The Cowboy's Convenient Wife Read online

  "Oh my God."

  "What?" I asked, confused by the sudden quiet dread in Ava's tone.

  "Oh my God," she repeated. "Astrid. Tell me you didn't."

  "Tell you I didn't what!?" I exclaimed. "Why do you sound like that? What do you think I've d–"

  "You're with him, aren't you? That cowboy from Wyoming, the one from the magazine. You are, I know you are. I can hear it in your voice."

  I don't know why I felt ashamed then, but I did. Like a child watching her balloon snatched away by the wind my shoulders slumped forward and my chin dropped. "He's from Montana," I said softly. "Not Wyoming."

  "And you're in Vegas?"

  "Yeah."

  "And are you in Vegas for the reason I think you're in Vegas?"

  Damnit. She figured it out. Without my even saying his name my best friend figured out exactly what I was up to – and who I was up to it with. Even my unpredictability was predictable.

  "Astrid?"

  "What?"

  "Are you Vegas for the reason I –"

  Suddenly, a pair of arms slipped around me from behind and someone nuzzled into my neck. Cillian. Fresh and still wet from the shower, he was wearing nothing but a towel around his waist.

  "Who're you talking to?" He whispered, kissing my earlobe. "Your lawyer? Is she telling you you've made a huge mistake?"

  "Is that him?" Ava asked. "Astrid? Please tell me you haven't –"

  Without warning, Cillian took the phone out of my hand.

  "Hey!" I protested, trying to grab it back. He dodged out of the way and disappeared back into the room.

  "Hello?" he said into the phone. "Who's this?"

  I gave up and listened to one half of the conversation between my friend and my new husband. They were going to have to meet somehow – at least that way I didn't have to endure Ava's reproachful tone.

  "Cillian," came Cillian's voice from inside the room. "Cillian Devlin. Yeah. What? Eve? Ava? Oh. Hey Ava. Yeah. Uh-huh. Las Vegas, yeah."

  Ava was grilling him. Just as I would have done, I suppose, if I was suddenly thrust into a conversation with some random guy she eloped with.

  A warm evening breeze lifted my hair off my shoulders. The back and forth between Ava and Cillian continued.

  "Why? To get married!"

  Well. There it was. Ava knew for sure. Cillian's arm appeared through the open door, the phone in his hand.

  "She wants to talk to you."

  I reached up to take it.

  "Hey," he whispered, not letting go until he had my attention.

  "What?"

  My husband winked at me. "It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks, Astrid. It only matters what you think."

  We get told a lot of things when we're growing up. We get told about relying on ourselves and not other people. We get told about developing confidence through personal achievement. None of that is wrong, exactly. But nor is it the whole story. It's good to believe in yourself. But it's also good – and perfectly normal – to need others to believe in you, too. My new husband's encouragement to trust myself worked. When I held the phone up to my ear again I found myself buoyed with a new confidence.

  "Ava?"

  "Hey. So you married him, huh? You really did it."

  She sounded more resigned than she did disapproving.

  "Yeah, I did. And I'm – I'm happy. Genuinely."

  "Good," Ava replied shortly, obviously biting her tongue on some less optimistic sentiments. "I want you to be happy."

  "Well I am."

  "Have you told your parents yet?"

  "No. You're the only one."

  "Has he told his?"

  "No," I replied. "Not yet."

  "That's going to be fun."

  "Why are you acting like this?" I asked. "Everyone was so happy for me when I was going to marry Julian. And you remember what happened with him, don't you? Remember the part where he dumped me on our wedding day? Why can't I –"

  "Julian is a piece of shit!" Ava stated with vehemence. "But that has nothing to do with any of this – and you know it."

  Before I could reply a large, tanned hand slid around my waist and pressed itself flat against my belly. I leaned back against Cillian's chest as a flame sparked to life inside me. How did he do that? So casually, like he wasn't even trying?

  "I have to go," I told my friend, trying to keep my sudden lack of breath out of my voice. "I – uh. Can I call you later? Or soon?"

  She sighed. "OK. But – Astrid?"

  "What?" I replied, swallowing a gasp as Cillian's hand found its way under my robe and began to roam up my inner thigh. "I – I really have to go."

  "OK. Yeah, I understand. I'll talk to you soon then."

  I ended the call and turned to my husband, who was sporting a rather large bulge in his towel.

  "Look what you did," he grinned, looking down.

  I smiled, looking away briefly, and he took a step towards me and pulled my body sharply, suddenly against him.

  "Are you embarrassed?" He asked, slipping his hand into my fluffy robe and cupping one of my breasts. I liked the way he touched me like that, like he owned me. "Embarrassed by how hard you make my dick? That's so cute."

  "I'm not embarrassed," I replied as he untied the robe and pulled it open. Such deliciousness to feel the soft night air against my bare skin, my naked breasts.

  "Yes you are. I saw it on your face, just then."

  If I hadn't been so aroused, I may have taken offense at the assertion that I was embarrassed – the way we often take offense at things that are true.

  "I'm not," I repeated, as he picked me up, wrapped my legs around his waist and carried me back to the unmade hotel bed – our marriage bed. "I just –" Cillian lay down on his back, pulling me down with him and not letting go, so the entire rigid length of him lay snugly between my legs. "I just – oh God. Oh!"

  I yanked my robe the rest of the way off and snuggled down against him but he – gently – pushed me back up again.

  "No. I want to look at you."

  I sat back up, lifting my arms over my head to show off my breasts. That still wasn't like me. My mother talked me out of a boob job at 18, when my God-given assets had steadfastly refused to grow beyond a B-cup at most. I was glad of it a few years later when a friend from college developed severe complications from her own over-sized implants, but it didn't cure me of the worry that I somehow didn't quite measure up.

  As if on cue, Cillian ran his hands up my thighs, over my waist and up to my breasts, stroking and caressing them with a touch that was just past gentle. It was like we were communicating through contact alone, through the precise places on my body where his skin met mine. I could feel his desire, feel him actually holding himself back.

  "Your friend doesn't approve of me," he noted, grasping my hips and positioning me so his cock nestled against a very sensitive spot.

  I sighed loudly. "I – "

  "She didn't say it," he continued, clearly enjoying the fact that I was unable to speak. "But I could tell."

  I started to rock my hips down against him as warmth built between my legs and began to spread down into my thighs. How did he feel so good? How had nothing ever felt so good in my life? My jaw was tight, my mouth almost sour with how badly I needed what I knew was coming.

  "What are your parents going to say?" He continued, not taking his eyes off me. "How are they going to react when they find out their little girl just married some –" he paused briefly and took a deep breath – "some redneck from –"

  It was too much. I reached down and grasped the damp towel in my hands, pulling it aside. "Fuck," I panted, lifting my hips up a little and wrapping my hand around the stiff proof of my husband's desire. "Fuck what my parents think. Fuck what –"

  I didn't get to finish that sentence. Cillian guided me down onto his cock – all the way down – and held me there as my voice dissolved into a desperate moan.

  "You sound so goddamned good," he breathed, his voice deep and slow. "J
esus, Astrid. I could come right now."

  He held me still even as I tried to move against him, with him. Something about the fact that he was that close that quickly just honestly blew almost every fuse in my brain. I couldn't think. Not about anything that wasn't Cillian Devlin or how lip-chewingly badly I needed him to come inside me. Just hearing his voice get ragged made my heart pound and my pussy ache and tighten around him.

  "Oh!" I exclaimed when he finally relented and let me lift myself up, all the way up the whole length of him before impaling myself once again. "Oh my God."

  I was familiar with the articles in the women's magazines my mom reads. I was aware of the advice columnists online and the well-meaning assertions of girlfriends. That is, I was in no way unaware of the narratives around sex, and how some kinds of sex were the good and right and correct kind and other kinds of sex were the bad and wrong and incorrect kind.

  None of it mattered with Cillian. All those lectures on equality in sex, on the fact that power had no place in a healthy sexual experience – all of it flew out the open door, tumbled down over the balcony railings and smashed to pieces on the street below.

  And I didn't even hear the sound of the shards scattering because I was gone. Taken, pulled along on an irresistible tide of very masculine lust, a tiny boat on the ocean of overwhelming possession flashing in Cillian's blue eyes. The only thing that existed for me was him, his grasping hands, the sound of him breathing and his thick, perfect cock buried inside me.

  That's what sex with him was like from the beginning, from the very first time. It didn't feel that we were striding beside each other with bright smiles on our faces, pursuing our goal together. It didn't feel like that at all. It felt much older than that. Darker, too. The parts of my psyche he reached weren't the higher, more civilized parts but the subterranean ones, so well hidden a woman could go a whole lifetime without even knowing they were there.

  I screamed when he made me come. A thin, trembling scream that leapt out of my throat like a pursued animal as Cillian sank his fingers into my hips and held me right where he needed me. He groaned loudly when he let himself go, the muscles in his neck straining as he pulsed inside me.

  Afterwards, I didn't even have the strength to crawl off him. I simply collapsed on his chest, limp from exertion. I don't even know how long we lay like that, gathering ourselves. The sky was completely dark when I finally managed to sit up and look outside.

  Cillian reached out and pushed his fingers through mine. My hand felt so small in his, so safe.

  He was perfect. Everything was perfect.

  You know what they say, Astrid. If something seems too good to be true...

  Chapter 11: Cillian

  Was she a sorceress? A witch? Some kind of undetectable AI robot sent from another solar system to seduce the men of earth and harvest our precious fluids? Whatever she was, one thing was clear as I lay next to Astrid Walker in bed that night: witch or not, I was bewitched. I couldn't even peel my eyeballs away from her long enough to check the time on my phone. She watched me watching her, smiling a mysterious little smile.

  "What is it?" I asked, discovering for the first time what it was to actually give a shit what a woman was thinking after sex.

  Her smile widened and her cheeks flushed pink.

  "Oh come on!" I admonished, lifting her hand to my mouth and kissing the backs of her fingers. "I just fucked your brains out. You can't go all sweet and innocent on me now."

  My wife – and oh, how unexpectedly right that word was – opened her mouth as if to say something and then turned away. "No. I can't. I can't!"

  "You can," I told her, slipping my arm around her waist and caressing her belly. "You can. We're married now, remember? You have to tell me everything. It's the law."

  She giggled. "Oh is it?"

  "Uh-huh."

  Rolling over to face me again, she suddenly covered her face with her hands. "Oh my God, Cillian. Just –oh my God."

  "What?" I teased, my ego swelling up like a balloon at the sound of my own name on her lips. "Are you in pain? Did I break you? Do you want me to call an ambulance?"

  "No!" She laughed. "No. It's just – ugh! No one ever did that to me before, OK? Like, no one ever even close to did that to me before. I – I don't even know what it is between us. What is it?! Am I going crazy?"

  I wanted to say something cocky in reply, as was my habit. I did say something cocky, actually. I reached out and ran a single finger over Astrid's bottom lip and told her that's what all the girls said.

  "I bet," she replied, taking my joking comment more seriously than I intended it. "I bet they do. Look at you. Look at how you are. I bet there have been so many girls."

  "I didn't mean it like –"

  "It's OK," she whispered. "I don't mind. As long as you never speak to or look at or breathe close to any one of them ever again."

  An alien. She must be. Human women don't come this perfect.

  "There haven't been so many girls," I told her, which may have been untrue based on my not actually knowing how many girls Astrid would have considered 'so many.' "I mean, there have been some. But not – you know, not like thousands or anything."

  She burst out laughing. "Just hundreds then? You're practically a virgin!"

  I was familiar with what she was doing. It's something girls seem almost driven to do. She wasn't trying to convince me she was cool with my possible promiscuity – she was trying to assess a possible threat. And unlike all those other times I experienced girls doing the same thing – girls I didn't care enough to bother trying to reassure – I was surprised to discover I did care about reassuring the dark-eyed beauty next to me. I cared a whole lot, actually.

  "Did you mean that?" I asked, suddenly gripped by an uncharacteristic moment of doubt. "What you said just now, about no one ever doing that to you before?"

  Astrid took one of my hands in hers and held it up to her face, pressing it against her cheek.

  "Yes," she replied, her voice so soft I could barely hear it. "I meant it. I know this sounds corny, but I didn't even know it could be like – like that. Like it is with you."

  I looked around the room and then back at Astrid. "If you keep this up, we're going to need a bigger room."

  "Are we? Why?"

  "Because my ego won't fit in this one anymore."

  She laughed and I pulled her in closer. "For real, though," I continued, wanting her to know I wasn't just trying to be funny. "I feel like the king of the goddamned universe right now."

  It was true. And as much as no man ever did to Astrid Walker precisely what I did to her, no woman ever did to me what she was doing as the blissful seconds and minutes ticked by and the world outside receded further into the distance.

  "I think you are the king of the goddamned universe," she whispered, her eyes shyly meeting mine once more.

  I rolled over onto my back, holding her against me and watching the white curtains billow and roll in the breeze blowing in through the open door.

  So this is what it's all about. This is what all the movies and books and poems I don't understand are about.

  I remember those first few days with Astrid so well. That moment in particular I remember with complete clarity. I remember the precise second the realization hit my brain that even after 26 years on earth – the recent ones spent in the company of countless women, most of whose names I couldn't even remember – I never really understood anything until I met Astrid Walker. I used to strut around Sweetgrass Ridge like a rooster, so pleased with the fact that I always had a different girl on my arm, so showily secure in the knowledge that other men would kill to be in my position.

  Which is to say: I was a clueless moron. The worst kind of clueless moron, too – the kind who doesn't know he's a clueless moron. All that time chasing the opinions of others. Reveling in the opinions of others – only to find none if it ever mattered anyway. In bed with Astrid, I felt no driving need to be anywhere other than where I was. I didn't need
the guys I went to high school with to see me with her. I didn't need my dad or my brothers or anyone else to have an opinion on the two of us. I didn't need the envy of others. All I needed was her.

  And I had her. Didn't I? How can you 'have' someone more thoroughly than lying naked next to them in bed a few hours after putting a ring on their finger? She couldn't wake up the next morning and skip off to her next liaison (as I myself had done so many times, to so many girls), or jet back to Miami never to speak to me again. No. We were married.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  The classic after-sex question. The one that usually prompted a series of fake snores out of me, so I didn't have to bother making some flowery, girl-pleasing shit up.

  Not with Astrid. When she asked me what I was thinking, it was all I could do not to sit up, clear my throat, and give her a 30-minute rundown of exactly what was going through my head.

  I told her the truth, of course. Just with a little more brevity than a half hour speech.

  "You."

  "Me?"

  I nodded. "Yup. You. You're what I'm thinking about."

  "Yeah?" She whispered, glancing away because she didn't want me to see just how pleased my answer made her.

  "Yeah. Also that you're kind of stuck with me now. Not that you couldn't change your mind or anything. Just that if you do, it's going to be a pretty big pain in the ass. And I don't know, I admit I don't know you very well but you seem pretty lazy to me."

  Astrid wrapped herself around me and nestled her smiling face against my shoulder. "You think I'm lazy?"

  "Yeah. Definitely. Too lazy to divorce me. Probably too lazy to leave this bed."

  I was literally drained at that point, even if I was too high on feel-good brain chemicals to feel it. But all it took was the sensation of her bare breast against my chest as she cuddled into me to wake me up again.

  I reached over, pushing my hand over her hip and around to her ass, squeezing her flesh, enjoying the almost dizzying feeling of all the blood in my body rushing south.

  But when I went to open her legs, she stopped me.

  "Wait."

  Was she too tired? Sore? "What is it?"