Sugarbaby

by Crystal Green

  I had no idea, but the sun was hovering slightly above the horizon as he pulled into the waving weeds and grass near the mill’s timeworn, paint-crisped buildings, which were boxy things that piled up on one another, presided over by a grain elevator. There were other abandoned buildings on the fringes of Aidan Falls besides this one—a grain warehouse, the Elrond mansion, a log cabin by the railroad tracks, the old high school—but I liked it here the most.

  I’d told that to Noah, and he’d been interested enough to see why. I was beginning to think he had an explorer’s heart.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said after cutting the engine, getting out, and opening my door. He was holding out his hand to help me to the ground. “You’ve brought men out here before, haven’t you?”

  I fought off an emerging blush, even though it wouldn’t show on my skin. “Not hardly. This is my place. I like to come here when I need extra quiet and some room to think.”

  I slipped my fingers over his palm, my skin tingling against his. If I thought he’d have soft, businessman hands, I was wrong. They were just rough enough to make me think he didn’t sit at desks all day tapping away on computer keyboards or standing in front of windows with city views, a Bluetooth device on his ear, barking commands at his minions.

  As I stepped to the ground, he kept hold of me for a moment more than was necessary. Heat swamped me again, and I nervously pulled my hand away, making a show of how I needed it to straighten my skirt.

  He didn’t seem to mind my awkwardness. “What do you think about when you’re here?”

  Gravel crunched under my boots as we walked side by side on dirt tracks that’d been here for ages, probably even before the mill closed in the ’90s. “I think about the future, the past.”

  “How about the present?” He sent a grin to me.

  I have no idea what to make of the present, I thought.

  The rising sun warmed his skin, giving his light hair fine streaks of red, like hidden licks of fire. The illumination made the scar on his neck stand out all the more, because it was as white as a patch of snow that wouldn’t melt, no matter how intense the heat got.

  He spoke. “I remember reading on the Hellfire Club boards that there was once an underground sex club here in the seventies.”

  “That’s not why I brought you.” Flustered. First the shower sext, now this. I was a movin’, groovin’ set of contradictions as I kept a polite space between us that was a contradiction, too. He’d closed that space a couple of times before, and I wanted more than anything for it to disappear now.

  But when he gazed at me, it was a caress. Of course, I was too shy to meet it this time. Here, out in the middle of nowhere with the morning so hushed and still, I felt more vulnerable than ever. Yet why should I when this guy had already proven that he wasn’t out to hurt me?

  We kept walking, and he paused a moment in the middle of the field, taking measure of the sun. Then, as if he wanted to put a bit of business behind him, he fetched his phone from his pocket, sent a text, and shoved the phone back where it belonged.

  Without any explanation—why start now?—we resumed our stride.

  “So about this underground sex club,” he said. “Isn’t Aidan Falls too uptight for that kind of thing?”

  “That might be true of some people in town, but not everyone’s uptight here. Just most of the population.”

  He laughed, his walk smooth, marked with all the power I’d noticed in the tent yesterday. He was in his element out here, able to move free. He almost reminded me of something that quietly stalked among the grass, pacing me.

  “I’m not laughing because that was a quaint thing for you to say,” he told me. “It’s just that I’m used to faster places than this town. Coming here is like experiencing the speed life should move at. Things go fast in the cities.”

  The girls probably did, too. His comment made me keenly aware of how he didn’t fully fit in, even if he looked just right in those Wranglers and boots. Heck, the pickup he was driving didn’t blend, either, even if it seemed like a hundred others in Aidan Falls. How could it look right when he was the one driving it, not a regular old cowboy?

  I led Noah toward the corner of the main building, toward a wall you couldn’t see from the path we’d driven up on. “Anyway, I’m not the kind of girl who’d be drawn to disco sex clubs, but when I was younger, I couldn’t help imagining what it must’ve been like with all those hippie cowboys and cowgirls meeting here to do what they did. It’s kind of hilarious, really. I’ll bet they had posters of that Burt Reynolds guy on the walls. My uncle used to be a fan of his movies, so that’s pretty much all I know about the seventies.”

  “Why is this mill worth a drive out here if it’s not your thing?”

  I slipped a look at him, then angled my head toward the wall as we rounded the corner.

  Noah’s steps slowed. Then, with an unguarded smile, he scanned the art someone had painted long ago, the washed-out vision of a sea goddess whose hair floated like water, whose body faded into the waves, whose eyes invited you to be a part of her world.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think this might be Nyi Roro Kidul. She’s a deity, a mermaid goddess who seduces people into the water.”

  “How do you know who she is?”

  “My friend Evie read my Tarot cards at the end of the summer, and Nyi Roro Kidul was part of the deck’s artwork.” The sea goddess’s particular card, Temptation, had kept coming up during my few readings, too, but I’d had no idea what it meant.

  Not until I stood by this wall now, my gaze going from the mermaid to Noah.

  Temptation.

  No kidding.

  My mouth started to run away with all the nerve-addled words suddenly coming out of it. “I’d ride my bike out here just to stare at her because she’s so beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Noah said, “she is.”

  But he wasn’t looking at Nyi Roro Kidul now. He was looking at me.

  I’d been told I was pretty before—Rex and Micah had even said gorgeous—and I’d believed it once upon a time. But the girl who’d been looking back at me in the mirror with troubled hazel eyes these past few years had only seemed tired from the stress of worrying about Uncle Joseph, then from the Rex-Micah scandal and its fallout.

  It was as if Noah could see past all that.

  He must’ve realized that I wasn’t normally a fast girl, that I’d put on the brakes lately so that I was practically at a standstill, because he went back to surveying the art. “Life is funny, isn’t it? You discovered Nyi Roro Kidul long before she appeared in your cards.”

  “I thought that, too, after Evie showed me the deck, but maybe whoever this artist was didn’t know about the goddess. Maybe they were just drawing a mermaid.”

  “Or maybe it was fate.”

  He tossed a cockier grin my way, then leaned his back against the wall, propping his heel against it and inspecting me as closely as you would any piece of work in a museum. I shuffled my boots.

  “And what tempts you, Jadyn Dandritch?” he asked.

  As if I was going to answer that. “I see you’ve gotten around to learning my last name.”

  “You’re avoiding the question.”

  Smart guy. “I have the same temptations as any girl in this town, I guess.”

  “Such as you want to get out of here, make a bigger life for yourself?”

  “Yes. I’m going to be a doctor who specializes in geriatric medicine. I was good with my uncle, so I’d be good in that particular area.” Didn’t I sound sure of that? I wore the confidence well, even if it was a size too large on me.

  “A doctor,” he said. “That’s a noble pursuit.”

  Was he poking fun at me? I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “It might sound like I’m teasing you because we’re not used to outright
honesty these days. We live in a cynical society where snark rules.”

  “You don’t do snark?”

  “Oh, I have my moments.”

  He traced a finger on the wall beside him, sketching the lines of a washed-out wave. I felt the brush of that finger over my skin, as if he was mapping the inside of my arm, and I shivered.

  I wasn’t about to ask what tempted him, because I thought I already knew. Was he imagining that the wave was me, just like I was fantasizing?

  He stopped touching the wave, instead flattening his palm to the wall, almost as if he could stop the movement of the sea. And before he’d been forced out of his business world, he probably could.

  “What made you want to be a doctor?” he asked.

  That was simple. “Uncle Joseph always said I was a nurturer and a bookworm, so the two go pretty well hand in hand. I’m trying to secure some kind of internship, though. I’m already behind on getting a head start when I transfer to an actual university instead of community college.”

  “The medical profession can be a hard life. Just the amount of education you have to get, and those endless shifts . . .”

  Was he familiar with medical schedules?

  I couldn’t stop myself from glancing at that scar on his neck or from remembering what I’d learned about his dad and mom. He’d probably spent some time in hospitals because of them, but what about for himself? Had he checked out of life for more reasons than what I knew?

  “I can handle the hard work,” I said.

  He nodded, watching me again. “I get the feeling you can handle a hell of a lot. It must’ve been tough to take care of your uncle. You’re young, and you must’ve missed out on parties, dates, fun.”

  “Not really.” I shirked off the comment because I didn’t want any of the guilt right now. I’d been Uncle Joseph’s person. I’d been the only family member who’d given enough of a damn to be with him during his last years. I had nothing to feel bad about.

  “Jadyn,” Noah said, moving away from the wall, “don’t look so sad. That’s not why I pulled you out of bed this morning, to be sad.”

  I forced a smile. “I’m not.”

  To prove it, I wandered closer to Nyi Roro Kidul, as if I’d never peered at every detail of her before, as if I’d never seen her this close. I just wanted to be nearer to Noah, only I didn’t know how to go about it.

  “Hey,” he said in a low whisper.

  In spite of my wariness, I glanced up at him.

  He tweaked my chin, right under the slight cleft I had there. “Do you know what I promised myself last night after you left?”

  After his urgent phone call. “I can’t possibly guess.”

  “I told myself that today you were going to start opening up to me.”

  A whisk of fear beat through me. I was afraid I’d already opened up more than I should, because what would happen after Noah got tired of this rich-man’s escapade out in the country? What would he leave behind in me—a heart-hurt mess?

  I was already too used to that.

  I couldn’t stand to have him getting this deep, so the random words began to trickle out of me again, unstoppable. Words were a buffer, and I’d learned to use them well.

  “Supposedly, this mermaid goddess takes the spirit of anyone she wants, usually good-looking younger men.” Like Noah. I hadn’t meant to point that out. “So it makes perfect sense that the Temptation card signifies obsessions you can’t control. That’s only part of it, though, and Evie said—”

  It all happened in a whirlwind of motion—his hand cupped under my jaw, turning my face toward him, his other hand slipping to the small of my back, pulling me to his body, his mouth claiming mine as all the air in my lungs suspended.

  His smell—clean and musky. His taste—a faint trace of mint. His lips—softer than I’d fantasized, damp and warm, sipping at me as I clutched his shirt and leaned back, bending with a breathless force of desire that split me from the middle up.

  Somehow I had the strength to be pulling him to me, too, feeling the hardness of his body, his muscled chest, his strong arms. The burn of his morning stubble heated my face, but that only added to the flames flickering inside of me, rising, nearly bursting as the pressure of his mouth on mine let up.

  His words pulsed against my lips as he spoke.

  “You don’t take hints very well, Jadyn, so I had to come out with it.”

  “You—”

  “Wanted to kiss you? Hell, yes. I’ve been wanting to do it since I saw you across the café, trying to avoid my table.”

  I breathed against his mouth, still fisting his shirt, unwilling to let go. I wasn’t sure I could stand on my own, and I hoped he wouldn’t take his arm out from behind my back. He was my pillar right now because my knees were weak, my bones wavery. And the more I looked into his eyes—sea green, temptation green—the more I went liquid.

  “Why me?” I asked again.

  “I already told you. You’re my fresh air.”

  His words were poetry to my starved self-esteem, and when he kissed me again, all my walls fell, crumbling piece by piece.

  I clung to his shirt, pulling him closer. I curved my arm around his neck, as if he was going to go somewhere. But from the way his lips caressed mine—slowly, sensuously, adoringly—I knew he wasn’t leaving. Not for now, at least.

  “Jadyn,” he whispered against me, slipping his hand to my waist, tugging at my shirt.

  It was as if he was only asking to do what he did next—coax his fingertips under the material, touching my skin until I grasped his wrist.

  He stopped, but I hadn’t wanted that. It was just that I was excited, my blood spiked with popping heat, and I wanted him to go on.

  Wanted it bad.

  I led his hand upward, over my ribs, and held my breath. His own breathing suspended against my lips.

  “Touch me here.” An agitated whisper was all I could manage before I bit my lip in anticipation, pressing his palm up and up until he covered my breast.

  He paused, as if he hadn’t expected me to be this bold. I hadn’t expected it, although I should have.

  This was what I wanted, needed.

  As if understanding that, he eased his finger into the cup of my bra, toying with my nipple.

  I sucked in oxygen, arching toward him. I brushed against the bulge in his jeans and held back a tiny groan.

  His voice was gritty. “Don’t tease me.”

  Was I teasing? If I wasn’t, I had to be prepared for another round of shame. Rex and Micah had seemed like good ideas, too. At the time.

  That’s when my common sense turned down the temperature, even if my blood was boiling. I had no business doing this with Noah. I hardly even knew him.

  He seemed to realize I was having second thoughts, and with a muffled curse, he took his hand from beneath my shirt, straightening the material, then planting his palms on my hips. He leaned his forehead against mine.

  “I can wait,” he said roughly, but there was a gentleness there, too. As always I couldn’t get a bead on what he was all about. “You’re worth the wait.”

  I was? With my exes, everything had happened in fast motion—the seductions, the leaving—and to hear someone say this . . . ?

  Well, it was a surprise. A good one, although I knew this was about Noah being a billionaire who got what he wanted, even if that included a hard-to-get waitress he needed to chase.

  With that, he walked backward, putting distance between us. “Don’t keep me waiting long, though. I’m not as patient as I seem in these blue jeans and boots.”

  As my heartbeat filled my throat, blocking all words, he left me standing there, my world rocking once again as the sun slanted over me, pouring over the sea goddess by my side.

  Temptation, I thought again.

  It had me on its hook more than ever.


  ***

  If I had been worried about experiencing any tension between me and Noah as we drove away from the mill, I shouldn’t have bothered. That text he’d sent earlier had clearly gone to Simmons, who was waiting by Noah’s pickup, seated in a vehicle that sure wasn’t a Ferrari. He’d gotten a more modest set of wheels, although it was still a sleek, black SUV, and he didn’t look happy about downgrading.

  Noah headed for his pickup, giving me a pulse-hopping smile. “Simmons will take you home. He was headed your way.” He gestured toward the flatbed. “There’s still some fishing time left in the day for me, and I know you don’t want to go.”

  Well, maybe I suddenly did. Or was he giving me space now that he’d made his intentions very clear?

  Simmons had gotten out of the SUV and was opening my door. “Fishing and riding. He wasn’t kidding about getting that done on this trip.”

  As Noah hopped in the cab, started the engine, then drove off with a wave out the window, my stomach tightened. Why did I have an even worse feeling about the reason he’d called Simmons? Was it because he didn’t want to take a chance that someone would see me with him, now that people would be awake and driving around?

  I shouldn’t have let that get me down—I knew Noah was still staying away from the public. But I felt a separation from him, a definite sense of being set aside on a lower shelf until he was ready to play with me again.

  Yet after all the things he’d told me, was I still on that kick?

  I got into the car and, soon enough, Simmons peeled away from the mill, merging back onto the road to town.

  White fences blurred past us, cattle grazing on the grass. Simmons glanced at me.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “Thanks?”

  “It’s an observation, not a judgment.”

  I hadn’t been tired around Noah, but I really was feeling it now. “I’m going to crash in bed for a few hours when I get back. So much for getting all my studying done before work tonight.” A yawn attacked me, and I gave in to it, then said, “I’ll hit the books sometime this weekend.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that.” When I lifted an eyebrow at him, he added, “Noah still has riding on the agenda. I don’t think he’ll want to do it as early as the fishing expedition he had planned this morning, but prepare yourself.”