Free Kiss Me Again by Kristi Rose Page A

old. Thank you very much. Look at you. Those pants are about the same age."
    "Hey," he cried indignantly and pointed to his well-worn camouflage cargo pants. "These are my hunting pants. They're good luck. I figured we could use all the luck we could get." He finished his beer and set the bottle on the counter.
    What did that mean? Did he think they were going to need luck to get turned on by each other? That arousal might require more than a highly charged sexual ambience and the person you loved? Unsure of how to respond, she went with sarcasm.
    "Yeah, that's why you should wear the pants that you spray with deer urine every year. Because that's hot. It's a sex club, Buck. We should try for sexy." Andee picked the bottle up and walked to the sink to rinse it out. She dropped it into the recycling bin before returning to the fridge to get two bottles of water. It was a bit of a drive to where they were going.
    "It's sexy to the deer."
    Andee turned to hide her eye roll and immediately regretted her impatience. "Did you put the overnight bags in the car?"
    "Yup." Buck took the water bottle she handed him.
    Grotte d'Amour, also known as the Love Cave, Tampa Bay's finest BDSM dungeon, was their destination and over an hour away. Andee had felt it best they get a hotel nearby. Should everything go as planned, fingers crossed, she hoped they'd be too revved up to make the drive home, too desperate for each other. A hotel would be the icing on the cake. Besides, she'd already had plenty of sex with Buck in a car and they were long past high school lovemaking, forced to be creative with their intimacy. This was to be a new experience, something spontaneous and fun. One of the relationship books she'd read had given her the idea, and she was still bowled over that he'd agreed to try.
    "Are you ready?" Buck asked. "You sure you still want to try this?"
    "Are you having second thoughts?" She played with the lid on her water bottle.
    "You said you wanted us to spice things up. This is sure a deviation from what we're doing."
    Dreading where a response might lead, Andee searched carefully for the right words. "We're in a rut, Buck. Marriage does that to couples, and we don't have the excuse, or luxury, of blaming it on children. Research shows that the seven-year itch really happens at ten years. Happiness in relationships declines."
    They'd be celebrating ten years of marriage next week. But what worried Andee more was that they really had seventeen years together, having been high school sweethearts. Andee couldn't bring herself to look at the statistics on those dynamics. The ten-year itch numbers were disturbing enough.
    "If you say so."
    "Look," Andee said and pointed to the large thermometer she'd created in Excel, blown up to over two hundred percent and hung on their fridge. "We've worked really hard to save money for the last ten years. Which is great. It's starting to pay off. The article I read about the ten-year itch says that spontaneity is lost to forward planning. We are awesome at forward planning." She tapped her finger on the picture she took great pleasure in updating every month to mark their progress. They were one month out from achieving their goal: to buy a vacation home. Every time Andee looked at the picture, she wanted to clap her hands in glee and dance around the room. That was until she had read that article. Seeing the confusion on Buck's face, she finished with, "Which means we have no spontaneity."
    "And apparently too much forward planning means the balance is a sex dungeon." Buck pushed up the sleeve to his white T-shirt to scratch his bicep.
    "We're trying something new."
    "Aren't we though," he said with a shake of his head.
    Andee pulled scissors from the kitchen drawer and held them up. "The instructions on the web site say the theme for Friday nights is sensual. To come as your alter ego. A hunting man is not your alter ego." The list of suggestions she'd read in the women's magazine listed both