He strode to the radio beside the bed, which was a Bose and had beautiful clear sound. After a little tuning he settled on a smooth jazz station and turned around with a devilish smile. Farnsworth responded with a flush, pulled a throw pillow over her midsection and held onto it like a life raft. Everything about what was going on screamed naughty, but she was helpless to end it.
Rev was already coatless. She’d pushed it off his shoulders when they were still by the door. As he watched her closely, observing every reaction, he toed off his shoes, took off socks and threw them behind him. He paid careful attention to where her eyes were tracking and to changes in the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest.
Dancing was certainly not a skill he would claim, but he was flexible and he figured the aspect of clothing removal was more important than actual dancing. So he began moving rhythmically, unbuttoning his shirt as slowly as he advanced on his audience. It seemed that Rev Farthing’s body had recorded muscle memory of dance moves. Maybe Sol wasn’t a dancer, but Farthing was.
Farnsworth was feeling all sorts of tingling sensations awaking parts that had been dormant for a while. She found herself feeling impatient about the time he was taking to remove his shirt. She was ready to see his exposed upper body.
When he did pull the shirt back, he was standing right in front of her. Her eyes went straight down the hills and valleys of his abs to the dark happy trail that disappeared into his pants. She wanted to lean forward and lick straight up that trail until she reached his nipples while running her hands over that flawless expanse of skin.
He motioned for her to take hold of his right cuff. When she did he pulled away and turned until the shirt landed in her lap, leaving her feeling like she’d just stripped him. Without thinking or taking her eyes away from the floor show, she brought it up to her nose. The scent was shockingly familiar. Starch, Old Spice soap and a hint of cigar, like the little black cigars Sol used to smoke. Underlying all that was something indescribably masculine that got her nether parts even more engaged in the experience at hand.
Still moving to the music, Rev’s hips and body were making slow circles, not so exaggerated as to be comical, not so insignificant as to go unnoticed. Her eyes followed his fingers as they undid his belt buckle. He began to draw it out of the waistband loops, painstakingly, agonizingly slowly.
Glancing up at his face she could see that he was clearly enjoying her obvious appreciation of his body and its performance, but he was also smoldering as much as she was. It was by far the most erotic thing she’d ever experienced.
When the belt was halfway out, he extended the buckle to her and nodded. Tentatively she reached out and took it, then pulled until it came free in her hands. He smiled like she’d done something quite exceptional.
He unbuttoned, unzipped, turned around and took a step toward the bed before letting the pants drop to his bare ankles. She already knew he had an eye-catching rear view because she’d been watching him turn around and leave her office several times a day. But the panorama of his bare muscular shoulders and back tapering to his slim waist was a whole new level of lust-driven need to salivate.
When he turned back around to face her, he was wearing nothing but black knit boxers and a smile. He walked forward until his legs were touching hers. One small piece of fabric was the only thing that stood between Rev and nakedness.
“Go on,” he said. She shook her head in an exaggerated way just like a little girl. He laughed. “I insist.”
His hips began moving again as if to entice her to submit. She was mesmerized. And he knew it. Finally, her desire to see what was under the boxers overrode every bit of warring emotion whether it was caution, anxiety, guilt, or fear. She reached out with both hands and let her fingertips slide under the waistband. The second her hands came in contact with his skin he closed his eyes and subtly thrust his hips forward as if his body was reflexively begging her for more touch.
With her heart beating as fast as if she was riding a roller coaster, she pulled the stretchy material toward her and down so that his cock could spring free. She didn’t have so much as three seconds to appreciate the glorious sight of perfect, ample young male in the fullness of arousal before he bent down, tossed the pillow aside and scooped her up.
During the brief time her mind was frozen on a loop of oh, my, my, my, my, my, he managed to carry her to bed and place her securely underneath him so that she was trapped by part of his upper body and one of his heavy legs. All thought of protest died as he began an assault of hot and sincere kisses over her neck and face. She had absolutely no desire to be anywhere else doing anything else.
Her body had already been primed by the sensual demonstration of striptease so that she overheated like a pressure cooker with actual contact. When her lips parted to release a moan, he muffled the sound by covering her mouth with his. Thus distracted, he reached under her, released the bra snaps and pulled the fabric away. As he continued to overwhelm her with touches light and firm, kisses passionate and feathery, she had no defense to offer when he lifted far enough away to pull her panties down her legs.
There was a question in her eyes once she was bared to him.
“Beautiful. Perfect for me.”
She could tell that he was telling the truth. He really wanted her. In that way. All forty-four years of her.
As he continued making love to her she marveled at how he seemed to know exactly what she wanted and needed. He knew every one of her erogenous zones and explored them like he’d had a Farnsworth instruction manual. It was heady and heavenly. And comfortingly familiar. When she climaxed, she shocked herself by calling out Sol’s name.
The instant it left her lips, she realized what she’d said and gasped. Rev had stilled. He lifted his head to see her face and found her eyes wide open and starting to tear up.
“I’m sorry,” she began. “So very, very sorry. I know it’s you and, oh gods, I don’t know how I could have said that.”
“Shhhh. It’s okay,” he murmured in a soothing tone. “Don’t be sorry. You just gave me a goal to work toward. Someday you’re going to feel that way about me.”
What he wanted more than anything was to tell her that she wasn’t wrong, that she responded to him like he was her man because he was her man. He hadn’t really realized just how hard it was going to be to keep that particular secret.
During the night, as Farnsworth lay in his arms in the dark, she told him everything about what had happened at the beach house up to and including the paramedic callously saying to his companion that she could have prevented Sol’s death with the correct application of a tourniquet.
He listened silently, her tears falling on the bare skin of his chest, as she poured out the grief and sorrow and guilt. All the while he was thinking that he’d been a selfish bastard, first caught up in getting back to life and then caught up in getting Jefferson Unit up to speed. He hadn’t really considered the extent of what she’d been through while he’d been otherwise occupied.
There as they lay together, for the first time, he put himself in her place and tried to imagine what it would have been like if she’d been the one who bled out on the beach on a cold March day while he watched helplessly. He pulled her tighter as his chest constricted and he loved her even more.
Lost in those thoughts he had to go back and piece together what she’d just said.
“What?”
“I said it’s time for me to sell the beach house. I don’t want to ever be there again. I guess I’ll go down this weekend, get the stuff out I want to keep, and talk to a realtor.”
“I want to go with you.”
After a long pause, she said, “Why?”
“It was a place you loved and it was a place where something life-changing happened to you. I’ll take Saturday off and go with you.” After all, he thought, what’s the point of getting a second chance at life if not to do some things differently? Like take a day off to go on an important errand with your girl.
“You’ll take Saturday off?” She seemed to be considering. “I don’t know.”
“Why not? Is this a one night stand?”
She sighed and made a sound like a stifled laugh. “No. Nothing like that. It just… I don’t know. Seems like it would feel wrong to take somebody else there.”
“Tell you what. Let me go with you. If my being there makes you uncomfortable, I’ll take a hike. Okay?”
“I can’t imagine why you’d want to go. Really. But truthfully, I’d just as soon not face it alone.”
“You haven’t been back since?”
“No.”
“Then I absolutely insist on going.”
Things between Rev and Farnsworth were moving at dizzying speeds. She hadn’t had a lot of relationships with men, but she knew enough to know that her relationship with Rev was highly unusual.
On Saturday morning at dark early they left Jefferson Unit in her Land Rover. The vehicle was old, but it ran and she loved that it had so much glass. It was the next best thing to being in a convertible.
Rev noticed that she was becoming more and more apprehensive as they drew closer to Cape May.
“I’m with you, Susan. You’re not doing this alone.”
He saw her face soften as she glanced over at him. “I know. And I’m glad. It would have been harder to come all by myself.”
The house smelled a little musty when they opened the door and stepped in. As Farnsworth went through the rites of opening the house, Rev followed her around trying to keep her mind occupied with questions. Like, “How long have you had this place?” “Did you always want a beach house?” “What is it about the beach that you like so much?”
When she took her jewelry box out of the dresser drawer in her bedroom and dropped her pearl necklace inside, he saw the ring he’d given her sitting alone inside one of the pink velvet compartments. That ring wasn’t designed to sit inside a beach house jewelry box like a high school memento that had outlived its day and its usefulness. That ring was made for wearing on her finger. He’d known it the moment he first saw it.
Farnsworth glanced at her watch. They still had half an hour before the realtor was to meet them there so she made a pot of coffee and they sat down at the kitchen table to wait. Ten minutes after appointment time, the realtor called to say something urgent had come up and could they possibly reschedule for the next day?
“Just a minute.” She put the phone face against her chest to mute the sound and turned to Rev. “She can’t come today and wants to know if I can meet her tomorrow instead?”
“If you’re asking if I can stay with you until then, the answer is yes.”
She nodded, told the realtor they could meet Sunday afternoon instead, and ended the call. When she faced Rev, it was evident that she wasn’t sure what to do next.
“So! We’re spending the night?” he asked, trying to sound enthusiastic. She looked around nervously and bit her bottom lip. It was heartbreaking to see his supremely confident lady so devastatingly insecure. “Or we could go get a room at that bed and breakfast we passed. Come back tomorrow.” When she didn’t answer, he added another option. “Or I could go get a room at the B&B if you’d rather.”
He watched her chest heave as she took in a deep breath and steadied her resolve. It gave literal meaning to the term “suck it up”.
“No. We can stay here. It would be silly to go somewhere else.”
Rev wanted to do something to ease the pain he was reading on her face and body language, but didn’t know that anything but time, and maybe love, could fix that.
“Let’s go back up the highway to that grocery store and get some supplies. I’ll make dinner. What would you like?”
That seemed to distract her, at least temporarily. She smiled. “You know how to cook?”
“Not everything, but I have a couple of specialties. Bam!” He made a stage magic gesture with both hands.
She giggled. “Would never have taken you for an Emeril fan.”
“Well, while we’re driving to the store, I’ll tell you about the time I was stuck in a Nicaraguan dump waiting for a guy who was supposed to deliver a Chupacabra report. There was a TV, but the only channel that came in was the cooking channel. For days I had nothing to do but watch that guy and listen to it rain.”
“Okay. Going to grab a sweater and then we’ll go.”
When she came back down, she was wearing a brightly colored hand knit sweater that truly was wearable art and Rev would have thought it was gorgeous on her except for one thing.
“What’s that?” He pointed at her chest and looked unhappy.
She looked down. “It’s a sweater.”
“No. That!”
She looked closer, following the trajectory line to the exact place where he was pointing. The sweater was a highly prized designer item that had been an expensive gift. It was covered with rows of pretty white fleeced, white-faced sheep following each other in rows, except for a single black-faced sheep that was facing outward. “Are you talking about the little black-faced sheep? It’s the designer signature.”
His eyes rose to meet hers and he realized he probably looked and sounded a little crazy. He shoved a hand over his head. “I guess this sounds crazy and I apologize for that, but could you possibly wear another sweater?”
Farnsworth let her mouth fall open. “Are you afraid of the black-faced sheep on my sweater?”
He looked like he was trying to decide what to say, but never got a chance. She burst into laughter that racked her body. It was a feeling she’d grown unaccustomed to. She held her sides and laughed so hard she actually thought it might make her sore. The fact that Rev looked so humiliated only made it funnier.
Farnsworth wasn’t usually the sort of person to find humor in ridicule, but there was something so ludicrous about the battle-hardened vampire hunter being afraid of a little inanimate sheep, part of a woven pattern on a piece of cloth.
“I’m not afraid,” he said, failing to sound convincing. “I just don’t like it.”
She shook her head and started back upstairs to change, chuckling all the way.
She had given him the keys to drive, but said nothing else after coming back down wearing a sweater that was mono color. White. He thought she was making a statement with her choice of substitute.
En route to the store, he said, “I guess it was ridiculous.”
“What?” she asked innocently while batting her eyelashes and screwing up her mouth to stifle a giggle.
“Okay. Have it your way. Just keep it up, but you’re looking at karma’s errand boy.”
That phrase completely messed up her determination not to tease him anymore. The laughter started all over again.
“You want to tell me what it’s about?”
“What?”
“Being phobic of black-faced sheep?”
He looked away, out the driver’s side window, then back at the road, but did not look at her. “No,” was all he said, but it was obvious he was pouting. She’d hurt his ego.
Staring at his handsome profile for a few beats, she was thinking that everyone is entitled to a few quirks, a few eccentricities, and a few secrets. “Okay. I know it wasn’t that you were bitten by one because they’re herbivores. But that’s all I’m going to say. Subject closed.” True to her word she didn’t say anything else about it. Right after one last muffled chuckle.
They argued over whether to use red peppers or green peppers and finally compromised on both. Oddly, even the arguing felt like a glove worn into the exact shape of the hand.
It started to rain just as they made it back to the house, ran up the stairs, and closed the sliding glass door.
Rev grinned. “Good timing.”
The temperature dropped a little, but mostly it just felt colder because of the additional damp in the air. He built a fire using wood that Sol had brought in and, again for the thousandth time, wished that he could turn to Farnsworth and remark about the oddity and bitter sweetness of that
.
They sat down on the couch in front of the fire together. With dinner a couple of hours away, there wasn’t really anything to do but be in the moment. Together.
She decided the best way to handle a silence before it became awkward was to fill it with sound. “So I guess Rev is short for Revenge?”
He angled his body toward her and reached over to finger a stray tendril of dark locks next to her face. “No,” he said with a light of amusement dancing in his eyes. “Short for Reverence.” And that’s what she would call the emotion being projected back at her, but she didn’t trust it. Couldn’t trust it. People just didn’t fall in love so fast.
He leaned over, lowered his voice, and said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
Her body betrayed her in a series of quivers. She asked herself if she wanted that and the surprising answer was yes. She thought making love to a man who wasn’t Sol, in that place of all places, should feel like a betrayal, but it didn’t.
Before they arrived she would have said the same thing about teasing and laughter, that it would feel horrible, that it would be an affront to her relationship with the man she loved – the man she would always love. But she didn’t feel guilty about laughing with Rev. It didn’t make her feel bad at all. It was more like the easing of a giant burden.
Without another word she rose and walked to the stairs.
They made sweet love that afternoon with rain falling on a roof that had been built before modern codes required sound-muting insulation. It was lovely.
It was also eerie that he seemed to know exactly what she liked in bed. All the little familiarities that lovers usually learn through time and experiment. Like the fact that she liked her nipples tweaked but not pinched, that she liked oral sex right after a recent shower, that she liked breath on her ear, but not tongue in her ear, that she liked nipping but not biting.
Knights of Black Swan, Books 7-9 (Knights of Black Swan Box Set Book 3) Page 16
