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Текст книги "Unraveled"
Автор книги: Jen Frederick
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 18 страниц)
“God, yes, talk to me,” she cried, her eyes fluttering open.
I shoved up with my hips in a furious rhythm. “Your cunt is squeezing me like a vise. Your cheeks are flushed and your eyes are glassy and I’ve never seen a girl look so into this. I wish we had a mirror right now so you could see how fucking hot you are. Don’t stop,” I begged. “Christ, my balls…”
I couldn’t talk anymore, but I didn’t have to because she came apart in my arms. Her whole body tensed and she shuddered, crying out, “Oh God, Gray.”
My balls felt like they’d nearly exploded when I came. “Almighty fucking…Sam.” I clutched her to me as we both trembled in the aftermath. I could have fallen into the lake and drowned and never realized it because I was that senseless. I’d never had a fuck as good as Sam Anderson and was afraid I never would again.
I lay there against the hard bench and the cooler and hugged her close. There was no explanation I could think of—at least not one I was ready to accept—as to why our physical connection was so spectacular.
“It’s so good with you,” Sam muttered. She’d collapsed on top of me, tucking her arms between us, her warm nose in the crook of my neck. Not knowing how to respond, I just kept up rubbing her back in long strokes from the base of her neck to her spine. Then, when I was about to let the post orgasm stupor take me under again, she asked about Carrie.
This time I just vomited out the whole story. I suppose I could’ve blamed it on the timing but I think I wanted her to know. Sam seemed to understand everything else, maybe she’d get this too. And maybe I owed it to her. “When I was in high school, I was tall and gangly. I had no game, and the girls knew it. Like they sensed I was weak and ran far away.” I grinned but it faded quickly as Sam looked at me knowingly.
Sighing, I snugged her up against my side and pressed her back onto the cooler so she couldn’t look at me. Or I couldn’t look at her. One of the two. With an exaggerated sigh, I pulled my sunglasses back down and continued the story. “We moved a lot up until my junior year, and then my dad got stationed at Pendleton. First day of school, Carrie walks right up to me, takes my hand and shows me around. She eats lunch with me, has me drive her home, and that’s it for me. It blew my mind that she wanted me, of all people.”
“And then she broke your heart.”
"Guys don't get heartbroken, honey. We just get pissed off."
She made a humming noise that could mean anything. I continued. “I’d always known that I was going to join the Corps, and I was up front about it. She loved the idea. Sometimes she’d squeeze my arm and say that the military was going to make me a man. Around Fallbrook, there are plenty of military, and not just Marines. I always felt like she was taking a step down to be with me. When I joined the Corps, it changed me a lot. Not just how I looked, but my whole attitude about things. I was way cockier after boot camp and even worse after I finished the school of infantry.”
“Is that when you got this?” She tapped my arm where the bottom of my tattoo peeked out of my shirt sleeve. We were both bare-ass naked from the waist down but had kept our shirts on. That was kind of fucked up. Sitting up, I reached down and picked Sam’s shorts and panties off the bottom of the boat. Thankfully they were dry. She pulled them on and then settled into the seat opposite me. I handed her another Coke and took one for myself. I needed the caffeine and sugar to get me through the story. I wished I’d brought some beer.
“Yup. All of us after we got out of SOI. We ran off to the first tattoo parlor we could find and got ourselves all tatted up. Semper Fi,” I said mockingly. “And all of this thrilled Carrie. Her boyfriend had turned into something other girls wanted, but it also made her insecure. She flirted a lot with other guys to make me jealous. We fought a lot and had crazy make up sex. I didn’t realize at the time that we were fucked up. Inside the bubble it felt normal. We got to see each other fairly regularly. She'd drive up to base and we'd stay at a hotel on the weekends if my battle buddy wasn't around.
“A few months into my deployment, I hear that she's been coming down regularly, every weekend, which at first seemed like she was just trying to be part of the network. I'd thought about proposing to her when I got back from my deployment. It was only going to be seven months. Then I hear she's been seen with a recruiting officer. The same goddamn 2nd Lieutenant that had signed me up. I got leave halfway through deployment, but I didn't tell her."
"I know the end of the story but already I don't like it."
"Yeah, me neither. Want me to stop now?"
"Nope." She tapped her can against mine and then took another sip. I downed the sugary sweet soda and then crumpled the can in my hand.
"I get back to base and I wait in my car outside the LT's recruiting office until it closes and then I follow him. LT can afford to live off base, and he's got an apartment in Oceanside with some other officer. I wait outside of his condo. If he doesn't meet up with her, then I've wasted a whole afternoon and evening of my tiny leave with this and that pissed me off but I had to know.
"He goes in, does whatever inside, and then an hour later, she shows up in the car her daddy bought her when she graduated from high school. She's wearing barely any clothes and fuck me heels. He comes outside and starts making out with her, playing grab ass on the street. I almost get out of my car then but something tells me to wait. He takes her keys and they get in and drive to a small private beach down along the coast, between San Diego and Oceanside and then…”
I stopped when Sam reached for the can in my hand. I saw that I’d been squeezing it so hard some of the metal had pierced my skin. With a sigh, I released the can so I wouldn’t continue to make myself bleed, even though recounting this whole episode seemed like I’m reopening a scabbed-over wound. "Then they start fucking in the car. I didn't get it then. I thought maybe she saw me and was giving me the ultimate middle finger. I found out later that his roommate had told him that he either stopped screwing around with a deployed Marine's girlfriend or he'd report him to his superiors, so they had to resort to screwing in her car whenever they wanted to get off."
"I got out of the car and rapped on her window, staring at her ass gyrating like she’s a stripper, until they finally heard me. She starts sniveling and crying and saying that he forced her. That didn't fly with me, so she changed her story. She was trying to help me get ahead. He just sat there like a dumbass, sitting on his thumb while he let her twist in the wind. I figured he was the kind of guy that if I decked him, he'd report me, and I wasn't going to fuck up my career for this bitch or that asshole."
"No touching the officers." Sam knew immediately why I couldn’t have beaten the officer like I wanted to. Enlisted men don’t ever touch officers. That was an automatic Article 15 or non-judicial punishment at the very least.
"Right. So I tell this girl that I dated for over three years, the girl I thought about proposing to, that I didn't want to see her cheating ass ever again. I left and got sick drunk and returned to A-stan."
"But that wasn't the end of it."
Stretching out my hand, I threaded a few strands of Sam’s honey-blonde hair through my fingers. It felt like silk, finer than anything I’d touched before. The sunlight made her hair look a thousand different colors. I knew I could stare at it for weeks and not see the same thing. I could barely remember Carrie’s hair, and I knew I hadn’t ever been this fascinated with it. "Nope. The LT sends me an email while I'm deployed, telling me that I better get to the health center because my bitch gave him syph. And that he wasn't the only guy she was fucking while I was gone."
"Is that true?"
"Don't know, but I checked out fine."
We sat there as she took in my sad little tale. I kept sifting through her hair. She didn’t try to tell me that I should’ve given Carrie another chance or that deployments were hard on everyone. She didn’t try to offer any sympathy or, worse, pity. The wound I thought I had re-opened lacked the sharp pain that usually accompanied thoughts of her perfidy. Maybe I’d only had a little poison inside of me and we’d bled it out.
Her hand squeezed mine tight and then she turned and kissed my hand.
“I’ve never been to San Diego. I’d like to visit sometime.”
“You can come and visit me,” I joked but then I realized I was serious. I wanted her to visit me. I wanted to stay connected to her in some way.
“Maybe I will.”
I wanted to change the subject and talk about something other than cheating girlfriends, dead husbands or the Corps. "Tell me about your knitting."
She told me about how a widow from the Yarn Over Knitting Club had reached out to her after Sam's story was told in their local newspaper, and how she hadn't wanted to go but her therapist thought it was a good idea.
"You still could have stayed home," I pointed out.
"I don't think my parents would have let me. I had moved out of my condo when Will and I got married but then after he died, I didn't do a very good job caring for myself so I had to move back home for a while.”
The thought of a grieving Sam not feeding herself made me sick to my stomach and I curled an arm around her and brought her closer to me. It was strange but when she talked about how much she loved Will, that actually made me feel better. Like she was different and that she would've been faithful, unlike so many other women I knew. And men, too, I guess. The military didn't foster fidelity. Even though there were rules against it, adultery and cheating ran rampant through the Corps. It was almost expected that one of your comrades would sleep with your girl the first chance he got. If you didn't get cheated on, it was like you hadn't been tested in battle. I didn't know how other people started trusting enough to start up another relationship or maybe they just knew going in that they were going to cheat, that their partner was going to cheat and that they just lived with it.
I didn't want that. I wanted a relationship, but it could wait until I got out. Or when I was done deploying for long months. I just didn't believe that any relationship could survive long separations, but here was Sam. She'd stayed true to her husband while he was training in Alaska. She'd been true to his memory long after his death. If there was ever a girl that could be true, maybe it was Sam. I pulled Sam up from her seat and tucked her into my side.
I hadn't lied to her when I said that I didn't cuddle, so having her warm body snug against mine without the urge to flee, when we weren't enjoying some post coital glow, was weird. A good weird, but it was definitely hitting different nerves and neurosensors in my brain. I liked it. There was something really relaxing and almost comforting just holding her as the waves of the water slapped gently against the boat. It was so good that I just drifted off to sleep.
Samantha
“DID YOU SEE THE BIG piece of green felt in my condo? It hangs above my sofa."
"What's it for?" Gray's words sounded slurred and drowsy like the heat was lulling him to sleep this time.
"An afghan I was knitting. The felt holds the yarn pieces up so you can stare at the pattern. It's a flag but I'm supposed to do a technique called intarsia and I really suck at it so I haven't finished the star part." Gray fell asleep as I was explaining how intarsia knitting techniques had stymied my ability to finish my flag afghan, and I wasn't even the tiniest bit upset that he did. Gray often had a hard time relaxing. His eyes were always roaming around as if he was trying to identify all potential targets. His story about how he'd been cheated on hurt my heart. I wondered if he knew he was still grieving that.
Oh, he wasn't grieving the loss of his girlfriend so much as the betrayal of that trust he'd given her. And his sense of justice was offended too. He was over there in the dust and danger of Afghanistan making a huge sacrifice and she and an officer weren't even trying to match his sacrifice. He was so hurt he was holding himself apart. His friends with benefits situation sounded awful. The girl he slept with treated him like a human vibrator? That sounded too terrible for words. And yet, he not only pursued this setup, but was proud of it in some weird way.
That he wanted to have sex with me was out of character but in a good way, as if he and I were both stretching outside of our comfort zones because something we wanted was just out of reach.
Eve was right. I realized that now. Will's death had broken my heart. Actually, his death hadn't just broken it. For a while I thought my life had been buried with him. And like I told Gray, I only knew how to do serious relationships. Casual sex didn't sound appealing. It took me a while to get used to having sex with Will, which told me that based on my physical reaction to Gray, I must have a few feelings for him. When he was holding me and I could feel the deep rumble of his chest against my own body, I wanted to sink into that. And the body that I thought was too muscular when I first saw him in the bar had become a source of constant fascination. When he'd rowed us to the middle of the lake, I couldn't stop staring at the way the muscles under his skin undulated and flexed.
The light dusting of hair had felt wonderful against my breasts. Will hadn't had a lot of chest hair but Gray not only had hair around his chest but there was a lovely trail that bisected his stomach and led the eye downward. I'd heard Eve call it the treasure trail and it did beg for me to do some exploring.
And his erection. I smiled a little to myself, glorying in some heretofore unrealized feminine power, but Gray was erect around me a lot. His heavy cotton cargo shorts didn't hide it, and neither did the swim trunks he'd worn during the slip and slide party.
But it wasn’t just his physical power that attracted me. It was fun to talk to him and to do things like going out on a boat and pretending to fish. Gray watched out for me, too, always making sure I had enough to eat or drink. There was a tenderness in his gestures, a sweetness too. Carrie had been a fool, but I wouldn’t be.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AFTER THE FISHING TRIP, GRAY and I were inseparable. He’d call or I would. May wound into June and each day brought us closer together. When I wasn’t working or he wasn’t off doing something with his friends, we’d meet up for a hike or just to play catch in the park. I wasn’t very good at it, but he never complained. I started to get to know his friends and was excited to find out that some of them were currently enrolled at Central. All my high school friends had either graduated already or had never gone to college so it was a relief to know that I’d see at least a couple of familiar faces on campus in the fall.
I’d fielded one awkward phone call from Carolyn who asked sad questions about this guy I’d been seen spending a lot of time with. A friend, I’d told her.
“A male friend?” she’d asked plaintively.
“Yes.” I’d packed up most of the stuff around the condo but the felt still hung on the wall. I needed a damn ladder but I wasn’t about to ask Tucker for one. Maybe I’d hit up Adam for real this time, not just as an excuse to see Gray. Besides, I thought, a little giddy, I didn’t need an excuse.
“I hope you’re enjoying yourself.” Her voice turned sharp. “I’ve been at home looking through Will’s letters. I just can’t believe it’s only been two years since he’s been gone.”
My memories of Will were fading and I hadn't realized how much until I met Gray. Will had been such a big part of my life that at one time I felt like I was losing pieces of me. For so long I'd been a part of the unit that was Will and Samantha. I hadn’t been able to move on because my future had always been as part of that unit. Everyone I knew identified me as Will's girlfriend, Will's wife and then Will's widow.
“I’ll always miss him but…” Looking down at my ring, I started tugging and it slid off like my finger had been buttered. Palming it, I spoke more forcefully. “He’s not here anymore.”
Carolyn started crying and usually that set me off, but not this time. “I’m sorry. You should talk to Tucker.” I’m not sure if she even noticed I hung up. I texted Tucker right after to call his mom and then I shut the phone off. I went upstairs and pulled out my jewelry case. I didn’t have much. There was a pearl necklace my parents had given me when I was sixteen and a watch that my grandmother had gifted me on my graduation from high school. There were a few pairs of earrings and a couple of bracelets. I wore none of it other than a pair of gold hoops I never took out. I slid the ring inside, shut the lid and then kissed the box. I loved Will. Some part of me always would.
But it was time.
Out on my deck, I soaked in the sun and finished up the cap, sweater, and tiny booties, all in ivory alpaca yarn. Making baby items was one of my favorite crafts—and not just because the projects were a lot quicker to complete. I loved the soft yarns, the tiny booties, and the idea that some of my items were the first thing that a new human being ever wore.
I had started ticking off the days left in Gray’s visit. My chest would get tight when I thought about him leaving. July was fast approaching. Ever since the fishing trip, I'd had different fantasies, imagining attending class with him. Holding hands as we walked across campus. Eating together in the cafeteria. We’d both be older students, and so we’d talk about how no one around us makes any sense, only we make sense together.
One night he appeared at the bar without Adam or any of the other guys. He just showed up.
“When are you on break?”
“Maybe ten minutes? The band has two more songs in the set list.”
He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead and then spent the next ten minutes downing two waters. “Driving,” he explained when I asked him.
Eve’s eyes were wide but she didn’t say a word. When the band finished its last song of the set, she pushed me out of the bar saying that she’d be fine. Gray took me by the hand and led me inside, down the hallway and into the storeroom.
“It occurred to me,” he said as he knelt down between my legs, “that I’d made some promises I never delivered on.” I was so glad I was leaning against the door because otherwise I would have fallen over.
His rough fingers and mine made swift work of my shorts. When I was nude from the waist down, he lifted one leg over his shoulder. “Lean against the door, baby. Your knees are going to get weak.” He was smug when he said this, but why wouldn’t he be? I was coming two minutes later.
“One more time,” he said, kissing my inner thigh and rubbing the heel of his hand against me softly while I convulsed around his fingers.
This time both my legs were over his shoulders and he held me up with just one palm. He used his other hand to spread my lips and spear me repeatedly with his tongue. I felt the abrasiveness of his evening stubble against my super-sensitive skin. The only thing I could do was hang on. I dug my hands into his hair and clenched him tightly with my thighs, but he never complained that I hurt him. If anything, my eager response turned him on because he half growled, half laughed against my skin.
My heels thrummed against his back as my second orgasm swam through my bloodstream, setting fire to my nerves. It was sensory overload, and I sobbed out my release when I climaxed. Lowering me to the floor, he hugged me close, making sure that he didn’t release me until my shaking had stopped and I could stand on my own, although I felt as wobbly as an infant.
“Shit hot in the bedroom, right?” He winked.
“And the storage room,” I muttered weakly. Wickedly, he licked each of his fingers clean and I almost had another orgasm right there. When I reached for him, though, he danced away.
“You can return the favor later.” Then he pressed me up against the door and kissed me so hard that I couldn’t remember my own name. Drunk on the taste of him and in a fog from my orgasms, I couldn’t come up with a decent counter argument so I just clung to his shoulders and kissed him back. I don’t remember much about the rest of the night. I was in a sex daze.
I’m not sure where he went for the rest of the night but when the bar closed he was leaning against my Rover. I had a hard time not attacking him there but he made me drive to my condo and take him upstairs to the bedroom. Waiting could be foreplay according to Gray. Maybe he was right. I shot off like a rocket when he first entered me and came two more times before I went into my post sex coma.
I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING special for him, so with a little help from Adam, I took Gray out to Finn O’Malley’s farm the next weekend.
"I'm excited about our excursion." Gray said. "I want ice cream to be included at some point."
Just the look of him made me feel good. "Not to worry. We'll get that on the way back.”
“Sounds good.” He made a big show of licking his lips. “Make sure it has whipped cream. In my sex dream about you last night, you were wearing a whipped cream bikini.”
“You had enough energy for sex dreams?”
“Baby, every night after you wear me out, I’m dreaming about waking up and doing you again. And let me tell you, last night had me so horny this morning, I had a hard time getting out of bed. Good thing you’d gone down for breakfast because otherwise I’d have eaten you before the coffee and bagels.”
I held up a hand to forestall any further description of his fantasies. "I only brought one pair of panties with me today, so you've gotta stop talking about sex right now."
"Does my talking turn you on, Samantha?" Just the tone of his voice could get my engine working.
"You know it does."
Taking pity on me, Gray started telling me about his friend Hamilton and Hamilton's sister, who was a dead ringer for some girl who posed in Playboy. "So you harass poor Hamilton about this, knowing that it's not his sister."
"Sure, we'd never do it if it was his sister."
"Why not?"
"Because we're assholes but not that big of assholes,” Gray explained. Marine logic, I guess.
"So where we going?” he asked as we moved further west from the city center.
"Finn's farm. His dad owns—or I guess Finn, since his dad died, now owns about a hundred acres of land out west. His mom has horses."
"I don't know how to ride," Gray admitted.
"Me neither,” I answered. "I want you to teach me to shoot a gun."
"For real?" There was surprise and excitement in that question.
"Yup."
"That's some hot shit, Samantha. Now I'm the one with wet panties."
Finn met us at the back lot of his property. There were wooden targets at various angles and then just a lot of empty space. A couple of collapsible tables holding cases, ammunition and protective ear gear were waiting for us.
"So some of this stuff is Noah’s and Bo's and some is mine and Adam's. Mal doesn't believe in firearms so he sent this along for you to enjoy after you’re done shooting." Finn held up a bottle of red wine that read The Prisoner on the label.
"Nice man, what do I owe you?" Gray stuck his hand in his back pocket to reach for his wallet.
Shaking his head, Finn replied, "Nothing. It's for Sam." He slapped Gray on his back and kissed me on the cheek. There was grief in his eyes, still lingering from his father's death, and I followed my instincts by throwing my arms around his waist and squeezing him tight.
"It gets easier. I swear,” I said.
Finn hugged me back and then pushed away to hold me by my shoulders. "I can see that."
Gray
INSTRUCTING A HOT GIRL HOW TO shoot a gun was a lot different and more pleasurable than doing it with a recruit. I even found myself curling around her like some doofus in a chick flick, but I guess those doofuses knew what they were doing because it felt damn good. Holding Sam snug against my frame as we both held and shot guns was one of the best things I'd ever done with a girl before outside of the bedroom.
She shot the Ruger 357 revolver that had a barrel only a couple inches long. Her arm jerked up with every shot and not one of the bullets hit the mark that stood only fifteen feet away. I handed her the Magnum 45. It weighed over three pounds more than the little pistol but the longer barrel would have less of a kickback.
"You can do a two-handed stance or try the one-handed side stance." I reluctantly let her go but realized that the sight of her holding the big gun all on her own was just as hot. She shot all six of the bullets in quick succession and then laid it on the table.
Pulling her ear protection off, she said, "I kind of like that one. I'm surprised at the amount of recoil in the smaller guns.”
The revolvers had to be Noah’s because he was the more methodical and patient. He’d like spinning the cylinder and placing his bullets in the chamber one by one. Bo, on the other hand, would've wanted the ability to shove another magazine in as quickly as he’d emptied the one in the stock of the gun so the Glock and the Sig Sauer were probably his. I preferred my Colt 1911 Rail Gun. The .45 bullets it shot packed a big punch, and despite the fact that it took more maintenance, it had better accuracy. There was nothing quite like the toys that the Corps issued. Everything else may suck but the munitions were awesome.
"Yeah, you can get a lower recoil with a larger gun than a small gun. The accuracy of a small gun sucks. It's why in the movies when someone shoots ten rounds and misses with a small gun, it's kinda believable,” I told her.
"Plus, it’s hard to hit the ninja hero with his invisible hero force field around him."
I laughed. "That too."
We pulled our headgear back on and Sam tried out a few more of the handguns. Mentally I made a note that she gravitated toward the sub compact Beretta. If I was going to buy her a gun, that’d be a good one. After we’d torn through about sixty rounds and ten guns, Sam looked to be done in. Her hand was shaking from the unfamiliar exercise of holding five pound weights extended from her arm.
“I can’t believe they feel so heavy. It’s only a few pounds,” she complained.
“When you’re in boot, you have to hold a piece of paper in front of your face, both arms extended. After an hour, that’s the heaviest fucking thing you’ve ever held.” Sam giggled and we spent a few minutes of companionable silence picking up the brass casings around the target we’d set up fifteen feet away. Anything farther and Sam wouldn’t have been able to hit even the outer edge of the paper. "Not that I'm complaining, but why'd you bring me out here?"
She didn't look up immediately but fingered one of the bullet holes that she’d made in the black area of the target, a hit but not a kill. "Do you know the seven stages of grief?"
Not the topic of conversation I would've picked, but if she needed to work through some issues, it didn't hurt to listen. "No, but are they real and not just made up?"
"Not everyone experiences them in steps. Sometimes they run together and sometimes they overlap but yeah, you do feel the seven stages at some point. Or at least I did."
"Where are you now?"
"I think I'm a mix of four and seven. Loneliness and wanting to move forward. What about you?"
"Me?" Surprised, I fumbled with some of the casings I had picked up, the brass making clinking sounds as I recaptured them and walked swiftly back to our prep area. Packing things up, I told her, "I'm not suffering any grief."
"Sure you are. Over the loss of your trust, your first love. Your belief in a happy ever after."
I stopped my busy tasks all together and leaned my hip against the table. Folding my arms, I gave her a repressive look, signaling the end of the conversation but Sam was undeterred.
"Didn't you at first refuse to believe that your girlfriend—what’s her name?"
"Carrie." I said curtly.
"Didn’t you try to convince yourself that Carrie wasn't doing anything wrong? That she was showing up around base to be part of the wives’ support group? And at first, when you sat outside your lieutenant's apartment, you believed that it might be a waste of your time?"
"Yeah so?"
"And then you got sick drunk?"
I nodded cautiously. Feeling a little like I was being led down a dangerous path, I chose to just let Sam do the talking.
"So you have shock and denial, followed by pain. You probably had some thoughts that maybe if you didn't go on that second tour you'd still be together. That she wouldn't have cheated?"
Her spot-on analysis of my post-breakup thought process was unnerving. Quickly, I returned to packing up the firearm paraphernalia and took it all over to her SUV. She hadn't stopped talking, though, following me to the Rover and then back to the tables, which I swiftly dismantled.
"Don't look so surprised. After hours of actual therapy, I feel that I could be an expert. Also, I feel a lot of guilt about not moving to Alaska, so maybe I'm still working through stages two through seven," she mused.
Deciding she wasn't going to stop until she'd gotten everything out of her system, I shoved the two tables into the cargo space, shut the door, and leaned against the bumper. Crossed arms and a scowl on my face didn't faze her.
"And now you've got a lot of anger. You don't want to have relationships. You just want to have people you have sex with."
"Wanting to be safe and sensible isn't a product of anger. It's a product of good decision making."
Sam stepped in between my legs and placed her soft hands on my chest and her sweet scent mixed with gunpowder drained away any anger I'd felt toward the subject matter. Maybe Sam was feeling guilty about having sex with someone other than her husband. I’d noticed she’d taken her ring off, but I hadn’t said anything. Sliding my hands up her arms, I wrapped my fingers around her shoulders and tugged her a little until she fell against me.