Only His: A Second Chance Romance (Second Chances Book 2)

by Amelia Wilde

  “I said I never wanted to spend another day without you. And then I asked you if you’d be mine again, even though I was such an awful prick to you in college.”

  She draws in a deep breath, then lets out a little sigh of contentment.

  “Yes. That’s what you said.”

  “And you said—”

  Her cheeks rise with another incredible smile. Lacey tilts her head back and presses her lips against mine, this time tenderly, gently, like we’re both still a little fragile.

  It doesn’t take long for it to turn into something else entirely, my hand sliding up to the back of her neck, the length of her body pressing against mine. She makes a little mewling sound into my mouth, then pulls back, laughing.

  “Stop. I’m going to be late, and I can’t be late.”

  “Don’t stay here on my account. I’ve got everything I need.”

  “There are burgers in the fridge.”

  “Time is ticking…”

  “I know.” She whirls around, heading for the front door. I already started her car and shoveled off the driveway, scraping last night’s snow away from the Jeep’s roof and windows. If I have extra time later, maybe I’ll make room in her garage so she can actually, you know, park in it like a regular human being who doesn’t want to deal with all this winter bullshit every morning.

  Of course, Lacey’s not a regular human being.

  Never has been.

  She pulls on her black, puffy down coat, reaches for her purse, hesitates, and leaves it hanging on the hook. Then she pats the pockets of her coat. “Wallet. Keys. Oh—here’s the house key, if you’re going to get a copy made.” She darts back, presses it into my hand.

  I kiss her again, and her lips pressed against mine sends a shock of heat racing through my chest. My cock threatens to burst out of my jeans. If she doesn’t leave soon, this is going to become a problem.

  “Have a good day. Save lives.”

  She opens the front door and looks back at me over her shoulder. “Fix…kitchen floors.”

  We’re both laughing when she closes the door behind her and is gone.

  In the silence of the house, I take a deep breath.

  Holy fuck.

  I can’t believe—and yet I can believe—that Lacey is back in my life like this, even though…

  Even though it’s probably a mistake.

  It’s definitely a mistake, because sooner or later, I’m going to end up hurting her, and I don’t want to do that.

  But right now, it feels too much like a fucking dream that I don’t want to wake up from. I’ve got this job to do, I’ve got a woman to see when she gets home from work, and she’s everything I ever dreamed I could want in a woman. She’s Lacey. She’s the only woman I have ever dreamed of, will ever dream of. She’s it for me.

  I push that nagging doubt deep down in my gut, then climb the stairs, heading back toward the bedroom. I had a spare t-shirt and pair of boxers in my truck—always, in case of emergencies on a job site—and this morning when I brought them in, Lacey put them at the foot of her bed. “Feel free to use the shower when I head out,” she’d said, rushing through her morning routine, up a few minutes late. No surprises there. I’d wanted to climb into the shower with her, but she was in and out in three minutes. She’s a damn efficient woman.

  I head into the bathroom and take a look at myself in the mirror. My hair is sticking up in every direction. How the hell did she manage to kiss me with a straight face?

  The thought of kissing Lacey makes my skin go red and hot.

  This can’t keep up, or I’ll never get anything done ever again.

  I strip off my clothes, dropping them onto the tiled floor, and turn on the water in her shower full blast. I step in. The heat cascades down over my shoulders, clean and pure, and I close my eyes, lean back, let it cover my face, let it run down over every inch of me.

  The only downside is that I have to wash her scent off my body.

  Well, that’s okay.

  I’ll have another chance to put it back on tonight.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Lacey

  “This city just isn’t what it used to be.”

  The old man shakes his head, holding his arm out so that I can take one last blood pressure reading.

  “How’s that?”

  It looks like he’s stabilized from when he first came in, and I breathe a little sigh of relief. No close calls today, though I’m still just as exhausted as any other day. That’s what I get for being up in the middle of the night with Crosby.

  “Well, the snow plows.”

  “What about them?”

  “It’s terrible.” I remove the blood pressure cuff and slide back a foot on my rolling stool. “They don’t send them out on time. Budget cuts.” He raises his hands up in the air, purses his lips. “What are they doing with all our tax dollars if they can’t even plow the streets?”

  “That’s too bad.” I jot down a couple of notes in the file. “When I was growing up, it seems like those plows were out all day. Well—I could be wrong about that. I was in school, after all, not keeping track of the plows.”

  “You’re from Lockton?”

  “I am.” I give Mr. Robinson a smile. “I moved back for my residency.”

  “Good for you, young lady. Good for you. We don’t have nearly enough young people staying in town.”

  “My mother said that same thing the other day.” It’s not a white lie—she really did. We were in the middle of a text conversation about how the town has grown way too dependent on the tourism industry—that’s my mom for you—and at some point, she brought up the fact that Lockton is fairly bereft of young professionals. I told her that I was a young professional, and I would have mentioned Crosby, but she wouldn’t consider him a professional, and anyway—

  It’s a good thing my shift is over because my thoughts keep straying away from me. “You seem to be doing fine, Mr. Robinson, but if you have any more trouble, you come right back here.”

  “I will.” His face wrinkles with a smile. “My wife will insist.”

  “Good for her.” I stand up, shake his hand. “Linda will be in—it’ll only be a couple of minutes—and then you can get out of here.”

  “Thanks, Dr.—”

  “Dr. O’Collins.”

  “I hope I see you next time.”

  “Let’s hope there isn’t a next time,” I smile.

  Then I sweep back out the door and head back behind the nurses’ station.

  It takes only a few minutes to catch up on my notes for the day, and with a jaunty salute from Dr. Howard, I’m done.

  The roads are pretty clear, despite what Mr. Robinson said, but then again, the weather has settled down. Last’s night’s snow was followed up by clear skies, which of course means bitter temperatures.

  Someday, maybe Crosby and I will—

  I laugh out loud. I’m getting way ahead of myself. Plans to move to some southern climate where Crosby can work all year round and I can—I don’t know, enjoy it on my day off—are way, way premature.

  Or…are they?

  We’ve been together a single day, but it seems like we’re picking up right where we left off. Well, right where we were before he broke up with me and came back to Lockton. A lump comes to my throat when I think about how ashamed he must have been. I get it—kind of. I just don’t get why he thought he needed to protect me from him. I’m a grown woman. I can handle it.

  I can handle it now, as a matter of fact. I might have had my doubts about it, but now that I’m actually in the situation and not just imagining it, it seems doable. More than doable. It seems right.

  The drive home doesn’t take nearly as long today, and my heart leaps when I see the lights pouring out the living room window.

  There’s something else, too.

  The garage is open.

  I pull into the driveway, my headlights illuminating the cavernous opening.

  I can’t stop the smile from getting
ridiculously large because all the boxes I’d had the moving company shove in there have been moved to the sides, neatly stacked. There’s enough room for me to park in the garage, for the first time. My heart glows.

  I steer the car into the garage and turn off the ignition. There’s a doorway in here that leads into the kitchen—I’ve just never thought of using it, since I had no way to fit my car around the damn boxes.

  Only now that I’m standing in front of it, I register that there’s another new addition.

  A plastic button. A switch, with some brand name I don’t recognize on the front.

  I press it.

  The garage door rumbles, then slides down into place.

  “Crosby!”

  The door swings open, and there he is, standing in my kitchen, in jeans and a t-shirt, a sly grin on his face.

  “You called?”

  I laugh, my body bubbling over with delight. “Are you some kind of butler?”

  “If that’s what you want me to be.”

  “No way.”

  I step into the kitchen and breathe in.

  “Are you—cooking?”

  He shakes his head. “I didn’t want to run the sink in case there’s any issue with the pipes. I’ve got a guy coming to look at it tomorrow.

  “Whoa.” The hole in my kitchen floor is even bigger, with layers torn out. It’s covered by plastic sheeting. “A guy?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I know a guy.”

  “So you’re not cooking?”

  “No, but—” He cocks his head in the general direction of the dining room.

  It’s a totally different place.

  He’s covered the table with a linen tablecloth—or maybe it’s cotton, I don’t know, but it looks fancy—and arranged the silverware around three serving dishes stuffed with Indian food.

  “There’s Indian food in Lockton?”

  “How long have you been gone, city girl?” Crosby laughs, and his voice is a smooth rumble that lights up my soul.

  “Too long, obviously.”

  He steps behind me and takes my coat, then leaves, probably to hang it on the hook. When he reappears, he pulls my chair out for me, sliding it in effortlessly as I sit down, like he’s practiced this a million times.

  “Maybe I’m wrong, but this—” I shake my head.

  “What?”

  “This seems like a date. Crosby King, are you courting me?”

  “Courting you?” He narrows his eyes, like he’s thinking about it carefully, then crosses to the other chair and takes his seat. “If you want to call it that.”

  He puts a cloth napkin—I’ve never had cloth napkins—on his lap. “I just call it…making up for lost time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Crosby

  Across the table, Lacey yawns and tries to hide it behind her hand. She still looks every bit as fucking beautiful as she did when she left this morning—it’s more than a twelve-hour day, I realized somewhere in the middle—but being a doctor clearly doesn’t leave much on the table for the evenings.

  A bitter version of me might care about that kind of shit, but after last night—

  “You should head to bed.”

  She smiles at me like I’ve just told her the most absurd fucking thing in the world. “Bed?”

  “Upstairs—with the sheets, and the comforter…there are pillows…”

  Lacey responds by putting another bite of Indian food coyly into her mouth. “This is delicious.”

  I lean back in my chair, a warm satisfaction competing with a tight worry in my gut. Lacey really should get some sleep.

  “You must have been hungry.”

  “There wasn’t much time for lunch.”

  “No?”

  “Yeah—we had a little bit of a rush then.”

  “So you didn’t eat?”

  She looks me in the eye. “You don’t have to worry about me, Crosby. I’m all grown up.”

  “I’m not worried.” It sounds convincing enough, but there’s that prickling again.

  Lacey eats another two plates of food—lunch must have really been disappointing—then leans back in her chair and stretches her arms over her head. When she opens her eyes again, they’re glittering in the lamplight. “I love Indian food.”

  I can’t shake the feeling that everything she says somehow leads us back into the past. I wish I didn’t mind going there so damn much.

  “When did you start liking it?”

  When we were together, Lacey was an All-American girl, a product of the town we grew up in. Location is far enough north that most of the restaurants within sixty miles are either shitty or good, but try finding a place with any kind of ethnic stuff and you’re out of luck. The partial semester I spent in college—in at least a semblance of a city—was the last time I had the chance to walk a quarter mile and have my pick of foods from more than one country.

  “I didn’t have to learn to like it. I only had to realize that it existed.”

  “Lockton didn’t have much when—” When what? We were together? We were in high school? I don’t want to talk about fucking high school. I was glad to graduate and leave it behind. Lacey was the only silver lining.

  She picks up her napkin and threads it between her fingers, then pats at her mouth. “No, it didn’t.”

  “You wouldn’t have eaten it even if we did have it then.”

  “Damn right.” Lacey smiles and wrinkles her nose, which is the cutest fucking thing I’ve ever seen on a person. She’s always done that when she thinks she’s said something especially funny.

  “So what changed your mind?”

  “My roommate.”

  “Which roommate? I don’t remember—”

  “It was my second-year roommate, Bethany. You never—I didn’t meet her until the end of freshman year. We connected in a biology class.”

  “Over what?”

  “Over really hating biology.”

  “If you hate biology, how did you end up becoming a doctor?”

  “It wasn’t so much biology that I hated as the professor. He was an old pervert.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “Oh, it more than explained it. Anyway—she loved Indian food. It was her favorite. She took me to three different restaurants while we lived together so I could test them all.”

  My chest aches. I wanted to be the one to take Lacey to all the different places our college town had to offer, and instead I ripped her heart out and left her behind.

  “What is it?”

  Her forehead is wrinkled, like she’s worried, and she’s staring across the table at me with both hands on the edge of it.

  I shake my head. “It’s nothing. You’re sure you’re not tired?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s really nothing.” I must have made some kind of face. Lacey’s already shredding my guard into tiny pieces. Something in the back of my mind puts up a fight, tries to argue that this is a mistake, a mistake, a big fucking mistake, but the throb of my heart won’t let me leave her.

  Not now.

  Any moment, this could all fall apart around me. I know it’s going to fall apart in my hands. That’s just the way my life has gone, and that’s the way it will continue to go. But can you fucking blame me for wanting to stay right here in this crazy afterglow for as long as it lasts?

  “I still don’t believe you.” Lacey’s looking at me with narrowed eyes. She’s pushing me, like she used to push me back when we were together. Together the first time. I have to keep reminding myself—we’re together again now. We’re together. She’s mine.

  “I wanted to take you to the Indian restaurant.”

  She shakes her head back and forth, a quick little motion of confusion. “Well, what time did they close? We could always go eat there in person when—”

  “At college.” The truth is bubbling up, and even though I hate it, I hate the feeling I have whenever I’m admitting some weak bullshit like this, I don’t k
now who else in the world I’d possibly say it to. “I missed out. I fucking—” My jaw locks up, and I have to work to separate my teeth. “I wanted to be the one to take you to all those place. I had to claw my way out of high school, and for a second, for a fucking second, I thought I might get the chance to—” My voice is getting loud, out of control, but Lacey doesn’t lean back. She doesn’t look at me with wide eyes, get timid, creep out of the room. She’s not afraid of whatever it is that’s pouring out of me right now.

  No. She simply stands up and crosses over to me, puts both her hands on my face, and tilts my chin up so that she’s looking directly down into my eyes with a little smile that makes me want to peel all of her clothes off and carry her upstairs.

  “I don’t care about college.” Her voice is low, smooth, like expensive liquor. “I wanted you to take me, too.”

  The heated anger flashes again, curdling my stomach. “And you’re not pissed off that I fucked it all up?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “Because—”

  “Why would I be, when it’s just like you said, Crosby?” Then the grin turns wicked. “We’re making up for lost time.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Lacey

  “Oh, God.”

  I don’t want to think about what—or who—Crosby’s been doing for the last eight years. The only reason my stomach isn’t hot and sick with jealousy is that the time has smoothed out some of his rougher edges.

  Not all of them. Not the ones I like.

  “God has nothing to do with this.” He sounds so confident, that deep voice slipping over me like perfectly rough hands.

  He thrusts into me again, but slowly, so damn slowly I want to scream, but I know he’s smiling that dirty smile of his even if I can’t see it. He’s taking his damn time.

  I love it.

  I feel every inch of him, every ridge, every curve, spreading me around him. We’ve always fitted together like we were meant to be, but now somehow the sensation is intensified to a degree that makes me want to bury my face in the comforter to hide the moans that keep escaping from me.