Mirror Image

heart. Each word was the truth. Responding to the prompting of her emotions, she came up on tiptoe and touched his lips with hers.
    He yanked his head back. She heard the swift, surprised breath he took. She sensed his hesitation as his eyes roved over her face. Then he lowered his head. His lips made contact with hers briefly, airily, barely glancing them.
    She inclined her body closer to his, reached higher for his lips with her own, and murmured, “Tate, kiss me, please.”
    With a low moan, his mouth pressed down on hers. His arm went around her waist and pulled her against him. He unraveled their clasped fingers and curved his hand around her throat, stroking it with his thumb while his tongue played at getting between her lips.
    Once it had, he sent it deep.
    He instantly broke off the kiss and raised his head. “What the—”
    He peered deeply into her eyes while his chest soughed against hers. Though he wrestled against it, his eyes were drawn back to her mouth. He closed his eyes and shook his head in denial of something he couldn’t explain before covering her mouth with his own.
    Avery returned his kiss, releasing all the yearning she had secretly nurtured for months. Their mouths melded together with hunger and heat. The more he got of hers, the more he wanted and the more she wanted to give.
    With his hand on her hips, he tilted her forward against his erection. Arching into it, she raised her hands to the back of his neck and drew his head down, loving the blend of textures encountered by her fingertips—his hair, his clothing, his skin.
    And then it stopped.
    He shoved her away, putting several feet between them. She watched with anguish as he drew the back of his fist across his mouth, wiping off her kiss. She emitted a small, pained noise.
    “It won’t work, Carole,” he said tightly. “I’m unfamiliar with this new game you’re playing, but until I learn the rules, I refuse to participate. I feel sorry for what happened to you. Since you’re my legal wife, I did what duty demanded of me. But it has no bearing on my feelings. They haven’t changed. Got that? Nothing’s changed.”
    He snatched up his sports coat, slung it over his shoulder, and sauntered from the room without looking back.
    * * *
    Eddy stepped out into the courtyard. The May sunshine had brought out the blooming plants. Oleander bushes bloomed in pottery urns bordering the deck around the swimming pool. Moss rose carpeted the flower beds.
    It was dark now, however, and the blossoms had closed for the night. The courtyard was illumined by spotlights placed in the ground among the plants. They cast tall, spindly shadows upon the white stucco walls of the house.
    “What are you doing out here?” Eddy asked.
    The loner, slouched in a patio lounger, answered curtly. “Thinking.”
    He was thinking about Carole—about how her face had looked reflected in the mirror when he had entered her room. It had been incandescent. Her dark eyes had glowed as though his arrival signified something special to her. He decided it was quite an act. For an insane moment or two, he’d even fallen for it. What an idiot.
    If he had just walked out, never touched her, never tasted her, never wished that things were different, he wouldn’t be snarling at his friend now, nursing a bottle of scotch and fighting a losing battle with an erection that wouldn’t subside. Aggravated with himself, he reached for the bottle of Chivas Regal again and splashed some over the melting ice in the bottom of his tumbler.
    Eddy sat down in a lounge chair close to Tate’s and eyed him with concern. Tate, catching his friend’s candidly critical gaze, said, “If you don’t like what you see, look at something else.”
    “My, my. Cranky, aren’t we?”
    He was horny and lusting for an unfaithful wife. The unfaithfulness he
might
forgive, eventually, but not the other. Never the other.
    “Did you see Carole?” Eddy asked, guessing the source of Tate’s dark mood.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you give her the statement to read?”
    “Yes. Know what she did?”
    “Told you to shove it?”
    “Essentially. She tore it in half.”
    “I wrote it for her own good.”
    “Tell that to her yourself.”
    “The last time I told her something for her own good, she called me an asshole.”
    “She fell just short of spelling that out tonight.”
    “Whether she believes it or not, meeting the press for the first time since the crash is going to be a bitch, even on