Free THE AFFAIR by Dyanne Davis Page A

things. He’d been too busy to see how unhappy the decision made his wife.
    He took another longer sip. She’d get over it. She had to. He thought of their latest argument. In the past eight months they’d fought more than they had their entire marriage. She was trying to hurt him deliberately, that much he knew. He just didn’t understand why.
    How could she say she didn’t want kids? That would make her as bad as his own mother, and she was nothing like his mother. He remembered how much attention she’d paid to the kids, putting them in ballet and music lessons, baking cookies for them. She had been a wonderful mother.
    She would have never taken their kids and just dumped them on the state, never bothering to look back. And regardless of what she’d said, he didn’t believe she would have ever aborted their child.
    A stab of pain hit him in both temples with the force of a two ton truck. After their second baby Mick had cried during each pregnancy and begged him to allow her to have her tubes tied. He’d always said no. He wondered what would have happened if this had happened now, when a woman no longer needed their husband’s consent to do it.
    He couldn’t believe she’d refused to take time off from work and keep the kids for Erica and Roy to have some time alone. Now he downed the drink and rang for another.
    He definitely hadn’t believed she would send him to Arizona alone to care for two small children. He’d expected her to board the plane right until the moment the jet taxied down the runway. This was not the woman he loved. Michelle wouldn’t do this. But she had.
    Larry polished off his drink, the last he would have. Getting drunk never solved anything. He laid his head back against the soft leather and groaned. There was an ache in his heart as well as his head. The last place he wanted to be at the moment was flying away from his wife. He needed to be home. He needed to make things right.
    Lately she’d started having the dreams again, the ones of another man, someone she believed she’d loved and lost, and she’d begun talking nonsense about past lives and willing herself to die.
    A shiver froze his heart. Once started, he seemed unable to stop the chill that had crept around his heart from enveloping him, turning him into that same frightened boy he’d been when his mother had told him she was finding him a new home.
    His heart had pounded in fear as he’d tried to remember what bad thing he’d done to make his mother find him a new home. He’d begged and pleaded with his mother, promising to be good. None of the efforts of a five-year-old had mattered. She’d not found him a new home. She’d turned him over to the state.
    Larry had endured it, at first helpless, as one after the other of the caregivers he was entrusted to abandoned him also. Then he’d learned to survive. He’d learned to be strong, to harden his heart. Mick’s love had been sudden and unexpected, the balm he’d needed to heal his heart and spirit.
    Mick was his constant. She’d sworn to love him always. And until recently he’d never doubted that she always would. Now she was behaving oddly. He thought of the night more than two months ago when she had confessed to sleeping with another man. He’d laughed at her and she’d been insulted. She’d questioned whether he doubted another man would find her attractive.
    He shouldn’t have laughed. He should have told her then and there that the sight of her inflamed his senses. He thought she knew that. He had never meant to hurt her feelings, but the thought of her touching a stranger, making love with him…It wasn’t possible.
    His wife had taken years to get comfortable touching him. She’d been just as bad about him touching her. So he knew there was no way in hell she would allow a stranger to touch her.
    Opening his eyes Larry looked around the cabin. Enough thinking about problems that didn’t exist. Mick was probably going through the change. He’d