“Walnuts!” She exploded with laughter, then she made an obscene, for her, fondling gesture with her hand at them.
I set my arm around her neck, since it was safe to get back in the water, and pulled her in, sighing, kissing her temple. She held on to me and we walked into the stable together. Then she ditched me to grab an apple for Seraphina. She was trying to get comfortable with her. Seraphina seemed to sense this. She came right up to my wife and carefully took the offered piece of apple.
The horse still wanted to sniff her, curious about her smell, but I ticked my mouth at her every time she tried. She snuffed at me but didn't do it. I was proud of my wife. She was nervous but trying to overcome her fear, the fierce little outlaw that she was. She even attempted to get close to Guerriero while he was locked in his stable.
He eyed her with suspicion. He felt her unease and knew it was a weakness. He wasn’t like the rest of the horses in our stable. He liked a way in. A vulnerable spot. A chink in the armor. He was a war horse through and through. That fucking horse was an outlaw too.
I looked at him, and our eyes met as they had the first time. “Yeah,” my eyes said to him. “Fuck around and find out. You’ll be going to the soap factory.”
He beat against the stall and then, like a fucking bull, he pawed the ground, snorting. Sometimes he did it out of frustration, if his rides were not satisfactory to him. Maybe he was anticipating war. In that moment, he was letting me know.
Bring it, motherfucker. You might be going in the ground. Remember the close fall?
It was just the nature of our relationship. I’d die before I allowed anyone to lay a finger on him. I was almost certain he’d do the same for me.
Sistine looked between us and shook her head, backing up slowly.
I took her by the arm and pulled her to my side, shaking my head. “I’m next to you. Stand your ground.”
She spoke to him, called him by his name sweetly, and even though he wasn’t giving her the same defiance show, he was still looking at her with possible intent. Reading the look, she said, “That’s enough bonding time for today,” and went back to her angelic mare.
While my wife was attempting to make friends with her horse, I stared at the crooked sign and sighed. I grabbed my tools, then realized I needed a ladder tall enough to reach. I had never forgotten anything before. I shook my head, like that would set me straight, but then she started to hum while feedingSeraphina and…
Where the fuck was I again?
Sistine turned the corner. “What are you doing,Marito mio?” She looked at me and then at the wall, the direction I’d been staring in.
I blinked at her. Tiny particles of hay were floating around her, like dust motes, highlighted by the wintry sun. Not as golden. More silver. Stella had bought a pink and white trucker hat for my wife, and I had hung it on the peg next to mine in the stable. It hadCowgirlembroidered on it. Sistine must have set it on her head. I turned my hat backwards and went for her, knocking her hat off.
“Fuck,” I barely got out, taking her face in my hands, not able to get enough.
“Marito mio,” she rasped out, grabbing for me too.
“I have no fucking control.” My voice was out of control too. “No fucking control. You are my disease and my cure. You break my fucking heart and keep me breathing.”
Our clothes were shed, and my body was next to hers, and…
“Fire,” she breathed out. “You are so hot, you can burn this place down.”
“Fucking let it burn,” I said, entering her in a thrust that made her perfect breasts jiggle. I was hypnotized by them. Completely under her spell—for the rest of my life.
We rolled around in hay, neither of us breathing right, for…however long.
Not long enough.
We both walked out of the alcove dazed. I stared up at the wooden sign again, hands on my hips, my wife next to me. She kept blinking at the sign. I plucked a piece of fodder from her hair. That wasn’t going to help her cause with the horses, but fuck if she still didn’t look like my fantasy.
“What the fuck are we doing?” I said to her, but it was just a rhetorical question. Something that came from the space area of my brain. This woman had roped me in, and I was under her control. I couldn’t free myself, and I suddenly had a new respect for the cattle we did this too.
“Seven days.” She looked at me. Blinked at me. “We only have seven days, the last I counted.”
“What?”
“What—what?”
“Is that what we were fucking talking about?”
She shrugged. “I do not remember.”
