The Devil You Know (The Devils #3)(45)

I look around. “So where are your friends, anyway? Why can’t they get their own mail?”

“They’re in Italy working on a second kid this week,” he says.

“Only married people would refer to having sex repeatedly as work.”

He laughs. “They’d change your thoughts on marriage. They’re happy together.”

I want to say, “sure, until one of them gets bored”, but a part of me is tired of being that person. A part of me wants to be a bit more like Ben, someone who still has faith in the concept of forever.

“You’ve done some family law,” I say quietly. “How can you still be such an optimist?”

“There’s a reason I no longer do it. Once you see bad marriages, you start looking for more of them. You start believing that fifty percent of couples split up, and the other fifty percent are fooling themselves. And I know that’s not the truth. It isn’t that way for my friends. It wasn’t like that for my parents.”

His eyes darken for a quick second. I’ve known other people who lost a parent young, and most of them seem to have accepted it, moved past it. I get the sense, somehow, that Ben hasn’t.

“That must have been so hard on your mom,” I venture. “She’s lucky she had you and your brother.”

“Actually, there are four of us. It’s me, then Graham, then Simon, and then Colin.”

I blink. His mother was widowed with four young sons, one of them a newborn. My heart gives a small twist. “God,” I whisper, “she must have been so overwhelmed.”

“She was,” he says quietly. “It took a long time for her to come back from it.”

I want to ask what he means, how long is a “long time”, but it’s clearly a topic he’s not comfortable with. Seeing that repressed sadness in Ben makes something soften inside me. I have an almost overwhelming desire to touch him, to twine my fingers with his. I slide my hands beneath my thighs instead.

“What about you?” he asks. “No siblings?”

I shake my head. “No, thank God. My mom always wanted more but it didn’t happen.”

His brow furrows. “You wouldn’t have wanted siblings?”

“Sure, if they were my mother’s kids. My dad always implied it was her fault she didn’t get pregnant again, but then nothing happened with his next wife either, and I’m glad it didn’t.” It would have crushed my mother to see him create an entirely new family when she’d wanted it for them so much. “Go ahead: tell me how wrong it is to gloat over a couple’s infertility.”

He laughs, leaning toward me. “I’d have expected nothing less.” He kisses me then, his lips soft and certain on mine, as if to say, “it’s okay that you’re like this, it’s okay that you’re petty, that you’re vicious in court, that you push people away. I like you anyhow.”

He pulls back slowly, reluctantly, and helps me to my feet. I kind of wish we were staying. I wish he’d kissed me a little longer.

“If it weren’t for the turrets,” I suggest, “this would be a pretty nice place.”

“It’s okay.” He grins. “Not as amazing as your mom’s though, obviously, with that shelf of doom hanging over her cats.”

I don’t even think…I push him. He isn’t expecting it, and I wasn’t entirely expecting him to lose his balance—hoping, yes, but not expecting—and he goes right into the deep end. My laughter echoes over the pool deck, and I have not a moment’s guilt until his head emerges…and he’s flailing.

“Gemma,” he gasps, “I can’t swim.”

“Oh my God, are you serious?” I demand, suddenly panicked. Who the fuck doesn’t know how to swim in this day and age? His head goes under again, his hands above the water. It takes me one full second to unfreeze and jump wildly into the pool, where—the very moment my head breaks the surface—he starts laughing. He’s treading water with a big fucking grin on his face.

Of course, he knew how to swim.

“You asshole!” I shout. “I thought you were drowning! Now I’m soaking wet.”

He gives me a lopsided grin. “Is this a bad time to point out that you pushed me in the pool first?”

“You scared the shit out of me, though!” I cry, making my way to the edge. “It’s entirely different.”

“I completed an open water one-mile swim last year. I thought you knew.”

“I did,” I fume. Everyone in the office couldn’t stop talking about Ben’s triathlon, Ben’s triathlon, like he’d won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I just panicked and forgot.”

He pulls me against him, wrapping his arms around me. “It’s cute you were panicked on my behalf.”

“I was only panicking about my potential culpability if you died.” My arms go around his shoulders, letting him keep us both afloat.

He pushes my skirt up and pulls me so my legs are wrapped around his waist.

“I’m not going to let you turn this bullshit into an excuse to have sex in your friend’s pool,” I inform him.

“Obviously not,” he says, slipping his hand between my legs. “But I bet you let me get awfully close.”

His thumb brushes back and forth outside my panties, the lightest, most delicate touch, strumming every nerve. I reach between us and palm him through his pants. He’s so thick, so hard…My eyes fall closed. I will absolutely have sex in this pool.