LITMIR.BIZ

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the bed as she got in.

      His eyes opened. Good.

      Curling up beside him, she ran her hand slowly along the ridges of his chest.

      “You still have pretty decent pectorals,” she commented with a smile. Slowly, she strummed her fingers along the outline of his muscles. Brad was blessed with good genes, she thought, genes that allowed him to retain the physique he’d worked to create more than two decades ago. He still had a membership to the gym, but by his own admission, he had no idea where the card was any longer, or when he’d been to the gym last.

      Brad shifted. When she continued running her hand along his chest, he covered it with his own. And then moved it aside.

      “Stacey, don’t.”

      Instantly, she could feel herself stiffening inside. But she refused to believe that he was saying what she thought he was saying.

      Still, her throat felt tight as she asked, “Don’t what?”

      He looked at her and frowned reprovingly. By now, she should have known better. Wasn’t a wife supposed to be able to read the signs?

      “Don’t start.”

      God, but she hated the way he made her feel. Like a lowly supplicant, begging for a crumb of affection. Stacey sat up and looked at him. “Start what?”

      Brad seemed more weary than annoyed. “You know what I’m talking about, Stacey. You’re starting in and I’m tired tonight.”

      Starting in. Like making love with her was some kind of a hardship for him that he was forced to endure out of a sense of duty. She couldn’t keep the note of bitterness out of her voice, even though she fought it. “Why should tonight be any different?”

      He covered his eyes with his hand, like someone gathering what little strength he had left. “Don’t do the guilt thing, Stacey. I was on my feet for four hours, trying to save this kid’s legs.”

      “And did you?”

      The question surprised him. “I think so.”

      “Good.” And she meant that. Because she was proud of him, proud of the fact that he helped people. But that didn’t mean she didn’t want something for herself, too. “So how about trying to save our marriage?”

      “Our marriage doesn’t need saving,” he told her with a dismissive air, as if she was babbling nonsense. “And it doesn’t depend on sex.”

      “Thank God for that,” she quipped, “because if it did, it would have died a long time ago.”

      This was old ground. They’d danced over it before. He saw no reason to rehash anything tonight. He had no desire to get into an argument on their anniversary.

      “You get it often enough,” he assured her. He tugged the sheet up over him, rolling over as he closed his eyes. “I’ll owe you,” he told her. “I’m good for it.”

      “You know, if I ever decide to collect on that, you’re going to be making love to me for at least six months straight.”

      “I look forward to it,” Brad murmured. He was already drifting off to sleep.

      “That makes two of us,” Stacey answered.

      But she was talking to herself and she knew it. With a sigh, she leaned over, switching off the lamp. And then watched as the darkness swallowed up the room with one bite.

      CHAPTER 7

      “Here.”

      Coming up behind her at the kitchen counter the following Monday morning, Brad placed two hundred-dollar bills next to her mug of coffee.

      Lost in thought, she hadn’t even heard him walk into the room. Stacey turned from the counter, his breakfast—four scrambled egg whites and one slice of wheat toast, no butter—on the plate she was holding. She set it down before him.

      “What’s this?” she asked.

      Brad picked up the newspaper and gave her an amused look. “I know that you like doing everything by credit card or check, but I thought you could still recognize money when you saw it.”

      Taking her coffee mug and leaving the bills where they were, Stacey sat down opposite her husband. She hated it when Brad got flippant. It always felt as if he was talking down to her.

      She supposed that she was being overly sensitive, a holdover from her hurt feelings. Ordinarily, she didn’t allow things to fester, but Brad had been gone most of the weekend, attending a local conference. This was supposed to have been their weekend.

      It took everything she had to bank down the frown that wanted to possess her lips. “I know it’s money, Brad. What was it doing next to my coffee mug?”

      Brad moved his broad shoulders in a dismissive half shrug, uncomfortable with having to explain himself. He wasn’t a man of words. Didn’t she understand that? “I just thought you might want to go buy yourself something.”

      Stacey stared at him, speechless. Dear God, when had this man gotten rooted in the fifties? Did he suddenly forget they had a joint checking account?

      She took a long sip of the black coffee, letting the caffeine jolt through her system before commenting. Very carefully, she set the mug down before her, then curved her hands around it. She had this sudden need to anchor herself to something.

      Stacey raised her eyes to his. “If I wanted to go buy myself ‘something,’ Brad, I would,” she informed him evenly. “I have all those credit cards and checks you just referred to a minute ago. And—” she underscored the word because it was important to her that she was earning her own way, that he didn’t think of her as just so much dead weight he was carrying “—I earn a pretty decent salary, so if I did buy myself ‘something,’ I wouldn’t feel as if I was dipping into ‘your’ money.”

      Brad’s brow furrowed. He looked at her as if she’d just lapsed into a foreign language, one he was trying desperately to decode.

      “Don’t be ridiculous.” He jabbed at his eggs with his fork as if he expected resistance from that quarter as well. “It’s our money.”

      Right. Until I want to do something with it. This morning, as she turned on the kitchen faucet, she could hear the toilet flush. Since there was no one in the house but the two of them and there was no resident ghost to speak of, that meant the water pressure was weak in the third bathroom. Something else that could be addressed if they renovated the house.

      Stacey seized the term he used, cornering him. At least for a second. “If it’s ‘our’ money, why can’t I use it to renovate ‘our’ house.”

      Finished with his eggs, Brad took a bite of his toast. He’d always been a compartmental eater, Stacey thought as she watched him.

      “We’ve been over this, Stacey,” he told her wearily. “It’s not a wise move.”

      She was willing to admit that she was the one who liked to dream, to make plans that weren’t always rooted in cold, hard reality and that he grounded her by being the logical one. It was what made them a good team, she’d once thought. But somewhere along the line, it felt as if their team had become a dictatorship, with Brad in the role of Il Duce. She was getting so damn tired of his practicality, his bare-bones approach to things.

      It was all she could do not to roll her eyes as she listened to him.

      “I don’t want to be wise, Brad, I want new cabinets. I want drains that don’t stop up and I want bathrooms that don’t look as if they were left over from the set of Leave It to Beaver.”

      The toast eaten, Brad pushed back his plate, struggling with annoyance.

      “You’re exaggerating again, Stacey.” Looking past her shoulder, he saw that the money was still lying on the counter. She hadn’t put it in her pocket the way he thought she would. “Look,

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