Unwrapped

by Maisey Yates

  And now she knew what all the fuss was about.

  She was lost. In this, in him. She ran her hands over his back, wrapped her legs around his hips, letting him go deeper. And everything in her built, built until she thought she would break. Until she didn’t know where he began and she ended. Until she didn’t know herself.

  Because she was lost. In this. In pleasure. In Walker.

  In sex. She was Sarah Larsen, and she liked sex, thank you very much. And she was not, not, not, a virgin.

  That was her very last thought as the pleasure that had been building in her crashed over her and shattered like a sheet of glass. Devastating. Altering. Impossible to put back together.

  It never seemed to end, the release going on and on. Dimly, she was aware of Walker stiffening above her, thrusting hard into her one last time as he found his own orgasm.

  She clung to him then like he was the only thing keeping her on earth. Because she thought he might be.

  They were both breathing hard, and a sheen of sweat was on his chest. She didn’t care. He wrapped his arms around her and held her against him, rolling them both to the side. She rested her head on him, listened to his heart beat against his cheek.

  She’d never been so close to another person before.

  Sex had been something her grandmother had preached heavily against. That it would make a woman fall. That all a woman could be expected to get out of it was hurt and condemnation. That it was a shameful thing. That sexual desire was sin.

  Because of that, she hadn’t realized what sex could do emotionally. Sarah hadn’t realized what it would make her feel.

  She’d been so focused on the physical want, on not denying her needs anymore, on not being ashamed of them, that she’d missed the fact that there was a spiritual element to sex—the one part of it her grandmother hadn’t warned her about.

  But as a stranger held her in his arms, the full horror of what she’d done crept over her, along with a terrifying, awful feeling.

  A feeling that she wanted to stay in his bed, in his arms, in his life, forever. That parting with him would tear away a piece of her.

  No. No. That wasn’t what this was. This was her taking control of her life. Forming her own opinions and morals. Giving herself excitement. Shooting for more than okay.

  This had nothing to do with him. Nothing to do with emotion.

  But she wanted to cry. Not just cry; sob. Her heart felt too big for her chest. And she was shaking. What was happening to her? Why did she want to hold on to him forever?

  She sat up, her teeth chattering, her hands shaking.

  “I have to . . . I have to go,” she said, getting out of bed and looking around for her dress. No. It was downstairs.

  She picked up her purse. “Keep . . . keep the condoms. I have to go.”

  “What the hell?” he asked, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

  “I just . . . I can’t. I have to . . . I’m sorry.” She went downstairs and started pulling her clothes on as quickly as possible.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I made a mistake,” she said, her heart squeezing. “I made a mistake,” she said again, to herself this time.

  “My truck is at the bar.”

  “Sorry.”

  She put her coat on and rushed out the door, the cold air hitting her like a wall. She got into her car and jammed the keys into the ignition, starting it and pulling it away from the lodge. Away from Walker.

  She focused hard on not crying. On not regretting. She wasn’t going to regret this. She wasn’t. She’d made her choice. She’d taken control of her life.

  No one ever had to know. And she would never see him again.

  Chapter Four

  Sarah was ready for the day to be over. But it was ten minutes after most of the children had left, and her newest student, Kayla Callahan, was still there, looking at her with overly serious eyes.

  “Who’s supposed to get you, Kayla?” Sarah was riffling through the paperwork on her desk, hoping she had the slip with Kayla’s information on it. But she was starting to think it was still in the school office.

  “My daddy,” she said, barely meeting Sarah’s eyes.

  “Does your daddy always come and get you?”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes. He does.”

  She sounded so sad, and Sarah knew there was a story. It was helpful when this information was passed on to her, so she knew what she was dealing with.

  “Is he usually late?”

  She shook her head, her blonde curls swinging over her shoulders. “No. But he said the school was hard to find in this blizzard. And he said another word, but I’m not supposed to say it.”

  Sarah could imagine. “Okay, I’m sure he’s just lost. Does he have a cell phone number we can call?” She would just take Kayla down to the office to get the information if she had to.

  “Sorry, I’m late.”

  Sarah looked up and froze. Suddenly, that night last weekend when she’d been in a bar and looked up to see a man standing in the doorway, snow falling behind him, looking dangerous and sexy, superimposed itself over the here and now.

  Because there he was. Standing in the doorway of her classroom.

  She blinked, but he was still there. It was still him. Black hair, dark stubble on his perfectly square jaw. He was in torn, dirty jeans today, a work jacket zipped up with snow on the shoulders.

  He looked . . . he looked the same, but different. Real. Today he looked real. Not a larger-than-life fantasy, but a mortal man. And it almost made him seem even more dangerous.

  “I . . .” She reached up and touched her hair, such a stupid, girly reflex, and rued the fact that it was in a bun. “It’s fine,” she said, standing from her desk. She couldn’t acknowledge that she knew him. Not now. Oh, Lord, not now.

  Heat crept over her face, and she knew she was bright red. The full horror of it all was dawning, slowly, horribly.

  “She’s fine, she was just . . . we were just . . . about to go and call you.”

  Kayla brightened a little when she saw her dad, a smile on her little face. “I told her you didn’t forget. I told her you just got lost in the blizzard. And I didn’t say that word.”

  “Good, Kayla, thanks.” Walker smiled—a very forced smile, but his daughter clearly didn’t know that.

  His daughter. He was a father. He was the father of one of the kids in her class. Oh. Oh no. Oh no. She needed a paper bag to breathe into.

  Or that shot of whiskey she’d surrendered to him a week ago. Or, if she could go back that far, maybe she’d just reclaim her hymen. Stay home. Sit on the couch. Watch cute cat videos on YouTube. She could have bought a cat. She could have skipped men and bought a cat.

  Hindsight. Stupid hindsight.

  Instead, what she had was one blistering sexual experience that haunted her nights and that she had flashbacks to in the middle of class. In the middle of teaching five-year-olds, she would suddenly remember what it had been like to have a man’s face between her thighs and . . .

  Oh. Now she was blushing. Good.

  Just great.

  “I . . . so. You don’t live in Texas,” she said, the words slipping out without her permission.

  “No. I’m from Texas. Just moved here.”

  “Excellent. How are you liking it?” she asked, clasping her hands in front of her and smiling a smile to rival his fake smile.

  “My welcome was . . . very friendly.”

  Oh, she could have cussed. But his daughter was there. And she never cussed. “Good,” she bit out. “Happy for you. So, in future, the school hasn’t moved. This isn’t that much snow, and we’re done at two thirty. Not two forty-five.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.” He looked down at Kayla. “There are some things I’m going to need to discuss with you,” he said, his eyes flickering back to Sarah. “If we could have a meeting? And . . . is there a way she could be here, but not in the room? I don’t have anyone to watch her.”

>   “We can arrange something.” She really did need to hear about Kayla’s home situation. The girl was quiet. And sad. This was her first day, but that much was clear to Sarah. “The sooner the better.” Time to be a teacher and not an insecure little girl. “Tomorrow? Maybe after class. I’m sure Mrs. Jones in the office will be happy to help with Kayla.”

  “Great. Tomorrow. Two thirty?”

  “Yes. Blizzard or shine.”

  He nodded once and put his hand on Kayla’s shoulder. “See you then.”

  “See you then.”

  Sarah collapsed when Walker walked out, a groan escaping her lips. Of course. Of course her indiscretion would come back and bite her like this. Her grandmother had warned her.

  Of course, her grandmother had been slightly over the top and incredibly ridiculous. Obviously sex worked out fine for a lot of people. Like her friend Lucy, who was deeply in love with her boyfriend Mac and was, by all accounts, having fabulous sex with him on a regular basis.

  Lucy.

  She had to call Lucy.

  She started to run out to the car, locking the classroom behind her and pulling her phone from her purse. She dialed as soon as she was in the privacy of the vehicle.

  “Hello?”

  “Lucy, it’s me.” She put it on speakerphone and started her car—the car that had been her grandmother’s for ten years before passing into Sarah’s possession. The car that certainly looked like it belonged to an old woman: brown with a tan stripe, and roughly the size of a small yacht.

  “Sarah! I haven’t heard from you in forever. You didn’t answer when I called last week.”

  “I know.” She was a bad friend who was avoiding confessing her transgression. “I . . . I have a lot to tell you, and I’m going to be skimming over what you would call the juicy bits so I can get to the part that’s making me panic right now.”

  “Ohhhh-kay.”

  “I met a man last week. At a bar. No, that sounds like it was chance; it wasn’t. I went to a bar because I wanted to lose my virginity.”

  “You’re a virgin?”

  “No. But that comes later in the story.” She’d never wanted to confide in her new friend that she’d never had sex. So she’d just made vague allusions to being inexperienced. But the cat was out of the bag now. Although she had no cat. She’d had sex instead. Because she made terrible decisions.

  “What?”

  “I went to the bar to find a man to take my virginity, because I was tired of being the way I was. Am. You said we needed more from life than being just blah and I agreed when it was you and Mac. And, well, I agree for me too. I thought, go grab life and seize . . . stuff. So, I did. And then after we had . . . we did the . . . that, I left because I got this weird swelling feeling in my heart and I think I wanted to keep him and that’s so stupid”—she took a breath—“and then this afternoon he showed up. At my kindergarten class.”

  “He came to get you?”

  “He came to pick up his daughter! He’s one of the dads!”

  “Is he married?” Lucy asked, her tone murderous.

  “No, no. Thank God. No. But what am I going to do? Can you die of awkward?”

  “I don’t think so, or I would have died when I showed up at Mac’s house to take a position as his housekeeper.”

  She let out a long breath. “Okay, that gives me hope. I was concerned for my health.”

  “Let’s get back to the fact that you picked up a stranger at a bar, please?”

  “That’s all there is to tell, really,” Sarah said, her cheeks burning as she pulled her car into her driveway.

  Her little house looked like it always had. Neat, clean, tiny. It was part of the oldest neighborhood in Silver Creek. The home her grandmother had lived in for most of her life. The home Sarah had been raised in from the time she was a baby, when her mother, who she didn’t remember at all, had left her there with her grandmother.

  “Lies,” Lucy said. “All lies! Tell me. And why didn’t you tell me you were a—”

  “Because. Gosh. It’s humiliating.” Sarah turned off the car and got out, walking quickly inside, ignoring the chill in the air. “And anyway, okay, all there is to tell is that I went to a bar, looking for . . . that. Excitement. Whatever. And I met Walker. And it was perfect because he was a stranger, only he’s not a stranger, he’s someone I’m going to have to see! Lots.”

  “Okay, you have a dilemma. And you owe me details, but first, your dilemma.”

  She thought of the details. Of her whisker-burned inner thighs. “Oh, sure. Later.” She cringed. “But the dilemma?”

  “You have to decide what you’re going to do. How you’re going to be with him.”

  “Parent/teacher,” she said. “Strictly.”

  “All right, then, next time you have to see him . . .”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow . . . just . . . act like you’re meeting him for the first time. The man you were with that night isn’t the same man. How about that?”

  “Great. Perfect.”

  She’d known Lucy would have a solution. She would just pretend that Walker was a stranger. Again. And she would pretend that night had never happened. Easy. Totally easy.

  ***

  Walker tried, and failed, to listen to his daughter talk about the fairy movie she was going to watch when they got home. It didn’t really surprise him that she wasn’t talking about her day, or the other kids in her class.

  Kayla just wasn’t interested in friends. Not anymore. Not since his damn wife had had the guts to leave. And then the nerve to die.

  Yeah, he was pissed at her for both. Hard enough to tell your daughter that Mommy might come visit again “someday.” Harder to have to tell her there was no chance Mommy would come back at all now.

  Maybe it wasn’t fair to be mad at Elise for dying. Okay, he knew it wasn’t fair. But it had just compounded the abandonment Kayla had already felt. The abandonment he felt.

  Grief. And that was probably what it was, which was weird since in the end he’d hated that woman. Losing her, every single way he’d lost her, had hurt like hell.

  But he wasn’t focused on any of that. Not now. It wasn’t, for once, dire thoughts keeping him from hanging on to Kayla’s every word.

  It was the thought of one impossibly sexy redhead. Who was so soft beneath his hands she put silk to shame. An impossibly sexy redhead who had left the lodge while his head was still buzzing with his orgasm. And had left him to get a cab back to his truck the next morning.

  She’d sent him on a walk of shame.

  Oh yeah, and she’d been a damn virgin. Who the hell was a virgin? Not him, not for nearly twenty years, that was for damn sure.

  To recap, he’d picked up a stranger for a one-night stand, his first night of sex in more than two years. An attempt at recapturing a moment lost in time. One when he’d just been a man who did what felt good. And she’d been a virgin. She’d left him stranded. And then a week later he’d walked into his daughter’s kindergarten class and his old life and new one had collided viciously. Head-on. No survivors.

  He’d come here for a new start. A new life for him and Kayla.

  Oh well, she wouldn’t be in kindergarten forever. All he had to do was grit his teeth and make it through the next few months.

  There was no other option. He was in no place to have a relationship, no position to have an affair. He’d pretty much resigned himself to intense bouts of celibacy potentially stretching out for years at a time. But he was not going to be the dad who left his child with a nanny while he picked up random women down in the bar. It had been different the night he’d met Sarah, because he’d been away from home anyway. But he wasn’t going to abandon his daughter in search of sex.

  And he most certainly wasn’t going to be the dad who banged the kindergarten teacher.

  At least he was not going to sleep with her again.

  No, that wasn’t going to happen again. This was his new life. And now his life was all about
Kayla. She was all he had left, and he would make sure that wasn’t as much of a tragedy as it might be.

  If he had to spend an hour freezing his balls off in a snowbank before every school function? So be it.

  Chapter Five

  “She’s down in the office.” Walker closed the classroom door behind him and looked around for a seat. Sarah was sitting in a blue plastic chair at a table that was low and shaped like a semicircle.

  “Have a seat,” she said.

  “Where?” He looked around at the miniature orange chairs that were set up around the table.

  “Here,” she said, indicating the chairs.

  He arched a brow and kicked one of the little seats away from the table and sat down, his knees getting acquainted with his chest. “Nice classroom you have here.”

  “Yeah, um, thanks,” she said, leaning back in her chair, as if the table and height disparity hadn’t already put enough distance between them.

  “I wanted to give you some background on what’s going on with Kayla,” he said. Which he suddenly realized amounted to giving his one-night stand the rundown on most of his dirty laundry, which was . . . not ideal. But it was what he had to do. He had to be a father right now, not a horny lech who was looking at a sweet, innocent, recently devirginized kindergarten teacher with lustful intent.

  He shouldn’t look at her as a lover at all. She was the teacher. End of story. His life was about Kayla, not about his dick.

  “Kayla’s mom . . . we divorced a couple of years back. But Elise still came to visit sometimes. She lived out of town, but she did come for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Anyway, she died a few months back. And even though she wasn’t a big part of Kayla’s life anymore . . . she was her mom. And you can’t replace that. I can’t replace it. I’ve tried. I try to do the best I can, but I never saw myself doing the kid thing by myself. Now I am. And now I’m what she has, so . . . somehow she has to get through this. The new-school thing. Christmas. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about Christmas break.”

  Sarah frowned, her brow creasing. “She doesn’t have anyone to watch her?”

  He shook his head. “No. But I guess I’ll figure it out. Maybe it was a dumb move, coming here. But I couldn’t stay in Austin. I couldn’t stay where we’d been anymore. Too many pieces of the old life . . . it keeps you from finding a new one.”