Author's note: Absolutely a suggestive drabble of poor quality which is laced with double entendre. But I enjoyed writing it and laughed a lot while I did.
None of the characters herein belong to me and I make no monetary gain from writing.
It does no good for a grown woman, an older woman she reminds herself, to be staring at her husband the way she is staring right now. But she just can't help it. Maybe this was how she was supposed to have felt the first time around, when she was only young, when she was first married to Rupert. Of course, that wasn't the case – so maybe, she justifies, it was a sort of delayed gratification.
He's gardening – so that would be attractive enough for her. But it's Spain, warmer than Genovia, and he's obviously felt the need to remove his shirt. He has thrown it, rather carelessly, across the sun lounger beside her. His jeans are worn – I keep them here, he had told her, for things I need to do around the house – and his sunglasses are glistening in the sun. She offered him sun cream, he laughed and told her he didn't need it. She has tried, with the sort of vanity that proud women do, to avert her eyes but it is impossible. There are glistening trickles of sweat working their way down the valley of his back.
He has kept unbelievably fit – so much more so than she realised. She was almost embarrassed by her own body, though in good shape but softened by child bearing and age, when he had first undressed her. Even at that though, he's managed to make her feel like she has the body of a twenty-one year old. It feels like that, at least, until the morning after. And at this rate, every morning is a morning after. How truly embarrassing, she thinks.
He bends down, picks up a spade, and starts digging and she puts aside all pretenses of reading a book and just watches. And she could watch forever. She could sit by the pool side and watch him work all day and not be at all phased.
He has dragged her here for some relaxation – she's so relaxed she's boneless and heedless and helpless. He's rendered her as giggly as a school girl. And for a woman her age that is disconcerting in the extreme.
She tries, honestly she does, to avert her eyes but it simply is a task she isn't up to. She lifts her book up, sits it resolutely across her thighs and lets it fall open at the bookmark and that's as far as she gets before she gives up again. This time he's flexing his arms out, obviously stretching tired muscles, and it is mesmerising.
Then he turns his neck and smiles at her and she knows, she just knows, that she's been played. Because - she's discovered - Joe Romero knows just how good looking he is.
"Enjoying yourself?"
She feels her skin flush to fire and she fumbles with her book.
"What ever can you mean?"
He drops the spade onto the little bare flower bed and comes towards her.
"You're so smooth," she grumbles, "So sure of yourself."
"You love it," he states simply, "Don't you?"
"No," she tips her face up.
"Liar," he says, and it makes her weak at the knees, "Screw the garden."
She has a really, really witty – and appalling - rejoinder but despite the fact she's become rather fond of such exchanges in the year she's been his wife, she can't bring herself to say it out here, in the high-walled and evidently private poolside of their Spanish home. She just can't.
He smirks as if he knows what she's thinking, what she wanted to say anyway. He leans down.
"Want to know what I like about being old?"
She honestly doesn't know how to answer him when he's smiling at her like that, "Tell me."
Suddenly he grips a hand underneath her knee and another around her shoulders and scoops her up into his arms. For a moment she startles, but always safe, she settles into his sturdy embrace as he turns towards the terrace and villa.
"Afternoon naps."
He says it with such a disarming grin, she can barely respond. It's humiliating, but she loves it.
"Now who's the liar?"
She finally finds some wit, even though he's already at the top of the stairs and she's already dazed.
He reaches the bed and simultaneously places her down while kicking off his jeans.
"Let's nap," he growls.
"Mmmm, Joseph, I love your definition…of a nap."
"Me too dear."