Lovely Wild Read online

  She shoved him with her elbow hard enough to push him back and sat up, her legs over the side of the bed. In the moonlight, her naked skin gleamed. The fall of her dark hair down her back made her look exotic, foreign. She sighed and rubbed her thighs.

  Ryan sat up, too. “What’s wrong?”

  Her shoulders shook, and he didn’t understand what was so damned funny. Annoyed, Ryan tugged her shoulder to pull her around. What he saw stunned him more than her refusal of his advances had.

  She was crying.

  “Babe, babe,” he said and pulled her close to him. This time, she let him. “Are you sick? Is it something with the kids? What?”

  She curled against him, her face hot. The sheet tangled between them. She gripped his shoulder hard, her fingers digging into him so hard he winced. Her tears slicked down his bare skin and the hard-on he’d been nursing wilted. Anxiety made him push her away so he could turn on the light. He needed to see her face.

  “Mari. What’s wrong?”

  “Why did you bring me back here?” she cried in a low, strangled voice that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

  “I thought...we needed... It was a place to go to get away,” he began, the words clumsy on his tongue. “Because of what happened at work, the book... I’m sorry, babe. I didn’t think it would bother you so much.”

  But that was lie, wasn’t it? He’d known she would be affected. How could she be anything else? He hadn’t imagined the extent of how she might react, that part was true, but that had been his own stupidity, his blind spot. His greed.

  And now she was crying. Something she never did. All because of him.

  Mari sat up and swiped at her face. Her uncommon tears had left tracks on her face. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, fingers curling into the hair at her temples. She shook her head, then pulled her hands away to look at him.

  “What happened at work? Really, Ryan.”

  His gut clenched. He reached to the side of the bed for his boxer shorts and pulled them on. “It was a mistake. That’s all. My patient killed herself and her husband’s trying to blame me.”

  “Was it your fault?”

  That she would even ask the question stunned him into a sputtering reply. “No! Of course not!”

  “Why does her husband feel like it’s your fault?”

  Ryan’s shoulders sagged. He said nothing, but she read it on him. She must’ve known, he thought, then felt an instant pettiness that she was forcing him to say it aloud. That she was making him admit what they both could’ve continued to ignore.

  “How many times did you fuck her, Ryan?” Mari asked. Tears gone, voice sober. This was the woman he knew. Solid.

  “It was a mistake. An accident.”

  Her low, strained laugh made her unfamiliar again. “Ah. I see. She slipped on a banana peel and landed on your dick?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “What,” Mari asked, “is fair?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, babe. I fucked up. I know it. But it’s not my fault she killed herself.” Ryan spoke faster when it looked like Mari was going to interrupt. “She had a history of transference, which is when a patient believes herself in love—”

  “I was raised by your father, Ryan. I know what it means.”

  He went silent at that, mind abuzz and throat dry. Suddenly, everything Ryan had ever known was crumbling beneath him.

  “She had a history of attempting to seduce her therapists,” he said finally, when it became clear his wife wasn’t going to speak. “She’d had four before me. I believe she slept with at least two of them, if not all.”

  “And you wanted to compete? You wanted to be the best, her favorite? What?” Mari’s mouth twisted, but her solid and unyielding gaze pinned him.

  Ryan made a miserable noise from someplace in his throat. “She just kept coming at me. And finally, I gave in.”

  Mari was silent again for the span of several breaths. Then her laughter growled up from her belly once more. The sound chilled him. When she got off the bed to pace the narrow strip of floor between him and the dresser, Ryan wanted to reach out and snag her wrist. Get her to stop, look at him. He didn’t.

  “You gave in,” she said finally with her back to him. Her shoulders shook again.

  He couldn’t tell if she was laughing or crying, but Ryan got out of bed and touched her shoulder tentatively. “Mari. Babe. I am so fucking sorry, you don’t even know.”

  “No,” she said. “I guess I don’t.”

  He didn’t know what to say after that, but he took his hand away. They’d never fought, not really. She’d annoyed him and he’d irritated her, but their entire marriage had sailed along on smooth waters he’d come to take for granted. Now she had every right to be furious with him and to feel betrayed.

  “Today,” she continued before he could speak, “I went into town and a woman told me she knew my...my...”

  She struggled against sobs. The tears were bad enough, but this ratcheting sound of grief throbbing out of her mouth was enough to make him want to weep himself. It was worse that she was doing that thing with her hands again. He recognized the patterns, the shift of her fingers, the tap of a palm against her heart. He thought he’d mastered the lexicon that his dad and the rest of the team studying her had made so they could understand her. She’d so quickly taken up spoken language, regaining what had been lost in such great leaps that it had become unnecessary for them to use hers to communicate. What Ryan understood from what he’d read and watched so far, once Mari had started to talk with her voice, she’d given up using her hands. Now he didn’t know what she was saying.

  She obviously hadn’t forgotten, though. Just refused to go back. And that was how he knew his wife. As a woman who looked forward, not back. If he’d ever heard her say she regretted anything, Ryan couldn’t remember it.

  He was counting on that now.

  “Babe...Mari. Honey...I’m so sorry.” He reached for her again, and this time she didn’t shrink from his touch. She didn’t lean into it, either. “I screwed up. I know it. And it was over almost as soon as it started. I promise you.”

  He thought of Annette, breasts heavy in his hands as she rode him, her mouth slick with her favorite red lipstick. Such a cliché, that lipstick, but then everything about her had been from her bleached and overprocessed hair, her thong peeking from the back of her too-tight jeans, her tiny baby voice. Annette Somers had made a doll of herself. A man’s plaything, because that was the only way she’d known how to be. It had been Ryan’s job to help her overcome the insecurities and the mess she repeatedly made of her life. He’d failed in that.

  “I never loved her,” Ryan said. “And it was never because I didn’t love you.”

  Mari let out another rasping, agonized sob and turned to cling to him. Ryan buried his face in her hair. She shook against him, and her tears were scalding.

  “Then why?”

  “Because she kept at me and I was stupid. Because I was so damned stupid.” Ryan shuddered with his own tears. “I ended our professional relationship. But when I broke off the other, she...killed herself. She’d threatened to commit suicide many times before. She’d been hospitalized four times previously with attempted suicide. She had a long history of mental problems and depression. I was stupid and wrong, but I’m not the reason she died.”

  He believed that, no matter what guilt he felt about any of it.

  “But it’s going to be okay, babe. I promise you that. The case will be settled. I’ll get another job. And there’s the book.”

  She drew in a low, shivering breath. “The woman in the restaurant today knew my mother. She said she knew her. She recognized Kendra, then said she recognized me. She knew who I was, Ryan. And she said...she said my mother had me in the bathroom at the Red Rabbit! How, how... What should I think about that?”

  He looked at her, startled. “What?”

  “She said she knew my mother because she’d worked there. In that