by Anne Calhoun
She peered around his shoulder at the throng of people in the room, then looked at him. “You made that look easy.”
Something resembling a laugh huffed from his chest. “Nothing to it,” he said.
“Oh, sure,” she said, as mockingly casual as he’d been. “Because that’s not your ex-fiancée and your best friend planning the wedding that should have been yours.”
Trust Marissa to cut right to the bone. “As long as she’s happy,” he said, a little less casually. “How’ve you been?”
She shrugged. “Fine.”
Twelve years of near silence summed up in a single word, but she had every right not to tell him anything. “The house looks good,” he said.
She kept watching Delaney and her flock of attendants. “Good?”
“Amazing,” he admitted with a glance over his shoulder.
“That’s better,” she said, then looked back at him again. “Want a tour?”
Was there a hint of invitation under the simple question? “Yes.”
He could do this. He was a world champion at resisting Marissa Brooks. He’d done it since he was seventeen years old.
But now you don’t have to . . .
She led him to the center of the room, under the massive chandelier. “The house was designed by Henry Dalton Mead at Josiah Brooks’s request when he traveled west from Connecticut in the eighteen-eighties,” she started. “He’d sailed to Japan and China before he came to Dakota territory, and he was obsessed with the Japanese custom of sliding walls that partitioned off smaller spaces inside one large family home. So he had Mead build Brookhaven’s living space with that in mind.” She pointed to paneled places at the ends of the walls. “The panels slide into those compartments when he wanted an open space for parties or dances. Otherwise he would slide them out, along the runners in the ceiling to close off a smaller space by the fire.”
“To heat it,” Adam said.
“To heat it,” she agreed. “My grandfather put in a furnace. I updated it to a heat pump, but it still gets cold in here in the winter.”
She set off through the smaller groups still focused on wedding details, up the broad, oak staircase to the second floor. The upstairs resembled any other large house, with a row of white paneled doors on either side of a long hallway. She held open a door into an empty, square room with hardwood floors, a fireplace, and a large, rain-lashed window. “Each bedroom has its own fireplace. Seven smaller bedrooms share three full bathrooms, but the master bedroom has its own bath and sitting room.”
He leaned past her to peer into the room, large enough for a queen-sized bed and a chair and rug by the fire. “I remember cracked plaster. Some water damage to the flooring.”
“I got lucky. She was structurally sound, but needed a lot of cosmetic help,” Marissa said. “If you remember that, you probably remember her background. Sorry to bore you.”
“I wasn’t bored,” he said, and turned to look down at her. “You loved to talk about the house. Remember?”
And just like that, the space between them filled with the electric heat of the spring of their senior year in high school. They’d ended up out here all the time, officially trespassing because the county owned the house by then. Marissa would wander through the empty, rundown rooms, repeating her dad’s tales about Brookhaven and his family’s glory years. Adam would follow her, watching her talk, deafened to the point of hearing one word in four by the unsatisfied sexual longing thumping under his skin. Eventually they’d end up somewhere—the barn, if it was raining, by the creek if it wasn’t—in a tangle of arms and legs, tongues and gripping hands—
“I remember,” she said.
He jerked back to the present to find her looking into the room, heat staining the cheek turned to him. Goose bumps rippled along the pale skin, and her nipples peaked under the gray halter top.
Pretend that’s about chilly air, not hot longing that should have gone away . . .
“You’re cold,” he said, then cleared his throat. “Let’s go back downstairs.”
That sounded better. He stepped back, she closed the door, and at his extended hand, led him back down the stairs to the comparatively warm, brightly lit main floor.
“It looks great,” he said as they cleared the last stair, pitching his voice to carry. “You do good work.”
The look she shot him under her lashes told him he might have fooled everyone else in the room, but not her. “Thank you,” she said.
No one came to lay claim to him, so he fell back on small talk. She was watching him, her eyes curious, amused, maybe even challenging. “Still living in town?”
“No, I fixed up the servants’ quarters,” she said, tilting her head to indicate what he remembered as a tiny set of rooms off the kitchen. “I couldn’t afford to renovate Brookhaven and pay rent on the State Street house. I moved back here after Chris died.”
At the opposite end of the room Keith laughed, the sound rich and easy, his perfect teeth and blond hair catching the light from the chandelier when Adam glanced at him. Delaney looked at Adam, then slipped her hand into Keith’s.
When he looked back at Marissa she was watching him again. “You want a drink?”
To do what he needed to do, he had to stay clearheaded. He really didn’t need to add alcohol to the hot chemistry sparking between him and Marissa. He wished he could blame it on her mouth, her eyes, the length of her legs, the fact that he hadn’t had sex in over a year, but it was him, too. The heat simmering in his veins, slipping along nerves and skin to pool in his cock, fueled those flames. It wasn’t him, or her. It was them.
I’m fine sounded in his head, but what came out of his mouth was, “Yeah.”
“Come on,” she said with a tip of her head, then the swinging kitchen door closed on the conversations behind them. The silky ties of her halter hung between her shoulder blades as she disappeared through a door between the fridge and a closet, returning moments later to hand him a nearly full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey. Adam looked around as he twisted the bottle’s cap. He remembered a chipped white sink and a wood counter over Depression-era linoleum, not gleaming steel and granite countertops.
“You did this yourself?” he asked.
“Anything I could teach myself. I got help with the rest, apprenticed myself as free labor. An artist in residence at SDSU did the stained-glass windows,” she said, finding glasses in a nearly empty cupboard. “New deck. New roof. I kept it simple on the second floor, and just sanded and stained the floors and patched the plaster.”
“You do good work,” he said. He ran his hand over the granite while she poured. The joins in the granite were nearly invisible. He tried to remember what her career aspirations had been in high school and came up blank, but he doubted construction had been on the list.
“Thanks,” she said, and handed him a shot glass. She considered him for a moment, then poured out two shots. “So, Staff Sergeant Collins, what we should drink to?”
2
WAS HIS RANK an attempt to put some distance between them? Adam couldn’t tell. The outfit was sheer sex, the look in her eyes harder to read. “I’m out,” he said brusquely.
Her eyebrows lifted. “Really?”
“I start grad school in Brookings in January.”
She cocked her head and considered him over the glass. “In what?”
“Architecture.”
Her eyes narrowed, somehow at once amused and suspicious. “Architecture. That’s what you want to do now that you’re out of the Corps. You want to be an architect.”
He felt his face go expressionless. That was the plan, back before he’d ended things with Delaney. Once his future was supper for one, not two, architecture school seemed as good a career choice as any. Rural communities needed architects; he was coming home to a rural community, and he needed to do something. “I replaced my destructive habits with something more constructive. You didn’t know?”
“No one talks to me about you.” S
he said the words without a hint of inflection, no teasing, no flirting, no anger. That unemotional appearance could stem from total serenity, or a really good cover for a sea of emotions.
You should know . . .
“It’s Mr. Collins, now.” Fuck, that title sounded foreign, or maybe just wrong. He lifted his glass. “Adam, to an old friend. So . . . to old friends.”
Marissa downed the whiskey in one swallow and set the glass on the counter next to his.
“Is that what we are? Old friends?”
He’d been engaged to Delaney long enough to know when not answering a question was in his best interests. He exhaled against the burn. “Hit me again.”
With another little smile she poured out two more shots. The warm amber liquid picked up flecks of brown in the granite under the shot glass, and her gray top stood out against the white cabinets and granite.
“Your turn,” he said as they lifted their glasses.
“To reunions,” she said.
He lifted the glass in salute, and downed the shot. This time the fire seared along nerves already wide awake and tingling, and a glow ignited in his stomach.
He looked at the rim of her glass, free of lipstick, then at her mouth. Big mistake. “That color doesn’t come off?” he asked with a vague gesture.
“Special protective layer for shine and durability. Like a clear coat on wood,” she said. When he huffed, she flicked him a shuttered glance through her lashes and lifted the bottle. “Want to go again?”
“Hell, yes.”
Her hand was steady as she splashed the third round into the glasses. “Your turn.”
He thought for a second about coming home, about weddings, about life after the Marine Corps, about loose ends. About the step he had to take, and might as well take now. “To new experiences.”
She paused with the glass halfway to her mouth. “You’ve never been a best man before.”
“Nope,” he said, and tossed the shot back. He flicked a glance at the full glass she held. The silky halter top draped over her peaked nipples, and another bolt of lust crashed through him, spurred on by whiskey, exhaustion, and a sense of recklessness he thought the Marine Corps had trained out of him. “Try to keep up, Brooks.”
She swallowed the whiskey without breaking eye contact, then set her glass on the counter next to his. “It might be easier to score with a tipsy girl at the bars in San Diego, but you don’t have to get me drunk. Or maybe you don’t remember.”
This was why he’d avoided her for the last decade. The lock on the compartment holding all things Marissa was a good one. Solid. Bulletproof. Forged in the kiln of regret and anguish and fear. Walking through Brookhaven’s front door somehow warped the compartment’s walls. Memories seeped free . . . driving along Highway 12 on his motorcycle, her on the back of the bike, arms wrapped around his waist, her breasts firm and hot against his back, her thighs gripping his hips. They’d routinely done one-ten without helmets. Just riding the bike gave him a hard-on; riding it with Marissa drove him near to breaking, her hair streaming in their wake. Later, sitting by the creek behind Brookhaven, she worked out the tangles with her fingers while he watched, sprawled beside her. Her eyes alight with the same desire flaming hot and low in his belly, while he forced himself to remember all the reasons he couldn’t do what she would so willingly do.
Reason number one: you’re leaving and she’s staying.
Reason number two: no knocking up a seventeen-year-old girl.
Reason number three: feeling this much is more dangerous than doing one-ten without a helmet.
“I remember,” he said, and just like that he took another step down the path, found it scarily solid under his foot.
With a little glitter to her smile, she went on. “A best man’s job isn’t too difficult. Get the groom to the church on time and sober enough to stand up. Give a speech at the reception. They usually fall into two categories,” she said. “The first is incredibly formal and stilted, like something out of a high school speech class. The second is absolutely pickled because the groom and his posse have been drinking nonstop for two days, so they’re either drunk or hungover. Last year Tom Lewis nearly keeled over on the chancel steps before Father Dobson sat him down and shoved his head between his knees to keep him from throwing up on the altar. They did the abbreviated version of the vows, and then he went into the vestry and threw up in the baptismal font. Leanne still hasn’t forgiven him.”
He laughed, low and short. “I bet the honeymoon was a little on the frosty side,” he said absently. This speech wouldn’t be just any best man’s toast. All the guests would be watching him to see what he had to say about love, marriage, and his former fiancée and best friend.
From the look on her face, Marissa was thinking about the same thing. “New experiences indeed,” she said.
He set down his glass. “But that wasn’t what I meant,” he said.
A pink alcohol flush stood high on her cheekbones, and her eyes gleamed. Another memory long suppressed slipped under the door locking away everything about Marissa: his first kiss with her, in the pasture behind this very house, her back to a tree; her hands in his back pockets; her mouth open, hot, yielding under his. The kiss lasted as long as it took for sweat to rise at the nape of his neck, slide between his shoulder blades, and trickle down to the base of his spine, where her thumb stroked it back into the skin.
Another hard thump of his heart against his chest.
That’s desire. Lust. Nothing more. Still, you should walk away.
He reached past her to set down the shot glass, and when he did, his inner arm slid against the slick fabric of her top, warmed by her body heat. The hair on his arms stood on end, and an electric shock zapped down his spine, straight to his cock. She shuddered, the movement faint, quickly tamed, but he’d seen it.
“If you’re looking for new experiences, you’ve come to the wrong place,” she said, her voice husky from the whiskey.
He’d had every reason to say no then, and no reason to say no now.
He stepped closer. At the movement she turned to lean against the countertop, a slight, challenging lift to her eyebrow. Another step and he braced both hands on either side of her hips, bringing their gazes level.
“I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be,” he rasped.
Seconds ticked past as the voices just outside the kitchen filtered into his consciousness . . . an earnest discussion about the supper menu . . . then he kissed Marissa Brooks.
The voices faded away. She tasted like whiskey, or maybe he did, but the slow slide of her tongue against his mixed with the bite of the whiskey and sent heat coursing along his nerves to pool in his balls. His cock thickened, straining urgently against the zipper of his cargo pants.
Her hands braced against his ribs and pushed. “You think we can just pick up exactly where we left off,” she said, still husky but now unsteady.
“Pick up and keep going,” he said bluntly. Not very romantic, but this wasn’t about romance. This was just old embers, coaxed back to life by a fifteen-month deployment, fueled by alcohol. Nothing more.
Still looking up at him, she bit her lower lip, ran her tongue over the sore spot, as if tasting them together, considering the implications with a caution she’d never shown when they were eighteen. Then she lifted her hand to his nape, fingers toying with the bristly edges of his buzzed hair, then tightening to bring his mouth back to hers.
A nuclear chain reaction of chemistry exploded between them, and suddenly all he could hear was the blood pounding in his ears. The soft, pleading noise she made vibrated under his hand, splayed against her exposed throat. He stepped into her body, felt the taut muscles of her belly tighten, then relax, against the pressure.
The first sign of yielding shot through him, and he gripped her ass, pulling her against him, working her skirt up enough to get his knee between hers. But her hands flattened against his chest and pushed, breaking the kiss. “We can’t do this here,” she whispered
. “We’re in the kitchen. Your ex-fiancée is in the next room!”
He hauled open the door to the pantry, gripped her upper arm and dragged her inside, then closed the door, plunging them into blackness. The only light in the tiny, windowless space slipped under the door, and in a moment his eyes adjusted to see mostly empty shelves lining three walls.
“This is the pantry,” she said, amusement clear in her voice. “The door to my apartment is the next one.”
He knew that. It took more than three shots in ten minutes to disorient a US Marine. He found her by feel, hands outstretched, skimming the rough shelving until he encountered warm, bare skin. The hollow of her throat, then with both hands he followed the tendon in her neck to her pulse, then to the line of her jaw. He cupped her jaw and aligned his body with hers as he bent his head and kissed her. The inability to see heightened everything, the scent of her hair, the soft, wet sounds their mouths made as the kiss deepened into ravishing. Her breasts against his chest, her hands slowly fisting in his shirt. So slowly he couldn’t tell if she was distracted or savoring sensations, she tugged his shirt free from his pants, and then her hands were on the bare skin of his waist. One hand slid around to the base of his spine, and her thumb stroked over his vertebrae, the motion exactly copying what she’d done during their first kiss. The difference was that before, her hand remained outside of his jeans.
Now her fingers flattened at the top of his ass. He growled low in his throat, and found the ties holding up her halter top. A quick jerk, then he dragged his hand down her breastbone. The fabric dropped to her waist, baring her breasts to his hands, then his mouth. She quivered when he used the edge of his teeth on her nipple, her fingers digging into his shoulders. Even in the dark he could see white teeth set into her lush, red lower lip.
He slipped his wallet from his pants pocket while she went at his belt and button fly. His cock bobbed free, bumping her wrist before she turned her hand and gripped him. It must have been his imagination that a pleased little purr drifted into the air when she slowly stroked him from tip to base, then cupped his balls.
