My Innocent Indiscretion. Eva Cassel

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      While vacationing in Europe, Morgan is taken aback by her sudden, intense attraction to a fellow traveler—a younger man who definitely isn’t her husband. Though Chad shares her interest, she can’t bring herself to cheat. Can they find another outlet for their forbidden passion in the uninhibited atmosphere of Amsterdam?

      Contents

      Begin Reading

      I was sound asleep when he boarded the train (probably in Brussels) and sat down in the seat opposite me. Technically, I was in his seat; when I’d realized shortly after departing Paris that I was facing the back of the train I’d flung myself to the other side. But he never woke me to make me switch. No, he must have sat there for a good hour, watching me drool and fidget until my tunic dress was bunched around my waist. I finally snapped awake, as exhausted and confused as an alien abductee, when the train veered and my forehead bounced against the window frame.

      Frantically adjusting my dress, my eyes burning from jet lag, I finally noticed him. He was reading a magazine, his sun-kissed wavy hair falling into his eyes, his leg extended arrogantly or absentmindedly over the invisible border into the space I had “rented” for four and a half hours.

      I shifted in my seat and recrossed my legs to move further away from him, hoping he’d get the hint. He didn’t. In fact, the bastard even stretched out further without looking up, flipping a page of his magazine. After the ten-hour flight from Seattle to Paris, sandwiched between two pungent old men, and the standing-room-only bus ride from Charles DeGaulle airport to Gare de Lyon (during which I decided I’d been insane not just to pay the $300 and fly directly to Amsterdam), I’d had enough of other people’s bodies.

      I got up, glaring at him, steadying myself against the window. Sitting down, you didn’t notice how rough the ride was; it was only when you stood and attempted to walk that you felt the four hundred kilometers per hour. It was especially freaky when we passed another train de très grande vitesse (literally translated as “of very great speed”), or when we went through a tunnel-in and out in all of two seconds.

      Since he still hadn’t retracted his stretched leg, I had to step over him. I was about as steady as a newly born colt. The train jostled us about like a pair of dice. I screeched inelegantly as I hurtled into his lap. I tried to clutch the back of his seat with my right hand as my left hand landed splayed on his chest, but my hand slipped and his face met my cleavage. Trying to extricate myself without making awkward eye contact, I noticed that his massive paws were gripping my hips. I was mortified.

      “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” I said, raising my left knee up to step over him into the aisle.

      “It’s fine, it was probably my fault,” he said in what sounded like a bastardized Australian accent, trying to move his leg out of the way, which only made it worse. And that’s when our eyes finally met. His were clear blue, his mouth broad, his jaw elegantly curved. With his sun-streaked blond hair and tanned skin he looked like a surfer. And a lot younger than I’d estimated. He was built like a tank, which was probably what had made him seem older when he was looking down at his magazine. He was at an age—around twenty-five I guessed—where he’d filled out to his full density but still had some of the markings of youth: a wrinkle-free brow, an open, frank gaze, and, dare I say it, rosy cheeks (although I thought I also detected a hint of jaded experience in the way his mouth naturally curved up at the corners). He looked healthy as a spinach salad, a kid on summer vacation, perpetually high on the certainty that the world would eventually be his oyster.

      Desire shot through my pelvis like a resuscitating jolt to the chest—followed immediately by pounding waves of guilt. Which was ridiculous, I told myself, as I finally burst into the aisle and made my drunken-sailor way towards the washroom, because after seventeen years of marriage Jeff surely found himself attracted to other women too—perhaps even to the occasional student. I’ve caught him, in fact, checking out some nubile, bouncy, blond thing, his head jerked around as though by a marionette string. And he always had that funny look on his face: guilty as sin, but nonetheless defiant and defensive of his God-given right to try to catch a glimpse of G-string. And I rarely minded. It was only natural—as long as that’s where it stopped.

      In the cramped train washroom I patted my face with a dampened paper towel, noting the puffy, dark circles around my brown eyes, now streaked with two-day-old mascara. Feeling the matted rat’s nest at the back of my head from lolling it back and forth in my sleep against the synthetic cushion (some of it was sticking straight up from the static electricity), I ran my fingers through my light brown hair and twisted it into a chignon at the nape of my neck. Then I ran my hands over my wrinkled linen tunic dress, pausing as my hands slid over my breasts, seeing his searching blue eyes before me. It took all my self-control not to linger similarly over my clit as I wiped myself after peeing. Suddenly the washroom was a minefield. I exploded out of it as though fleeing my own shadow and headed for the refreshment compartment. Coffee. Surely coffee would make it better…or maybe something a little more stiff.

      I ordered an Orangina and made my way back to my seat, my stomach aflutter with expectation. He was dozing, or meditating (he looked like the kind of guy that would have found Buddha by now, if for no other reason than to increase his social capital).

      I sat down gingerly (his left leg had migrated under my seat again), and opened my Orangina, taking the opportunity to stare at him. I could tell he wasn’t actually sleeping by the still, controlled way his head rested against the back of his seat. He could open his eyes at any second and catch me raking him over. I took a sip of my drink and momentarily looked out the window. We were passing rolling countryside, the kind that could put you in a coma if you stared too long. I looked back at him, taking another deep, gluttonous swig of my drink. It was pure sugar. More sugar than I’d had in the whole past month, being on a low-glycemic, low-carbohydrate, ass-of-a-sixteen-year-old diet. It was either this, though, or a shot of adrenaline directly into my aorta to wake me up. And oh sweet Mary was it ever good! My first official day on vacation and I was already cheating.

      I forced my eyes away from his crotch and busied myself reading his T-shirt instead. It was faded black, worn soft and thin by years of spin cycle, clinging to his defined pecs like a staticky polyester negligee to a pair of fake boobs. An Oxymoron a Day Keeps Reality Away it said just under the collar in white lettering, with a list of sample oxymorons taking up the majority of the T-shirt in small lettering underneath. I squinted, took another sip of my poison, and started reading him like a book: Jumbo Shrimp, Friendly Fire, Genuine Imitation, Freezer Burn, Industrial Park, baked Alaska, Original Copy… Halfway down his T-shirt I burst out laughing. When I looked up he was wide awake and watching me, smiling, which I must have sensed or seen in my peripheral vision.

      “Which one made you laugh?” He asked in a familiar, flirtatious tone, as though we’d just met through friends of friends at a party and could skip the preliminaries. “Holy Shit,” I answered, still grinning, wishing I’d decided to wear my wedding ring after all. “That’s one of my favorites,” he said, extending his hand towards me. “Hi, I’m Chad.”

      I gripped his hand. I was uncharacteristically shaky and tried to disguise it with a toss of my hair. “Morgan,” I said…

      I’d realized I had overpacked when I had negotiated my cumbersome suitcase through the Paris Metro system, full of treacherous turnstiles and neverending staircases. I almost abandoned the fucking thing when the Metro doors closed on it.

      When our train finally pulled into the Amsterdam station two hours later I was coveting Chad’s meager belongings, stuffed into a single, ratty backpack that looked light as a feather as he stood up and flung it over his shoulder.

      “Do you need some help?” he asked, seeing me trying to pull my beast down from the overhead luggage compartment, where it had been forcibly stuffed by a muscular