by Holley Trent
“Good mornin’,” he said, stifling a yawn. When he stretched his arms over his head, his shirt lifted a few teasing inches to reveal pale taut abs and a trail of silky black hair starting at his navel and disappearing into the waistband of his underwear.
She cleared her throat and averted her gaze. “If it’s a bad time, I can come back later. I…I don’t sleep well, and I was already up. I guess when I saw the sun was up I…well.” She hooked her thumb in the direction of her car. “I can go back out and bring you back some breakfast in an hour, or–”
“No, no, you’re quite fine. Come on in. You want some tea? I make it strong enough to make you twitch. Or coffee, if you prefer. That’s what I’m having.” He gestured to the inside of the apartment, once more indicating she should step through.
She grazed his side with her own as she passed through the narrow doorway beside him. “Sure. Coffee sounds nice,” she said. She’d already had three cups. One more couldn’t hurt. It’d give her something to do with her hands.
He closed and locked the door, and with a smile padded toward the kitchen.
She scanned the open living space, furnished with several pine bookcases, an abused leather sofa and an ottoman piled high with textbooks and exam booklets. There were also a couple of barstools shoved beneath the kitchen pass-through window, but the sofa looked like the safest bet. While Grant puttered about measuring coffee grounds and pulling down mugs, she scanned the studio apartment until her eyes landed on a dozen or so flattened cardboard boxes at the ready, dozens of unshelved history books and a trunk and suitcase laying open.
She got up from her comfortable spot and picked up the topmost book in the pile: a thin volume about Irish-speaking communities in the United States. She hadn’t been aware there were any. She took it back to the sofa and started flipping through it while making a casual assessment of the rest of the apartment. In the sleeping area at the opposite end of the open space, Grant’s bed was stripped, his open closet empty, and dresser drawers dangling open. Items from the kitchen cabinets were piled onto the countertops, some already wrapped in paper and taped.
“Are…you going somewhere?” she asked warily. She already knew the answer.
“Oh. The boxes and such.” He approached the coffee table with a tray bearing two mugs of black coffee, a sugar bowl, a carton of half-and-half, and the remnants of a package of muffins. He sat next to her so they were touching thigh to thigh, and at the memory of how he’d gripped her thighs the night before, she felt things down below clench.
She crossed her legs at the ankles. It didn’t help. He smelled so damned good she found herself leaning closer as he stirred his coffee. He had the kind of smell that made girlfriends steal their boyfriends’ shirts and sleep with them while they were away–the kind of smell people wanted to curl into: slightly musky, with a hint of the previous day’s cologne. And that reminded her to ask Sharon about her odd new fragrance.
“Carla?” He held her cup out to her.
“Oh! Sorry.” She took the mug and started doctoring it with half-and-half.
Grant smiled and suddenly she felt a bit less dolt-like. “To answer your question, I accepted the position in Ireland. I’m flying home on Monday.”
She stared agape before squawking, “Home?”
“Yeah, well. It may have taken me the better part of a decade to finish my degree, but I’m still an Irish citizen.” His voice was flat and listless, which stunned her because he was generally so cheerful. He tidied the stack of paperwork on the storage tote in front of them and put his feet up.
“Well, I’m sorry you’re going.” She rested her hand on his knee and gave it a consoling squeeze.
“Are you?” He angled his torso sideways so his shoulder leaned against the sofa back and he faced her.
“Sure. I…uh…I was looking forward to getting your help with my project.” She tried to avert his gaze by staring into her coffee mug, but he tipped her chin up again like he had the night before.
“Look at me,” he said. “You’ll give a guy a complex.”
“Sorry.” When she looked at him she felt like she was committing some sin and would turn into a pillar of salt. He was far too decadent a sight. “So, Monday? Wow. That’s not much time to…” She cleared her throat.
His cheek twitched from his apparent attempt to suppress a smirk. “Yeah, as soon as I get this place packed up and my things sorted. I’m going to leave pretty much all of the heavy stuff here, since I can just buy new once I get settled. Good thing about not having attachments is I don’t have to wait around for anyone else.” His smile waned. “So, tell me what you’ve brought me.” Grant put down his coffee mug and took her sheath of documents into his hands.
She stopped ogling the disheveled man and straightened up. “Oh. Apparently some distant aunt of mine kept up my father’s family tree until she died. She was able to get as far back as this man.” She trailed her finger down the page and tapped it when she found relevant entry. “A Phillip Callaghan.”
“Mm hmm. Probably came into the country as an indentured servant and earned his freedom by fighting in the war. Quite a few folks of Irish descent get admittance into the S.A.R. and D.A.R. that way. Likely came in through Philadelphia.”
“Can we tell where in Ireland he came from or where he lived? I’m wondering how the family ended up in Virginia.”
“And now North Carolina? Why do you want to know?”
She sighed. “If you were to study my family tree right now, it would look like it was struck by lightening and one side burned off. I know so much about my mother and her family, but am struggling to feel some connection to my father. His family was so small and there’s only me and my brothers left, so now I feel like I’m grasping at straws. I guess some part of me thinks if I can piece together the history, I’ll find some deep-rooted link that binds us all together. Maybe I’ll just feel…less…” She shrugged. The hell if she knew. All she knew was that it was important.
“Alone?” he whispered, pushing back a swath of hair that fell into her eye.
“Yes,” she confessed.
He pulled his hand back from her face and picked up her pile of research. “Well, most folks left Ireland during that time because abject slavery was preferable to the conditions they were enduring at home. They were all so poor and there was no public aid to be had like there is now. At least in America, they had a chance to improve their condition…if they survived their tenure. Sturdy crop of people. They were known to be hard workers, but what choice did they have? Actually, sometimes unscrupulous sorts kidnapped poor children from Irish streets to be sent here to work. The abductors would get a bit of a bounty. We’ll hope your ancestor doesn’t fall into that stolen bunch.”
She slumped against the sofa back. “Wow. I hadn’t known that was…a possibility.”
“Slavery has existed in different forms and with different names since the dawn of man. People don’t much like talking about it.”
“Apparently not.”
Grant drained the contents of his coffee mug and straightened up. “Well, I’ll tell you what. I have to go to campus today to clean out my office. There are a couple of books there I can consult and some people I can call. I think your case will be a simple matter of finding Phillip on a ship manifest. It’ll list where he’s from, at least generally. Alternately, if the original contract he signed to indenture himself exists, that should give us some information about his origins.”
She stared at him in a stunned haze. She had started the project thinking she would hit the same dead end Minnie had, but all it took to surpass her own limitations was to ask the right person for help. “I appreciate it. You don’t know what this means to me.”
“No worries. It’s easy when you know where to look.” He stood and cleared away the empty mugs and coffee accoutrement to return them to the kitchenette counter.
“Hey, Grant?”
“Hmm?” he answered with his back to her.
“You a
ll didn’t get arrested last night, did you?”
He forced out a ragged breath. “No.” He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. His jaw grated side to side.
“Well, what did happen? I felt like an idiot sitting at the table. I should have followed you outside to make sure there wasn’t a problem. I know most of the officers who would have been on duty last night.”
“We just got thrown out of the joint onto our asses and told to never come back. Good thing you didn’t come outside, because Fran would have probably picked a fight with you.”
“Fran?”
“Yeah.” Grant walked back over to the sofa and sat on the arm farthest from her. “She’s why I needed the kiss. Thank you, by the way, for the rescue. I owe you a boon. Fran would have harassed me until I flew out. I got back onto her radar a couple of years ago and ended up having to change my number and email address. She said she was willing to put the past aside because she missed me. Anyway, the guys told her I had a girlfriend, but I guess she didn’t think it was possible.”
“Why not? And do you?” Her heart thudded at the sudden possibility, but she remembered he’d said he had no attachments. A man who had attachments shouldn’t be able to kiss like that.
He shrugged and fondled the drawstrings of his pants. “No. I haven’t been in a serious relationship in a while. Dated some, but nothing came of it.”
“Well, why?”
“Why do you sound so surprised?” He narrowed his eyes as he smiled so the tiny wrinkles at the sides creased. “Aren’t you single?”
She opened her mouth, then closed as she shook her head. “I…um. I mean, you’re obviously smart and…”
He raised one dark brow. “And?”
“Andyou’renicetolookat,” she said without enunciating before funneling her energy into fiddling with a loose button on her blouse.
“I don’t know about that. I have a pretty hard time getting one lady in particular to look at me.” He nudged her shin with his bare foot. She managed a smile and gave him a sideways glance.
“My friend gave me a pretty hard time last night after you left.”
“Why?”
“Well, Meg seems to think you’ve got some dirty old man vibe going on. I mean, what must it have looked like? You making out with a former student, I mean.”
“That bother you?”
She shook her head and met his gaze face-on. He was smiling at her, and not a teacher-to-student smile, either.
“Neither of us are attached to the university at this point, right?”
“Well, not officially.”
“Right.” He slid onto the cushion beside her and twirled a swath of her hair around his second and third fingers. “I always liked your hair. It reminds me of old paintings of angels and female saints.”
“I’m no saint,” she whispered when he started to glide along her jaw with his fingertips.
“Angel, maybe? You know, Ireland is actually called the Land of Saints and Scholars.”
“I see where you fit in.” When her voice came out sounding huskier than she liked, she cleared her throat. She closed her eyes as he tickled the underside of her neck with the ends of her hair.
“I think we can fit you in, too. You can be the patron saint of lonely hearts.” He dropped her hair, and slid his hands up from her knees, pausing at the tops of her thighs.
He grazed her lips with his, but didn’t linger, laying whisper-soft kisses across her cheek and at the lobe of her ear, which he took between his teeth and pulled. When a breath escaped her lips, he said, “If you kiss me and really mean it–not like last night, but because you want to–there’s no turning back for me. I’ve waited too long for you.”
She didn’t know whether to trust him. Sweet words from a liar had enticed her in the past, and falling victim to such cajoling again seemed folly. Her last relationship was a textbook case of a small fly getting caught in a spider’s web. But, when she pulled his head back by the hair and studied his face, there was something in that solemn expression that had never been there when Otto was cajoling her: fear. So, she kissed him. She pressed her lips to his and straddled his torso with her knees, because maybe Grant meant what he said.
Chapter 6
Carla lay back on the sofa, with Grant on top of her peppering her neck with kisses and working loose the buttons of her blouse. While she worked his shirt over his head, he asked through the fabric covering his face, “Hey, you want to go to Ireland?” He didn’t want to leave anything unsaid, unasked. If there was a chance, he’d grab it.
His shirt discarded, she sat upright to access one of his pebbly nipples and took it into her mouth while reaching into the back of his pants to grab two handfuls of his rear. Something low rumbled in his chest and he wrapped his hands around her wrists to halt her exploration. “Hey, answer me.”
She released her latch on his nipple and licked upward toward his collarbone. “I’m sorry, what?”
He pushed her shirt off her shoulders and down her arms. “I thought women were supposed to be good at multitasking.”
“Whoever originally said that didn’t factor foreplay into consideration.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” He held her still for a moment so he could admire the way her breasts mounded in her push-up bra. They were small compared to what Francesca had purchased, but he’d always thought anything more than a handful was a waste. They were perfectly proportioned to her narrow waist and feminine hips. Carla didn’t need artifice. “I asked if you wanted to go to Ireland. You could do your research in person.”
She put a bit of space between them so he could see her furrowed brow. “I haven’t given making that trip very much thought. It’s not something I considered for the near future.”
“Well, no time like the present. Come with me.” He reached around her ribs and deftly unhooked the catch of her bra. With her breasts freed, he laid her back and pressed his bare chest to hers as he resumed the work of marking her neck.
She closed her eyes and moaned, digging her nails into the skin near his waistband as he carefully clamped his teeth onto her flesh.
He propped himself up on his arms to assess his handiwork. Not bad, but she wouldn’t likely agree once she saw it. “Well?”
Her dreamy expression morphed into something darker. “You’re playing with me!” Carla pushed herself up on her elbows and put her palms on his chest to give him a small shove back.
He grasped the tops of her arms to hold her still and laid her back down on the sofa. “No I’m not. I’m not some little boy who plays word games to get a woman to take her pants off.”
Her eyes narrowed a hair, but she said nothing.
“You don’t believe me? Well, I guess, why should you? You hardly know me.”
“Precisely.”
He forced out a breath through his lips and let go of her arms.
Shit. If she were any other woman, how would I be behaving right now?
No matter how hard he pondered, there was no satisfactory answer…or at least not one that could subdue his advances. Carla wasn’t any other woman. She was the woman.
When he trailed a finger around the blossoming bruises on her neck, she closed her eyes and giggled.
“Hey, look at me,” he whispered.
She opened her eyes.
“I want to confess something that’ll either scare you off or make you unbelievably horny. Hard to tell with you complicated creatures.”
When she tried to sit up, he unstraddled her and got on his knees on the floor beside her. She furrowed her brow again and covered her breasts with her arms.
Best to just get on with it. “Look, Carla, I want to help you with your project, but more than that I want to have a go with you.”
She raised one brow. “A go?”
“I…” He stood and raked his hair back from his face as he paced in front of the picture window in the living area. “This will probably sound incredibly stalkerish, but I’ve been thinking
about you for seven years, almost daily.”
“Me?” The look she wore was one of absolute incredulity.
“Yeah, you.” He crouched next to the sofa and folded his arms atop her lap.
She pushed his hair behind his ears.
He took her touch as a good sign. “Do you know how hard it is to want to give someone a hug make them feel better but you can’t because of how unseemly it would be? You were quiet before, but when you came back to my class after your dad’s funeral, I wanted to take you home and spoon you until you felt better. I probably would have overstepped my bounds if you had looked at me just once. Good thing you didn’t.”
She sat back agape. “I guess I…” She put her arms back over her chest and shrugged. “I suppose I didn’t think anyone beyond my friends was paying any attention to me.” She rolled her eyes and blew her hair out of her eyes. “Even my mother was offline. My advisor told me in no uncertain terms to suck it up because people die all the time.”
He pulled his arms away from her and leaned back onto his heels. He didn’t want her to think his fists had anything to do with her. He’d always gotten a bad vibe about that particular undergraduate advisor. Quite a few undergraduates had ended up taking his freshman-level courses late because the guy had steered them wrong. The man didn’t know how to read the handbooks, and that was his job. He steadied his breathing and tried to relax the tension in his jaw. He’d deal with it when he went to campus. “I’m sorry for that. Really, I wish I’d known.”
“It’s okay,” she said with a shrug. She was lying. Although her voice was sunny, the way her lips quivered indicated she’d just ripped open an old wound.
“No, it’s not okay. Someone should have been there. No siblings?”
“I have two brothers, but they were caught up in their own stuff. I didn’t want to bug them.”
He didn’t understand that. He hadn’t had siblings of his own, but wasn’t one of the built-in benefits of having them that they were a sort of support network? “Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess they were so busy propping up my mom that I figured I wouldn’t pile on.” Carla curled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Can we talk about something else?”
