“Oh, Bowie,” she whispered.
“By the time we divorced, we hadn’t had sex in two years. And that was on me. In the end, the man she’d convinced herself I was, that she could think that about me, I couldn’t bear to touch her. Though, unsurprisingly, she used that as an excuse to prove I was fucking around on her.”
“Oh, Bowie,” she repeated, sadder, quieter.
“I’m not telling you this to put Dora out there.” He lifted, rolled again, so they were chest to chest but Genny was on her back. “I’m telling you this, baby, because you need to know. Two years, and before that, shit was not great, and I did not stray. After I moved out, to prove something to her, and maybe to me, I didn’t date, nothing, until well after the divorce.”
Now the sad was dripping from her, “Darling.”
“The point is, I will never step out on you, Gen.”
She got what he was saying, he knew it when her body twitched under his.
“Bowie,” she said softly, gliding her arms around him.
“Never,” he told her. “And not only because you’re a seriously great fuck.”
Her eyes went huge.
And then she burst out laughing.
He grinned down at her while she was doing it and kissed her when it started waning.
She rolled him in the middle of it and then there was some groping, some licking, some sucking, before she took a bite of his beard then got in his face.
“I need to clean up, be back,” she said, and slid off him.
He watched her ass as she walked to the bedroom.
And reclining on the pillows, hands behind his head, not too broken up about his attention being taken from the view of a moonlit lake, he watched her walk back.
She came right to him and then fell on him, teetering like a tree.
He grunted and curled his arms around her.
She put her face in his.
“It’s almost more beautiful here at night than it is during the day. All those stars. The moon so bright. Crazy.”
“Glad you like it, baby.”
“You get Thanksgiving, but I get Christmas.”
He was not quick on the conversational change uptake.
“Sorry?” he asked.
“I have a company that does my decorations and they are, as Gage says, off the hook. You and the boys have to come to the condo for Christmas.”
“I do my own decorations, and they are off the hook, so your ass is here.”
“Fifty-fifty,” she haggled.
“Boys gotta give their mom time,” he warned.
“Okay, we’ll figure it out,” she allowed.
“Tom?” he asked.
She bit her lip but let it go to say, “We still do holidays together with the kids.”
“He’s welcome here if he can handle it.”
“God, God, God,” she hissed fiercely, her sudden change in tone and expression taking him by surprise, not to mention, she’d grabbed hold of his beard, “I love you.”
He stared at her.
Then he rolled her.
Before he kissed her, she said, “Please tell me we’re fucking again.”
“Genny, baby, I am no longer twenty-six.”
“Then we’ll make out and feel each other up,” she declared. “For a long, long time.”
“That I can do.”
She smiled bright at him.
Christ.
There she was.
In his bed.
Genny.
“I love you too, Imogen, and I never stopped.”
Her smile faltered as her eyes got watery.
That was when he kissed her.
And they made out and felt each other up.
For a long, long time.
Chapter 19
The Settling
Duncan
* * *
“’Night, Bowie.”
“’Night, honey.”
After she gave him a smile, Duncan watched Sasha start toward the hall to her room.
Before he began to go the other way, though, she turned and said, “You know, I know you all let me win.”
“You’re bankrupting my boys, darlin’,” he told her.
“Then you all should stop being cute dufuses and play for real,” she replied.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been referred to as cute, or a dufus, or if either had ever happened in his life.
But from Sasha, both felt like a compliment.
“I’ll send out that memo,” he told her.
She shot him another of her sunny smiles and a brief wave and then bounced down the hall.
Duncan didn’t move until he lost sight of her, and he didn’t move for a while after.
He had bi-monthly poker games at his house with his buds.
She’d sat in the last two, which were the only two since he’d had her mother back in his life, and Sasha in his life at all.
In that time, they’d been down to the condo on three occasions for short visits in order for Gen to show him her home, so Chloe could show off her shop, and for Duncan to attend his first event at Genny’s side, a fundraiser for the Arizona Humane Society.
Which meant he now owned a suit.
And Chloe had not only selected it, she’d bossed the tailor at the shop to have it fit to perfection (or what she considered perfection) while he was trying it on.
Needless to say, there were a number more pictures of he and Genny together out there.