Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) by Ruthie Knox Read Free Book Online Page B

bit? Was Tony imagining how stiff her shoulders were?
    The man said something and chuckled, but Amber didn’t laugh. Her smile was tight. Fake.
    When he put his hand on her back, the smile vanished, and Amber took a step away from him.
    She shook her head.
    Not interested
.
    When the guy walked away a few seconds later, all the breath whooshed out of Tony in one exhale, and he felt dizzy. The chair he was holding on to slid a few inches across the tiled floor, the screech of its movement inexplicably audible over the music being piped into the bar.
    “The Limbo,” of all things.
    How low could he go?
    Chasing his wife to the Caribbean, crashing her solo vacation, and then assuming on the basis of a haircut and a new dress that she was having an affair?
    Pretty fucking low.
    Tony let go of the chair he’d been gripping, pulled it out, and sat. Amber hadn’t seen him yet. Maybe she’d turn around soon. Maybe she wouldn’t.
    Either way, he needed to sit. To breathe.
    He needed to figure out what was supposed to happen in the giant planning gap between “get to Amber” and “fly home with your marriage miraculously fixed.”
    Tony sighed and rubbed at his temples. His hands were shaking.
    He had no clue how to do this.
    Their marriage was a system with no slack in it. They had work, they had three kids, they had ten or twenty minutes together in bed at night before they fell asleep. He didn’t know what was wrong with Amber—what was making her cry—and frankly he was afraid to find out. He’d been afraid to find out for a long time.
    Because he was pretty sure that whatever it was, he couldn’t fix it.
    He couldn’t work less—not and keep the house. He couldn’t take back the children he’d given her, he couldn’t hire a team of housekeepers and nannies to make her life easier.
    He could tell her he loved her a hundred times, but she already knew that, and whether she believed it or didn’t—whether it mattered to her or not—what could he do? Nothing.
    He could take her to bed and make love to her for two days straight, and that would be pretty fucking grand, but what would it change? Nothing.
    They were stuck with the lives they’d made for themselves, and he wanted to keep her stuck if the alternative was to let her escape.
    Which made it hard for him to think of any way to also help her out.
    Amber picked up her drink and swirled it around. It was green. Foggy-looking. She took a sip. The lines at the edges of her mouth drew deeper. She didn’t like it, but she was trying not to let on.
    She scanned the room and saw him.
    For an instant, her cheeks bunched, her eyes widened—the delight in them so delicious, he began to smile back, to
grin
, because Christ, yes, she was going to smile at him, and that was a damn sight better than what he’d thought was going to happen a minute ago—but then she went sort of blank.
    Like she hadn’t quite recognized him at first, but then when she really
placed
him, she remembered that she didn’t feel like smiling.
    Tony lost his breath, the blow as effective as a roundhouse kick to the chest.
    Amber averted her eyes. Looked down at her drink again.
    She lifted it and knocked off the rest of it in four deep gulps, and he tried to get his head around the fact that this person—this eye-catching stranger at the bar—could be his wife.
    And that she could decide not to smile at him.
    When had this happened? When had she started taking parts of herself back, and why had he let her?
    He didn’t know. It scared him how little he knew, now that he was here.
    But he
wanted
to know her. He wanted to know who she’d dressed up for, what she felt, why she’d almost smiled at him and then changed her mind.
    He wanted his wife back, and he wanted
this
woman. Whoever she was.
    If she was a stranger, he could be one, too. He’d seen magazine articles that claimed women liked that—liked to pretend to be new and unknown, liked to be seduced all over again by the men