Almost Mine

Excerpt - Almost Mine

Chapter 1

 

Present day — June eighteen

 

I woke alone this morning. Unfortunately this was how my life was playing out at the moment. You would think that I would have adjusted to it by now, but I would never become accustomed to the solitude.   

As my sleeping brain caught up with my waking body, I remembered what today meant, and slowly I stretched my body under the cosy covers in my bedroom, not unlike a feline coaxing a rub from her adoring owner. A Cheshire-esque smile pulled on the corners of my mouth, because I knew that this was the last morning that the other side of my king-sized bed would lie cold and bare beside me.

The plot that I’d spent months concocting, the finely tuned plan that I required to win back the man that I loved, was finally going to be executed today, and I had a renewed spring in my step, or at least I would once the anticipatory nausea in the pit of my stomach subsided and I could force myself to actually get out of bed.

An hour later, and feeling all the calmer after a long, vanilla scented bath, I made my way down stairs. I stood, with a cup of camomile tea rolling between my palms, at my kitchen window that amply gave view to the expansive livelihood we had built together, and as if on cue, the inky June clouds parted, allowing a short burst of unseasonal sun, equally providing an exquisite glisten to the dew drops that blanketed the property as it warmed my face like a long awaited kiss.  

I gazed out at our vineyard, at our five star restaurant that my exhaustless husband had built on our estate with his own two hands. Off to my left I eyed the small — only by comparison to the vast surrounds of the building — sandstone office that had day by day become his sleeping, eating and, basically, escaping-from-his-wife, quarters. I wondered, if not in there, or disturbing the shadowy surroundings of our property with his morning run, was my husband once again creating unnecessary work for himself in order to avoid coming up to the homestead, to his wife who loved him no matter what?  

God, I missed him. 

It had been three months since I had last been naked with him, and the time before that, I’d have to consult a calendar to calculate his abstinence. Three months since I’d felt his skin pressed against mine, since I’d felt his murmuring breath on my neck as he sent rippling shivers over my entire body, enticing pleas of mercy as he teased my orgasm from me…

I took another sip of tea and attempted to refocus. Though my neglected body ached for his touch, today was not about making love. It was not at all about renewing our delicious physical relationship, although that would be utterly splendid. What today was about, though, was breaking down the wall that he had built up to shut me out. Years ago he began constructing it, and though he’d fortified it with stubbornness along with unparalleled control that he’d convinced himself was an act of nobility rather than of frustrating foolishness, I had no other option than to believe that it was not impenetrable. I had to believe that I had it within me to put an end to his forced detachment from me.

I was about to step away from the window and initiate this plan of mine when something out of the window and to the left caught my eye. The office door opened and I watched as my husband rolled his head to stretch out his aching neck before pulling the cords on the hood of his jumper tighter around his face. My heart skipped a beat when at first I thought that he had looked up at me, but then I realised he was taking in the wide view of the depressing sky. The sun had been once again been stolen by gloom. Ignoring the cold sprinkling of rain he set off running toward the national park, and away from me.