal. After they’d eaten, he cleared away the remains of their dinner, leaving some finger food behind for munching, and got out Scrabble.

  She didn’t say anything, just smiled—a big, beautiful, guileless smile that made his heart twist a little—as she started setting up the board.

  “Hang on now,” he said. “This isn’t regular Scrabble.”

  “It’s not?”

  He produced the extra tiles. “Nope. Welcome to the return of Dirty Scrabble. I ordered a bunch of extra tiles so it will be easier.”

  “Ha!” She clapped her hands in delight.

  When they had first been circling each other—but unable to act on it because she was working for him—they’d played a game of Scrabble that had spontaneously devolved into what they had come to call in retrospect Dirty Scrabble. The fates had been smiling on them in that game—it had been strangely easy to produce words like “clit” and “lick” from their regular tiles. But they had never been able to reproduce the feat—the tiles normally didn’t fall that way. And God knew, given their love of board games and bedroom games, they had tried.

  So he’d decided to make it happen. “Okay, this is what I’m thinking. We each get a ton of tiles, but the catch is you have to play a dirty word. Innocent words not allowed.”

  She burst out laughing. “You are a genius.”

  “That’s true.” He smirked as he counted out tiles. “What do you think? I got six extra sets, so should we just do the usual number times six? Forty-two tiles each to start with?”

  “Sure. But how do we determine what counts as a dirty word? Isn’t dirty in the eye of the beholder? It’s not like there’s a dirty dictionary we can use if someone wants to challenge.”

  “How about if challenged, you have to use the word in a sentence. Convince the other person it’s dirty?”

  She nodded her head affectionately. “Okay.”

  “There’s one more thing.” She looked up, eyebrows raised. “This is Strip Dirty Scrabble. Every fifty points you earn, your opponent has to take off an item of clothing.”

  “This is why you wanted me warmed up! So I could turn around and take my clothes off!”

  Guilty as charged. “Yes. I…preheated you.” He laughed along with her at the phrase.

  “But you’re fully dressed and I have, like, two pieces of clothing on—a top and a bottom. Four if you count my socks.”

  “Well, you’d better not lose, then.”

  * * *

  Elise did not lose. She kicked Jay’s ass, in fact—and took great delight in doing so.

  Twenty minutes into the game, Jay, who had started out dressed in several layers, was down to his boxer briefs and one sock. She was pantless and sockless, but she still had her pajama top and underwear on. And it was her turn.

  She took her time laying down a long word: TONGUING. Then, as if to punctuate her victory, she stuck her tongue out at him. “Ha ha ha!” Having so many tiles was making longer words possible. Longer dirty words. She raised her hands, triumphant.

  “Challenge.”

  She rolled her eyes
.

  “What? Tonguing can be innocent!” He struggled to keep a straight face. “He tongued his ice cream before it melted.”

  He was challenging everything—and she had no doubt it was solely because he wanted to hear the dirty sentences she came up with.

  And she was giving them to him. “When you’re tonguing my clit, it makes me come really hard.”

  He shifted in his seat. “I’ll allow it.”

  She tried to smolder at him, but her attempt at a sexy look became a huge yawn. She was so sleepy. A day of sex and playing outside followed by a hot bath and a big meal would do that. And Jay had built a roaring fire while she was in the bath, so she was toasty and cozy and her eyelids were getting heavier by the minute.

  Although…she was pretty sure part of the uber exhaustion was the pregnancy. She’d read that women were usually extra tired in the first trimester.

  But she wasn’t thinking about that this weekend.

  “Tired?”

  “Nope.” She yawned again. Dammit.

  “You want to call it quits?”

  “Before I finish trouncing you? That would be no.” She turned her attention to the pad of paper they were using to keep score. “Tonguing puts me over five-fifty.” Playing with so many tiles meant they were racking up the points—or she was anyway.

  He started for his remaining sock, but she stopped him with an overly loud tsk. “I think you should take off your underwear instead of your sock.”

  “Oh, so you’re in charge now?”

  She shrugged. “Comes with winning. I can’t help it if I’m just better at Strip Dirty Scrabble than you are.”

  He moved for his sock, just to mess with her.

  She mock pouted. “I told you to take off your underwear.”

  “You like giving the orders, Elise?”

  He’d only meant it as a playful question, and he took off his underwear as he asked it, but it had the effect of changing the tenor of their game. Supercharging the air around them as the mood shifted in an instant from playful to dead serious.

  “No,” she whispered. “I like it better when you give the orders.” Her hands floated up to the top button of her pajama top and hovered there. Exhaustion and arousal were competing inside her, but she was trying to nudge arousal ahead. After all, what as the point of Dirty Scrabble if you fell asleep in the middle of it?

  “Take your shirt off, Elise.”

  She took her shirt off. But also yawned again. Dammit. “Sorry.”

  He just laughed and pushed himself up onto the sofa—they’d both been sitting on the floor at the coffee table. He laid himself out and opened his arms. “Nap time.”

  “No! I can rally!”

  “I’m sure you can. Don’t think I don’t have plans to thoroughly debauch you later. You just need a little rest.” He crooked his finger at her. God, she loved him so much. He always knew what she needed. As she moved toward him, he stuck his leg out. He was still wearing one sock. “Grab that for me on your way, will you?”

  She shot him a questioning look.

  “I look like an idiot naked except for one sock.”

  “It’s just me,” she said, but she took off his sock.

  “Exactly,” He held his arms up while she got herself situated against his chest. Then, once she’d settled, they encircled her, familiar, strong, and steady.

  * * *

  It’s just me.

  Just her.

  She’d meant it like “only” her, like she was not someone he needed to worry about impressing.

  She had no idea.

  Maybe it was dumb, but he still cared that a naked man wearing one sock was…not a good look. And yeah, maybe it was dumb, but he still wanted to impress her. Or at least not actively look like an idiot in front of her.

  It took her all of two minutes to fall asleep. He chuckled. This was not how he had imagined Dirty Scrabble ending.

  But he was not disappointed. Not at all. They’d had sex twice already today, and to be honest, he was enjoying this moment of…solitude? Not exactly, but of being awake while she slept. It let him really look at her in a way he couldn’t when they were both awake.

  She was breathing deeply, and her head lolled to one side, letting him admire the long line of her neck as the warm light of the fire illuminated her skin.

  God, he loved her. But it was more than that. He felt awe. Awe that she trusted him. That she gave herself over to him so easily and so completely, whether they were having sex or she was sleeping in his arms. His chest grew tight as he was flooded with a powerful sense of possessiveness. Not like ownership, exactly, more like the knowledge that they belonged together. That what they had was good. Elementally right. Unshakable.

  He held her until the fire had burned down to embers. He was tempted to just stay there, to let his eyes close and join her in slumber. But she would be more comfortable in the bed. So he carefully hoisted her into his arms. He’d tried not to wake her, but she stirred and sighed. As they rounded the screen that separated the sleeping area from the living area, they passed a window. Big, fat, fluffy snowflakes were falling.

  “It’s snowing!” she whispered.

  “Yes.” He laid her down gently on the bed. “It’s snowing.”

  There was a string of Christmas lights draped over the headboard, and he reached over to turn them on. They were just your garden-variety white, twinkly Christmas lights, but they seemed impossibly beautiful at that moment.

  Then he came around the other side, slid in, and pulled the covers up over both of them.

  “Merry Christmas,” he whispered, even though she was asleep again. “Merry Christmas, my love.”

  Chapter Five

  By Monday afternoon, Jay was almost asleep at his desk. It was a good kind of exhaustion, though. Like when you exercise so hard, your body just gives it up. He felt sore and languorous at the same time. Spent. Well-used.

  As a result, he hadn’t been very productive today. His mind had kept wandering back to the cabin, to his wife. He was like a lovesick teenager, for God’s sake. Except not, because no teenager had ever had that kind of sex.

  Actually, he had never had that kind of sex.

  He and Elise had a very healthy sex life, but this past weekend had been different somehow. They’d done their usual stuff—which continued to be as hot as all get-out. But they’d also…made love, for lack of a better way to describe it. Like that first time, when she’d asked him to pay attention to her breasts. And their last morning, waking up all cocooned in bed with the snow coming down around them.

  And he wanted to do it again. So fuck it, he was going to knock off early. Elise wouldn’t likely be home when he got there. She’d had client appointments off-site this afternoon. But he wasn’t going to get anything done sitting at his desk mooning. He could go home and take a shower to wake himself up and then rustle up some dinner.

  Or maybe he’d make a reservation somewhere. Yeah—he would take Elise out. He loved nothing more than cocooning, but there had been a lot of it lately, with the weekend away. His wife liked to get dressed up and go out and see and be seen. And he liked to wait for his wife to get ready and then, when she came downstairs, plant a kiss on her that messed up her perfectly applied lipstick.

  And if he beat her home, he could find the bridezilla ornament and put it back on the tree.

  When he pulled into the parking spot behind their house, he was surprised to see the door to the balcony off their bedroom open. Their bedroom was on the second story, and Elise liked to sleep with the door cracked to let in fresh air, even in the winter, even when her beloved snow was falling. Fresh air was one of her designer obsessions. “The best thing you can do for your home is open it to the outside,” she always told her clients. Her bedroom fresh air strategy worked for him, too, because combined with the fact that she got cold easily, it meant they got to cuddle up under a pile of duvets.

  But they always shut the door when they weren’t home. So they’d either forg
otten this morning, or like him, Elise was home unexpectedly early. Her presence was confirmed when he got out of the car and heard music wafting from the house. Well, not really wafting—more like blasting.

  Was that…Guns N’ Roses?

  Maybe an intruder had gotten in? An intruder with a penchant for Axl Rose? He chuckled and jogged around front and let himself in.

  “Lise?” he called. “Sweetheart?”

  There was no answer. She probably couldn’t hear him over the not-dulcet strains of “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” He smiled and hit the stairs. He could almost see it. She would have decided to do something like clean out her closet, and she would have found something that reminded her of her youth and put on the song. Except she was too young for GNR. Maybe Wendy was up there with her—Wendy had a rock and roll streak.

  Either way, he was flooded again with that same feeling of almost savage tenderness. Elise was so very much…herself. He marveled again how he had ever managed to attract such a creature.

  He stuck his head into the room. He had expected her to be bopping around, either alone or with one or more of her friends. Or at least to be hard at work doing some manufactured perfectionist project.

  He had not expected her to be sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed crying while she listened to heavy metal.

  Something lurched inside him. That horrible feeling he always got when something was wrong with Elise sent a jolt down his arms. They wanted to grab things, to shake something, to do something. He was forever fighting that impulse. He had to be rational here. There was no need to react until he knew what was wrong

  “Elise. Sweetheart. What’s the matter?” He started to go to her, but she held up a hand. That was…not like her. So instead he headed for her phone, which was resting on the dresser.

  She tracked his movements across the room. She’d been wearing eye makeup, and she had dark tracks down her face where tears had marred it.