"Do you miss it?" She tilted her head to the side, watching him curiously.

"You know what the club was," he reminded her. "I don't miss fucking other women, if that's what you're asking me."

Keiley kept him more than satisfied sexually. She knew how to tease him, how to make him crazy, and she was as adventurous as hell. More adventurous than she realized.

"That wasn't what I was asking you, Mac." She rolled her eyes before lowering them to her breakfast. 'Just forget I mentioned it."

That wasn't going to happen.

"Why did yon mention it?"

She stared back at him once again, her gaze reflective. "Because you're too tense. You have very few friends, and despite the invitations we receive, you never want to socialize.

You weren't like this in Virginia."

"I'm busy, Kei."

"You're hiding," she told him. "And hiding never works. It's definitely not going to work with me. Are you missing your sex games in Virginia, Mac? Is that the problem?"

He wished he could have snapped at her. He wished he could have stood up and stomped out. He wished he could have avoided her.

But she was staring at him with that faintly frightened expression she had used the first time she asked him about the club. Wariness filled her eyes, and he felt like a jerk. Like a bastard. Like he was failing her. Pushing her. Stealing himself against it, he let her see the lie coming.

"I'm not missing any sex games." The lie didn't come easily to his lips. "Now eat your breakfast."

The curiosity blazed in her eyes then. He was daring her, whether she realized it or not.

"What was it like?" she asked, as he dug his fork into the scrambled eggs on his plate and fought the anticipation building inside him.

"What was what like?" The words nearly choked him.

"Sharing a woman with Jethro Riggs? Didn't you ever get jealous, Mac?"

Son of a bitch. He was going to come in his jeans!

If she hadn't been watching for his reaction, she might have missed the expression that flickered over his face. It was dark, carnal, arousing. His eyes lifted slowly from his plate a second later, his features smoothing out, but his eyes, his eyes were like storm clouds now, brewing with dangerous undercurrents.

She could see his response and feel it inside herself. See the sudden shift of hunger in his gaze as he stared at her, the tension in his body, the way it whipped through the air and licked over her flesh. In three years of marriage she had rarely seen that look on Mac's face, and it almost, just almost, frightened her. It would have frightened her if her own arousal hadn't tempered the fear. She had to force herself to control her breathing, to control her response to him. To the thought of that forbidden act.

She had suspected he missed the Club and the sexual acts he engaged in there with Jethro Riggs. Rough, edging on dangerous, Jethro's sexuality drew every woman she knew. Even herself at one time. Until she met Mac.

The thought of those acts had terrified her when she first met Mac, but something stronger, something darker had drawn her to him, made her love him.

She had thought she had pushed back her reckless impulses years before she met Mac.

But in the past year or more, Keiley had found curiosity eating her alive. Mac never mentioned his sexual past with Jethro or the Club. He never referred to it, never suggested revisiting Virginia.

But that sexual darkness that had at first drawn her to him had been growing inside him, spurring her own. She needed to know what had drawn him to it. Why he had done it. For reasons that didn't make sense even to herself, that past was now tormenting her dreams and her fantasies.

"Why do you want to know, Kei?" His tone was a velvet rasp, rough, with the promise of a dark caress beneath it. It stroked over her flesh, reminded her that she had been days without feeling his possession.

Why did she want to know? Because it was killing her. Because in the past three years it had grown within her mind as her confidence within her own sexuality had grown. At first, it had been tainted with fear. The knowledge of the gossip that could arise, the whispers and destructive rumors that could build. But as she had found her place in Mac's hometown, watched it grow within the past three years even as she had grown, she had begun to wonder.

Why did he do it? And did he miss it? Was that the reason why the tension within him, the darkness that glittered in his gaze, had grown as well?

She shrugged uneasily. "We've never discussed it. We've talked about everything else in our lives except that."

And it was the truth. She had discussed things with Mac that she had never talked to anyone else about. The horror of facing the realization that her father had embezzled money from the company he worked from. The fear when she had lost her home, when her father had been imprisoned and her mother had committed suicide. Mac knew every part of her, but there was still so much she didn't know about him.

"It's not worth talking about." He turned his attention back to his breakfast as Keiley watched him closely. He was hiding from her, and that only dared her curiosity.

"That doesn't tell me why you did it, Mac." She continued to press the point even though the tone of his voice warned her that it was a subject he didn't want to discuss.

He was avoiding this subject just as he avoided other subjects when it came to explanations concerning the dark, shadowed parts of his soul.

Marrying Mac hadn't come without a little baggage. He was an alpha with a capital A, irritating, proud, arrogant, and bold. Mac didn't do anything by half measures and he sure as hell didn't offer a lot of explanations.

He avoided issues he didn't want to discuss, and when she pushed it they most likely ended up in bed where she couldn't remember the subject they were arguing over anymore than she could remember her own name once he started touching her.

He challenged her independence with his arrogance, and compromise hadn't come easily to him. She had the feeling that once she opened the door he was warning her to keep closed there would be no closing it again. There were parts of Mac so shadowed inside that she wondered if he wasn't just as wary of them as she knew she should be.

She was tired of the wariness. She was tired of feeling that a part of her husband was hidden from her. That a part of her own life was missing when he grew quiet and dark.

She was tired of being more frightened of losing him than she was of getting to know him. That was the mistake she had made when they married. She had known it was too soon to make their relationship permanent. Known there was too much about Mac that she didn't know, and now it was time to figure it. It was time to get to know the man she had married, whether he wanted her to know him or not.

His fork clattered to his plate as he laid his arms carefully on the table and stared back at her, his gray eyes brewing like thunderclouds.

"Because I was horny," he answered.

"You were horny, so you shared your women with other men?" She lifted her coffee cup and drank from it as though her pulse wasn't racing, as though she wasn't suddenly nervous as hell and so aroused she could feel her juices heating the folds of her pussy.

"That about sums it up," he growled.

"So, the women you shared, they weren't your lovers in particular? Just someone else's?"

His eyes darkened. In the three and a half years they had been married, she had never seen such contradictory emotions roiling through his gaze. Anger, irritation, longing, and arousal. It was a little scary and a lot harder to accept the suspicions that had been brewing inside her for months.

Or maybe she had just finally seen it in the past few months. She knew she could feel it. As the past three years had seen the growth in their marriage, it had also seen a vague restlessness. One she hadn't recognized just in herself, but within Mac as well.

What was happening to her? Pushing Mac like this was never a very good idea. He was indulgent for the most part, but once his dominance was roused it seemed only to push a part of her that craved more and more within their sexual relationship.

"Sometimes they were my lovers," he admitted, his voice lowering, becoming rough around the edges, roughening. "Sometimes I even cared about them, Keiley. Sometimes I cared about them a lot. The more I cared about them, the more I enjoyed it."

He was pushing her now, daring her. In that second Keiley realized she had made a dangerous error of judgment when it came to her husband. She had suspected he was missing his friends, his sexual games, that a part of him wished he were back in Virginia.

But now she knew he had been waiting knowing this was coming.

Now she had brought the subject out in the open. She had broken the boundary she herself had set, and she knew her husband, for whatever reason he had had for holding back, it would be gone now.

He could be amazingly ruthless. Mac lived by his own set of rules, and over the past three and a half years they had learned how to adjust, how to compromise with each other, and keep their marriage alive and growing. But she had always known he was holding something back. Had known and feared it.

"But you didn't love them," she said hopefully. "Not like you love me."

His lips quirked. "I've never loved anyone or anything like I love you, Keiley," he admitted. "You know that."

"Then you're not missing your friends? You're not missing the club?"

His gaze flickered with arousal and anticipation. "That wasn't what I said. That's what you said. And a word of warning, sweetheart. If you don't want to wake the monster, then don't poke at him. And right now, you're definitely poking."

Keiley felt her lips part, felt her mouth go dry, felt the tension shimmering in the air suddenly thicken, nearly choking her with the heavy undercurrents suddenly whipping through it.

She could see it in his face now, in his eyes, a desire that he kept leashed, a fantasy, a hunger, perhaps a need, she couldn't have fully anticipated. Then, just as quickly, it was gone. He picked up his fork, resumed eating, and let the subject drop while Keiley began wrestling with the implications he left in his silence.

"Stop worrying, Keiley," he stated, his voice still too dark, still too rough, moments later. "My membership in the club in Virginia isn't going to follow us here. No one knew for certain what Sinclair's Club was for."

"I don't care about the damned talk or how it follows us, Mac. I care about the fact that you're refusing to talk about it when I know damned good and well it's what you're thinking about."

She didn't give a damn what people thought about it. She had grown out of caring about gossip about six months after their move here and her realization that Delia Staten, one of the county's leading figures, intended to make her life hell. Because Keiley had Mac and she didn't. Delia had never forgotten that Mac had rejected her.

It was childish and stupid. Keiley had learned from the best exactly how to weather gossip. Whether or not anyone thought she was involved in one of the many menage relationships in this damned county didn't really faze her.

The fact that Mac's lips had thinned warningly did faze her. It pissed her off that he was continuing to ignore the subject.

"It wasn't a whorehouse, Kei. It was simply a men's club. A place to relax, share a drink, and unwind."

"And find a friend to share your women with," she inserted.

"That was an added benefit." The tight, controlled curve of his lips held back the lush sensuality that could fill them. "Now, I have to get to work. I have to make a trip into town later, though. Do you need anything?"

"Just answers," she sighed. "We need to talk about this some more, Mac."

"Talking about this is the worst thing we can do at this point," he told her. "What you need to do is drop it. Let it go away, Keiley, just as you did before we moved here. It doesn't apply to our life or what we have here. That's all that matters."

Oh yeah, she was just going to obey him like a good little girl.

With that, he finished his coffee and rose from the table before bending to brush a kiss over her cheek and move to the back door.

"I love you, Kei," he said behind her.

"I love you, Mac." She returned the words and the emotion.

"I'll be up for lunch if you take a break, then," he told her. "I'll talk to you later."

About anything but what she could feel pulsing in the air now. As he left, Keiley grit her teeth in frustration.

When she had first heard the rumors of Mac's sexual history, she admitted a fear that had nearly ended their relationship. She had been terrified of the darkness of such a sexual act, and the darkness in the man she was falling in love with.

She had been a virgin. Uncertain. Still wary of gossip and still wary of the strength of her desire for Mac. And the strength of her interest in his best friend and known third in his sexual relationships.

She had first met Jethro at an office party. A few weeks after that he had introduced Mac to her. Mac had stolen her heart within days.

She didn't know how to handle Mac, let alone another man. Especially a man as hard and as shadowed as Jethro.

She wasn't that frightened little girl anymore. But she wasn't certain she wanted fantasy to become reality, either. What she wanted, what she needed, were answers. And the only person she could get those answers from didn't seem willing to talk.

She stared at the backdoor and felt her resolve harden. That was just too damned bad.

That was her husband. Her life. He could talk or he could deal with the consequences.

Namely, she damned well wouldn't leave him alone until he did.

Chapter 2.

Mac didn't show up for lunch.

When Keiley realized the time, she closed out the program she was working on before standing from her desk and pacing to the wide patio doors that looked out on the barnyard in the back.

He was there, doing exactly what she had suspected he was doing, tinkering with the old tractor his grandfather had owned before his death. Bare-shouldered, sweat-dampened, his jeans hanging low on his hips as he worked.

Hard muscles flexed beneath the golden flesh, rippled and made her hands itch with the need to touch them, to feel them working beneath her fingers, tensing and flexing in pleasure from her touch rather than in tension from whatever was now brewing in his mind.

He was thinking. Deliberating. Working something in his mind. That was what he did when he worked on the old piece of farm machinery.

His thick black hair hung low on his neck, a bit shaggier than he usually kept it, but giving him a sexy, dangerous look. The look of an unconquered male. Exactly what he was. A man who would be very hard to fool and even harder to get to reveal his secrets, if he didn't want to reveal them.

Keiley had no intention of forgetting the fact that her husband had been an undercover FBI agent before his resignation. How could she forget it? It was one of the reasons so much of the man she had married was a mystery to her. He knew how to keep his innermost secrets while still loving her with a depth that amazed her.

She had tried to tell herself that she knew everything she needed to about the man she had married. That of course there were, would be dark places inside him, that he had seen the worse of humanity in many cases, that it would always mark his soul.

But over the past three years, Keiley was beginning to wonder if Mac hadn't gone into a career where he was dealing with something he had already understood. Something that had given him a chance to fight back against the demons of the past. A past he could never bring back or change.

And this was what had drawn her to Mac so strongly. This was the reason why she hadn't drawn back from him despite the gossip that surrounded him and Jethro.

Like her, Mac knew what it was to hurt, but he hadn't closed himself off from the possibility of love. Unlike his friend, Mac embraced life and he embraced emotion. Like Keiley, he had just been waiting for the right person to embrace it fully.

A soft smile tugged at her lips at the thought of those first weeks. How wary she had been, so uncertain, trying to figure out why he wanted her when he could have dozens of women who would have eagerly allowed Jethro into their relationship.

Those women hadn't known him, though. Before the end of that first dinner date with him, Keiley had known parts of him that she knew other women never would. She knew that dominant sexuality of his wasn't a game, it was a part of him. She had sensed that from the first.

As their relationship had developed, she had worried that he couldn't let go of the menages, though he had promised her, assured her, that it wasn't something he couldn't live without.