Finally she ceased her screeching. “Do it,” she gasped, pushing the guy away so they disconnected like a couple of dogs in the front yard. “Do it now.”
As Kieran gawked in utter amazement from a few feet away, she fell to her knees and let the man give his dick a few jerks and come all over her face.
“Well, hell,” Kieran blurted. The man grunted and stumbled, still spurting like a fountain. “Seriously, Melinda, I would have happily obliged you with that move. We should really communicate better.” He watched, ears ringing as the poor, unfortunate douche-bag crouched on all fours.
Kieran burst into laughter that he realized bordered on hysterical. But he couldn’t stop. He guffawed so hard he could barely breathe and had to grab the back of a chair to keep from passing out. Melinda tugged her skirt down and sauntered past him into the kitchen. When he finally had exerted some control over his reaction, he followed her, waiting as she calmly wiped her face with a paper towel, washed her hands, dried them with yet more paper towels then toed the garbage can lid open. She glared down at its contents then over at him.
“Who drank all this?” She pointed down at the empties.
The urge to defend his actions rose from his throat. He shoved it down and away.
“You are a scheming, slutty bitch.”
Giving him her best ice-queen glare, she dropped the paper towels on top of the pile of bottles filling the air with the lid’s metallic clanking echo. He had to give it to her—she had balls staring at him as if he’d just cheated on her in plain sight, and in spectacular, porn- clichéd fashion. At that moment, a huge weight shifted off his shoulders.
“Hey, babe, you told me he didn’t know we were back.” A deep voice said behind him. Kieran turned and faced money-shot man who was buckling his belt and appearing mildly put out. Kieran whirled around to face Melinda.
“Yeah, babe,” he ground out between clenched jaws, his head filled with a sort of scary, white noise and his vision dimming. “What’s up with that?” He crossed his arms, mainly to keep from throttling the woman.
“I...it’s....” She blew out a breath and attempted to stalk past Kieran. When he gripped her arm, he got a nose full of some other guy’s spunk combined with Melinda’s own spicy, aroused aroma—one she’d been denying him for the better part of three months now. “Let go of me,” she demanded.
The desire not to fail at this, at relationships, at marriage, had driven him for the last year and a half. His ingrained need to please others had blinded and deafened him to the fact he’d been ready to be tied forever to a grasping, snotty, know-it-all, ice queen of a—
“Cunt,” he spit out, not taking his gaze from hers. The dude hovered nearby, but Kieran had no sense of anyone or anything but the woman currently trying to writhe out of his grasp.
“Loser,” she replied, relaxing her arm. He let go of her, absorbing that single word, the one word he hated to hear but one he’d been playing in a fairly regular loop in his own head since snapping his leg in two on national television.
The slap came out of nowhere, catching him off guard. He tripped over some low-lying piece of furniture and landed on his ass, staring at her, his face flaming, and fury roaring through his entire body.
Both Melinda and her new friend gawked at him from a million miles away, until he launched forward, head-butted the man, and shoved Melinda out of his way lest he shame his raising by pounding her into the floor like some kind of abuser.
“Get out you stupid, lame-ass....high school teacher,” Melinda yelled.
He clenched and unclenched his fists, blew out a breath, and walked calmly out of the condo door.
Chapter Ten
The summer night air punched him in the face like a damp-towel-covered fist. Kieran doubled over on the sidewalk and puked out the rest of Melinda’s expensive beer and stayed crouched over awhile, contemplating his shoes and his next move. After wiping his lips and getting back to his feet, he jingled his keys and whistled his way toward his car.
Dizzy, elated, furious, horrified, and already pondering how he might beg her to not kick him to the curb, he got behind the wheel of the Mustang and turned the key, delighting in the low, throaty roar of the powerful engine. He’d paid for the car with his dwindling cash, nodding and smiling when his old high school buddy Drew Atherton charged him an amount of money this side of usury for a six-month insurance premium.
“Sorry, pal,” Drew had said, frowning at his computer screen. “It seems as though you have a not-so-great driving record down in Florida.”
Kieran gripped the wheel, closed his eyes a split second, which made the whole down-on-her-knees-come-on-her-face scene he’d been subjected to in Melinda’s condo replay in Technicolor behind his lids.