Married To Her Ex (a standalone novel)

by Kat Cantrell

  Moki shot Useless the evil eye, but the dog didn’t flinch. “There’s a pool in back, Mrs. Jesse. I show you the cabana. Useless likes to swim too.”

  At the word “pool,” Useless bounded off the couch and streaked out of the salon toward the back of the house.

  Cool water sounded so heavenly she didn’t bother to correct Moki’s continued use of Mrs. Jesse to address her. It did prompt a mental note to talk to Shannon about redoing the divorce settlement, however.

  She dug through her bags, grabbed a swimsuit, and followed the housekeeper through the kitchen to another set of double French doors off one of the large living areas.

  Texas heat devoured her whole when she stepped outside. She bee-lined it for the cabana and swapped her suit for the bikini.

  A waterfall rushed over strategically placed river rocks and fell into a dark blue oasis surrounded by hundreds of varieties of lush greenery arranged artfully for maximum effect. It reminded her of something she’d seen before, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe the builder had copied the look from a magazine.

  She dove into the pool. The saltwater felt weird on her skin, more wet and slippery than the chlorinated kind, and tasted vaguely like bland sardines. Beautiful colors revolved around her in a restful, otherworldly mix of blue and black. Seeking nothing but relaxation, she emptied her mind. Useless kept bumping her with his cold nose as he paddled in loopy circles, so relaxation didn’t exactly happen.

  “Margarita?”

  She raised her lashes and glanced in the direction of the voice.

  Jesse, now wearing swim trunks with his Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt, dangled his feet in the water from his poolside perch. His legs were as toned as they’d been the last time she’d seen them at Christmas, but she pretended not to notice. Just like she hadn’t noticed the hard planes of his chest when he’d held her through the panic attack earlier.

  He’d always had a rocking body. It was the stuff underneath the skin that caused all the problems.

  Near him, a tray sat on the flagstone walkway holding two frosty glasses rimmed with salt.

  She eyed the offering. “Isn’t it a little early for alcohol?”

  It wasn’t, but when it came to Jesse, a simple glass might hold more angles than a dodecahedron.

  Jesse laughed. “Never. Besides, you love my margaritas.”

  Keeping as far away from him as possible, she swished to the side where it was shallower and picked up a glass just to prove she wasn’t afraid.

  The sour-sweet tang hit her tongue and unleashed memories. Jesse and margaritas on a Sunday afternoon, the sting of salt on the rim and on his lips as he stole a kiss. The comfortable routine of a life now gone. Not just gone. Stolen from her.

  “I thought you were working.” He could jump over the moon for all she cared, but it would be nice to get a handle on his schedule. So she could avoid him as much as possible.

  Casually, he pointed over his shoulder. “One of the study windows is right there. I looked up and saw an almost-naked woman in my pool. Motivated me to finish early.”

  Over the rim of his glass, his eyes traveled along her bare skin, all the way to her murky toes glimmering below the surface of the water. Slow heat simmered to life deep in her core, and she tried to squelch it. She’d have better luck breaking concrete with her forehead.

  How did he still turn her on with a mere glance? It wasn’t fair.

  “We didn’t start off with the bang I was hoping for,” he continued. “Maybe we can have a couple of drinks and try again. Mexican for dinner? I whipped up a whole pitcher of margaritas.”

  “I get a vote?”

  She needed to get a hold on her temper. But seriously. He had no business looking at her like she was dessert. This whole scene grated on her nerves. With Jesse’s presence, a sense of expectation invaded what little serenity she’d managed to eke out, and it was as confusing as it was scary.

  He sighed and squeezed his temples between a thumb and forefinger. The crescent-moon-shaped scar under his eye—a souvenir from a bar fight in college—flashed. “Of course you do. You’re not a prisoner. You came of your own free will.”

  She glared at him. “You strong-armed me. You might be telling yourself this is some cozy Norman Rockwell scene, but I’m here to get my patent and leave. I’ll be nice on your dates, but I’m not sleeping with you, and I’m not going to pretend everything is fine between us.”

  She knocked back the drink and sloshed out of the pool. With a pointed slam, she shut the cabana door and furiously scrubbed her wet skin with a towel, mystified why Jesse simply asking about dinner had enraged her. Though, really, the dynamic between them blasted past simple a long time ago. Who could blame her for being testy when her gut was constantly braced for the misery caused by being around him?

  The reminders—of how good it had been before she got pregnant and how horrible after the miscarriage—were brutal too.

  A hard, sweaty workout was the only way to burn off her mad now, and she needed to get rid of it in order to be civil the rest of the day. She sailed toward the house without sneaking a glance at Jesse from the corner of her eye but then skidded to a halt before putting a hand on the knob.

  She had no car. Nor any clue how to get back to civilization.

  Without a car, she couldn’t run to the grocery store for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s at one a.m. when sleep seemed unlikely.

  She retraced her step back to the pool, halted in front of Jesse, and stuck her hand out. “I need your keys.”

  A muscle in his jaw rippled, but he didn’t turn his head. “To what?”

  Steel-rimmed Oakleys he’d slipped over his eyes intensified his frigid demeanor.

  “To the Vette. I’m going out.” She stilled her shaking hand lest he get the impression he affected her in any way.

  He covered a smirk but not very well. “You can’t drive a stick shift.”

  Of course she couldn’t. And of course he’d put her in the position of having zero control over anything.

  “I have to get out of here,” she snapped. “And we don’t have a scheduled date tonight. You can’t keep me trapped in your house for three months.”

  “Ask Moki for the keys to the Silverado. It’s got a navigator and OnStar.” He took off his glasses, and his blue eyes lit on her with a hint of softness. “I’m not trying to make you miserable, you know.”

  “You don’t have to try. It’s like magic. You show up and poof! I’m miserable.”

  She spun and stalked into the house, wishing she could shove him into the pool, but he weighed too much, and the attempt would be pitiful.

  The next three months were going to be horrific if this was only day one.

  It took some wrangling with the navigation system in the Silverado, but Alexia finally found the main freeway back to civilization and drove to her gym. The humungous truck was hard to maneuver into a parking spot, but she did it.

  Grabbing her gym bag, she opened the door and started to slide out. A woman in the next row was also getting out of her car, but she had a passenger in tow—a baby.

  Alexia froze.

  It was a little girl, judging by the amount of pink. She was strapped into one of those clunky baby carriers and seemed content to do nothing more than kick one bare foot as her mom toted her into the gym.

  Alexia watched the carrier disappear into the interior of the building through sliding glass doors, unable to tear her gaze from the baby, unable to staunch the flow of tears plopping into her lap.

  Her own baby was gone, life snuffed out before it had barely begun. No little toes in Alexia’s future. No first steps, play dates, first words.

  When would it stop being so hard?

  When would she go back to being that woman who didn’t want children? Once, she’d thought a career and a husband were enough. Once, they had been. No longer.

  Jesse hated children. And she feared she’d never again be the woman he’d married who claimed she’d be a terrible mot
her. That was only one of many reasons this patent deal would never work to reconcile their relationship, even if she wanted it to.

  Alexia yearned to be a mom with a burning passion she scarcely recognized. But that didn’t make it less so, just more impossible to see how she and Jesse would ever get back to the way they were.

  She didn’t remember starting the truck or driving, but the next thing she knew, the Silverado was parked in the lot outside Shannon’s condo.

  Lungs on fire, Alexia huddled on her sister’s couch, alternating between anger at the impossible situation and grieving over the emotional evisceration of those last few weeks as her marriage imploded over a miscarriage she had no idea how to recover from. Nor did she have any idea how to handle an angry husband who’d blamed her for getting pregnant on purpose.

  She had gotten through it, and she didn’t want a repeat. The before part, sure. But that was gone forever, and nothing Jesse could do would bring it back. Not by prowling around all smoldering hot, not by finishing work early, and not by extending any margarita olive branches. The deal only stated she had to live at the house, not open up a vein and bleed for him.

  Shannon listened as Alexia poured out the whole horrible story.

  “Give up,” her sister advised. “Find another product to sell if your ex coming up with such a resourceful way to get you back is so miserable.”

  “You act like he’s throwing roses at my feet and spouting poetry.” She pulled an afghan up to shoulder height, unable to ward off a chill from the air conditioner at full blast. “He’s not trying to get me back. He’s trying to prove something to himself and hijack my dreams at the same time.”

  The Thigh Thing would not only replace her marriage but her secret dreams of motherhood as well. It had to. Another pregnancy might finish her off, and Jesse had pretty much cured her of any desire to be a wife.

  Shannon flicked the remote and changed the channel. “Don’t be so melodramatic. You haven’t filed your incorporation papers yet. It’s not like you were in the middle of production and he ran in, waving his hands, shouting for the machines to stop.”

  “I’m melodramatic?” She sighed. Of course Shannon didn’t get it. Four years separated them, and her sister never failed to make it feel like forty. “This isn’t just about the Thigh Thing. We were partners. He left, and I’m going to do it anyway. On my own. I don’t need him, and he knows it. This deal is nothing more than a poor attempt to stop me from succeeding.”

  Eyebrows raised, Shan gave her the older-sister-knows-best look. “This is about Jesse standing in the way of your progress, huh? I’ll be curious to see if you still think so in a month.”

  “O wise sister. Please impart to me your knowledge of what is really going on here.”

  “The deal he proposed has nothing to do with business. He wants his marriage back.” Shannon tucked a lock of sable hair behind her ear. She’d gotten the luxurious silken hair of their mother while Alexia’s color could only be politely described as brown. “You can be difficult to reason with. Obviously Jesse knows that, and he’s plowing right through it. He’s good for you.”

  Stung, Alexia deliberately changed the channel on the TV and clamped her mouth shut. She’d get no support here. Nothing new. Of course Shan would take Jesse’s side. He was stable, prosperous. Everything Alexia wasn’t.

  Shannon had never believed in her, never thought she could be successful at launching her own business. Why had Alexia come here in the first place? Her sister’s initial words of advice had been to give up.

  Never.

  So she’d made a couple of bad decisions in the past, chasing other business ideas and products. Learning experiences. The Thigh Thing was different, and this time she was ready. Only Jesse and his enormous ego stood in the way of showing everyone—including him—how far she’d come.

  An unsettling realization fluttered low in her belly. Jesse believed in her. He always had, from the very first moment when she’d confided her secret dream to conceive, manufacture, and market her own product.

  When she came up with the idea for the Thigh Thing, he never laughed or dismissed it as stupid. Not once after she stormed into his office yesterday had he flung past failures in her face or questioned her competence.

  He believed in her, maybe more than she believed in herself. They’d always supported each other, been each other’s biggest champions, which was why his complete lack of support after the miscarriage had been so crippling.

  Sometime around ten p.m., fatigue began its pull at her eyelids. She was supposed to sleep at Jesse’s house every night for the full three months. Since she couldn’t crash on Shan’s couch, she drifted out the door. Full dark and an unfamiliar road coupled with bone-deep weariness threatened to drive her right off the freeway.

  A sudden flash of lightning lit up the night sky. Heavy, dark clouds lined the horizon as far as the eye could see in the direction of Tres Lagos.

  A thunderstorm. Great. She hated rain, hated the misery of being wet, of an angry sky, and most of all of the absolute dark it usually brought. What a supreme cap to a really, really awful day.

  As she drove down the exit ramp, the sky split and poured sheets of water onto the windshield, effectively concealing the road from view.

  Tha-thump.

  The truck had veered off the road onto the uneven shoulder. She jerked the wheel and almost drove off the other side. Who bought a vehicle this large? Ineffective headlights illuminated nothing but the curtain of rain. She’d be lost for hours. In the dark.

  Out of nowhere, the off-white stone wall surrounding Tres Lagos emerged from the gloom. Squinting, she followed it to the gate and fumbled in the glove box for the remote. With some help from above, she managed to not hit one of the giant trees along the main drive and still find the garage.

  The covered walkway from the garage to the house did little to keep her dry from the driving rain, which blew sideways and straight down at the same time. As water pooled under her feet on the tile floor of the utility room, she curled her lip. She would clean it up if she knew where anything was—like towels. If she’d earned any points with Moki thus far, she’d just erased them all.

  Shivering now in the cool, dark interior of the house, she dragged fingertips along the wall, feeling the way to the small salon and only making two wrong turns.

  Whew. She had made it without collapsing into a little ball of panic.

  Thunder cracked through the air, rattling the windowpanes, and an immediate burst of lightning signaled the storm was directly over the house. Jesse and Moki must already be in bed but were no doubt still awake unless they’d gone deaf before the storm hit.

  Sighing, she massaged her temples. She’d forgotten to ask Moki for a blanket and a pillow and, more importantly, where the bathroom was. Or the light switches. All her earlier fit of temper had gotten her was wet, cold, and disoriented. Why hadn’t she stayed here and settled in? She hadn’t gone to the gym after all—or eaten, for that matter. As a result, she felt sorry for herself, and the house was as dark as the inside of a cow.

  Black pressed in on her, skittering along her skin. Filling her mind with creeping darkness. Where was the switch? Palms out, she stumbled around the small room and whacked a shin on a chair. Fantastic. But she couldn’t stop to rub it.

  Finally, her fingers scraped over a light switch behind one of the French doors she’d left ajar. The room flooded with light, and the weight rolled off her chest. She shrugged into a University of Texas T-shirt and yanked on sweatpants, but she had nowhere to leave wet clothes except on the Berber carpet. She laid them out, hoping they would dry before morning.

  Another wave of thunder cracked, making her jump. The light flickered and dimmed. Brownout. Then the room went black as the power completely failed.

  Terror crawled into her brain through her eye sockets like a black oil slick with oozing fingers. She gulped, but the slow suffocation continued, relentlessly squeezing her lungs. Her throat closed, and the crawl
y tingle spread across her chest. Rain pelted the window like marbles against glass, sounding ominously loud in the small room.

  Her eyes wouldn’t adjust to the darkness, like she’d been stuffed in a box with the lid nailed closed. No matter how hard she beat on it, she couldn’t lift the lid.

  Mewling sounds gurgled in her throat, inaudible over the storm’s cacophony. Her knees collapsed. Hot tears of fear wore an angry path down her cheeks. The total lack of control over her own body infuriated her even further.

  She registered Jesse’s presence only an instant before the blanket settled over her shoulders. He pulled her into his strong arms and held her, murmuring words she couldn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. The familiar rumble in his chest against her ear flooded her veins like a balm. Like salvation.

  Suddenly she could breathe again. He was here for her, like Before. Not at Outlaw, like he’d always been After. She sank into his firm, reassuring chest and wrapped her arms around him.

  Her pulse slowed, and her lungs filled. A small thing like a psychological imbalance couldn’t rival the power of Jesse, who commanded the wind and rain to do his will.

  He was so solid. Scents of soap and his factory lingered in her nose and triggered intense longing for the man she’d married. If only it were possible for him to be Before Jesse again. The man she didn’t mind leaning on, the man she wanted to support her and hold her. She’d loved Before Jesse with blinding abandon.

  If he could be that man again, she would jump at the chance to be with him, to trust him with her heart. To start over. Their marriage—even if it ended up childless—might be enough. At least she’d be willing to try.

  But Before Jesse had vanished into After Jesse. After Jesse, the workaholic who put Outlaw first and ignored his grieving wife. He’d probably never again be the man she’d married, just like she couldn’t be the woman he’d married.

  The merciless lights blinked on, too harsh for the small room. The burning moved from her chest to her throat, making it hot and tight. Scorching saliva coated the inside of her mouth, and she swallowed. The panic receded.