I

Sarah:

Love in the Ruins

1.

Cold hands burrowing between her warm thighs at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning wasn’t high on Sarah’s wish list, if she had a wish list. Not that it would matter to Henry, of course, who was being insistent. But Saturdays were for sleeping in, weren’t they? She wondered if it would do any good to just keep pretending that she was dead to the world. What was the chance that he’d get bored, or miffed or whatever, and leave her the hell alone? It was a rhetorical question, as she knew all too well.

The chances were exactly zero.

Henry was always hot for it in the morning, and she most definitely was not. She might have felt differently if he’d been hot forher, rather than just plain old horny, but he wasn’t, and she knewthat, too. Unfortunately, lying on one side with her back to him and her long legs drawn up gave Henry a clear shot at her girl parts, which made the actual source of his arousal a moot point. Even as she thought that, he slipped one hand around her rump to scratch gently in her pubic hair. It tickled unpleasantly and she wished he’d stop, for fuck’s sake.

They’d already made love, after all, complete with candlelight and the better part of a gallon of Bahama Mamas, an island specialty combining several kinds of fruit juice and exotic rums, which was violently pink in color, fool-you sweet in taste, and very nearly lethal in any quantity at all. That meant that Sarah was not only tired, but spectacularly hung over, as well. What she really needed was two more hours of undisturbed sleep, maybe three.

The only way she was going to be responsive was for Henry to grab a fistful of pussy and yank her around to take what he wanted, rough housing her sleepy ass into arousal. Yeah, likethat was going to happen.

What his touch did instead was remind her that she needed to pee in the very worst way. Or maybe the very best way, come to think of it. She’d slept all night without a trip to the bathroom, an event worthy of some note in her book. However, eight hours or so in the sack left her with an aching bladder, and that was one of the paybacks of age, damn it. She was thirty-seven years old, but sometimes felt older—a lot older. It was like she’d gotten there almost without noticing. How in the hell had that happened? Life just seemed to be passing her by.

“Am I making you wet, or is it the smell of fresh coffee?” Henry said in the soft, faintly amused voice that always left her wanting to explain herself.

“Tinkle time,” she said, automatically using the little girl words that Henry approved of. He didn’t like for her to be unladylike, which took a fair amount of effort on Sarah’s part, as she was no lady.

She yawned and stretched and reached for her glasses on the nightstand by the bed, then staggered off to the toilet, leaving his questing hands behind. Soft golden light poured through the single frosted window, and she stopped to peer at her reflection in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet.

“Sigourney Weaver my ass,” she sighed with caustic dismay.

Everyone said she looked like the actress, but if that was true then Sarah felt very sorry for poor Sigourney, especially in the morning. Still grumbling, she prodded at her jowls, or where her jowls would be if she had any. She didn’t, but that didn’t keep her from worrying about them.

Sarah did, in fact, have the high cheekbones and big eyes