“Yes?” she breathed, before emptying her second glass, unable to tear her gaze from him.
“I…I…” He seemed insecure, as if he didn’t know how to continue, and oddly, that hesitance had her wanting him even more.
It was weird, really. She had never been with any man other than Paul, and he had done his best to mold her into a submissive, unfeeling vessel for his Saturday night needs. In the beginning of their relationship, she had felt something awakening in her, a little spark of lust that had begged to be increased into something more, something fulfilling.
It had never happened, though. It had not taken Paul much time to kill that little spark, and instead she had ended up spending ten minutes every week flat on her back, with an odd sense of gratefulness as she looked up at Paul climaxing with just as much control as he controlled everything else.
She didn’t think Ben would be as controlling.
As a matter of fact, she most definitely thought Ben would become quite upset with her if she didn’t enjoy the act as much as he did. Or more. Ben was not the egotistical psychopathic statue that Paul was. No, Ben was a man of flesh and blood, with a body she needed to feel against hers and hands she was sure would be able to fully cup her aching breasts.
With cherry wine courage, she stood up and faced Ben, who still stared at her. Aware that she had to move fast, before her brain woke up from its daze and told her exactly how scandalously out of character she was behaving, she moved over to him, placing herself between his legs.
Brazenly, she grabbed his hands and placed them on her breasts. Both Ben and she moaned, in chorus, and normally she would have found that ridiculous. But not now. Not as her whole body burned with a need she had never before experienced. A need she could see echoing in his eyes.
Without removing his hands from her breasts, he stood. “Are you sure?” he breathed, and she nodded in response.
With a groan, he leaned forward and kissed her, and she recognized all the fire burning inside him. Leonore, whimpering, pressed her body against his, forcing him closer with her hands. Her obvious response to him had him kissing her even more deeply, and she felt ready to faint as his hands worked their way downward until they reached the hem of her skirt, pulling it up with slow, hot movements.
Her briefs disappeared like dew in the morning sun, and as he lifted her up and pressed her against the cold stone wall, she could feel him throbbing against her. She wrapped her arms and legs harder around him, and for a second he let go of her lips and smiled warmly at her.
“You sure make the idea of keeping you here in the cellar pretty alluring.”
She giggled, amazed that he could stop and joke with her in the middle of the act. Tension she hadn’t been aware of washed away, and she leaned forward, nibbling lightly on his lower lip as her hand slipped down between her legs, grasping his throbbing member, forcing him gently even closer to her. She didn’t know or care when he had opened his jeans.
“My cellar is just as secluded. Perhaps I should keep you there?” she said into his mouth and moaned as his tongue entered her mouth.
She came with the force of a nuclear explosion as he thrust into her, and he didn’t need to move many times before he followed her into orgasmic heaven. Without leaving her, he sat down on a chair, his legs shaking under her buttocks. “Oh, my God, Leonore. You make me act like a schoolboy.”
She just had to kiss him.
Gently at first, but more intensely as she felt his response, she deepened the kiss until she felt him harden inside her again. This time it took a little longer for her to reach satisfaction, and as she rode him she didn’t let go of his gaze once, enjoying his honest sexual reaction.
“I usually have a more stamina,” he groaned as he lifted her off his lap, looking toward the ceiling, where they could hear light steps moving over the floor. “But right now I am thankful for it, as it seems Miss Emerson is up and about.”
“Do you think she heard?” Leonore said with a small, embarrassed grimace, feeling more awkward by the minute.
“Kelly? God, no. She wouldn’t hear if a tornado knocked on her door. Didn’t you hear the music? She plays it loud enough to wake the dead, I think.”
When Kelly opened the cellar door with a large bang and stomped down the cellar stairs, Ben and Leonore were sitting on their respective chairs again, fully dressed and sipping on cherry wine.
“Dad, can you drive me to town?”
Leonore had to purse her lips to hide a smile as Ben sighed deeply with a calculating look toward his daughter.
“Kelly, there’s a storm outside. I can’t drive you anywhere.”
“But I want to go to town,” Kelly whined, not listening at all. “Everyone is meeting at Rosa’s in an hour, and I have to be there!”
“No one will go to Rosa’s, honey. The diner is probably closed already. I don’t think the Sweets expect guests in this weather.”
“But Da-ad…”
“Yes, Kelly?”
“Dave will be there!”
“And yet I remain unpersuaded.”
Glaring at Ben, Kelly’s nostrils flared as she desperately searched for some way to get her old, obnoxious father to understand the importance of her situation. It was almost comical to watch the near-teenager as she moved her gaze from Ben to Leonore and a smug little smile vaporized the glare.
“Leonore, don’t you have somewhere to be? I bet you can’t stay here all day, waiting for Dad to decide that the storm is going to stop.”
“I’m fine,” Leonore managed to say without laughing out loud.
“Are you sure? Staying here in this mess of a home must be a nightmare for a tidy person like you.”
“Kelly!”
The younger Emerson clearly sensed some sort of victory. “Or what was it you called Leonore the other day, Dad, when you and Grandpa discussed how you should be able to get to her at Valentine’s Day?”
“You better stop this, young lady. You are way out of line.”
“Really? I am out of line? So calling Leonore a boring nitpicker with a fancy stick up her bony ass was all right then?”
Leonore froze. Listening to Kelly’s young, angry voice reciting her father’s malicious words about her person hurt more than she ever had been hurt before. Not one of Paul’s harsh descriptions of her had hurt like this, because Paul might not be a good person, but at least he didn’t pretend to be someone he was not.
Ben had lured her into his web, deceived her into believing him to be the same warm and caring person she remembered from years earlier. Knowing how much Granny had appreciated him, she had not once stopped long enough to make up her own present opinion of him.
Oh, Lord, she was such a fool.
Ben stood up, one hand resting on his hip and the other pointing angrily toward the stairs. “Go to your room. I don’t want to see you again until you are ready to apologize.”
“I’m sorry,” Kelly snorted, crossing her arms over her chest.
“An honest apology, not just two words that don’t mean shit. Do you understand what you have done? Do you understand how utterly rude you just were?”
“You are the worst father ever!”
Silently, they listened to Kelly stomping through the house again, until her door was closed quite loudly and the thumping music was turned on again.
“It’s amazing that all the windows remain unbroken, with that level of bass streaming from her room,” Ben joked, as he turned to face Leonore again. Then he took in her attitude as she stood feeling more like a rape victim than a woman who had just had two most fulfilling orgasms. He lost his smile, and a worried frown grew on his forehead.
“Leonore, I’m sorry about what Kelly said. She was all out of bounds. I am in shock over her horrible treatment of you, and rest assured, she will not go unpunished for this.”
“It’s not Kelly’s fault,” she said with numb lips, wanting nothing more than to do exactly what the younger Emerson had just done: leave. But she couldn’t.
She had nowhere to go. No door to close as hard as she could. No, she had to stand here, in this unfriendly, cluttered house, with this man she’d foolishly made a little hole in her mental wall for, who deviously had shown her exactly how gullible she was.
“Still…” He sighed, unaware of the chilling turmoil he had created inside of her. “She knows better. I feel like such a failure when she acts out like that. I am sorry, truly I am.”
The Leonore who had stood here before Kelly’s arrival would have smoothed things over and maybe kissed him a little again, excitedly pressing him toward the cold cellar wall this time.
But she wasn’t that person. She was a boring nitpicker with a fancy stick up her bony ass, and she had in the heat of the moment forgotten all about it. Paul would have shaken his head most patronizingly if he had known.
“Never believe that you are special, Leonore Brody,” he would have said, as so many times before. “You are as dull and bland as a person can be, and all you can do to save yourself from blending into a whitewashed wall is to keep up a façade good enough to fool people into believing you are more than meets the eye.”
For a minute, Ben had made her feel special. For the smallest moment, she had felt almost alive. She had felt wanted.
Lord, she was such a fool. When would she ever learn?
“I have to go and talk to her, before she knocks down the house.” He hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, looking back at her over his shoulder. “You do understand that nothing she said is true?”
Somehow, she managed to nod and smile, and reassured, he grinned back before leaving her alone amongst the jams and chutneys, her broken heart shattered on the floor at her feet.
Chapter Five
She spent the rest of the evening in the kitchen, cleaning everything repeatedly until every surface was spotless.
A sour-faced Kelly emerged before bedtime, properly subdued into apologizing. With no kids of her own, Leonore guessed that “Dad says I must apologize, so…(deep sigh)…sorry” was enough, because afterward Ben beamed with fatherly pride, and Kelly looked pouty but relieved.
“Thank God that’s over.” Ben laughed as Kelly disappeared in a much quieter way than the last time, grabbing Leonore by the waist and gently nuzzling the side of her neck with his lips.
She didn’t feel a thing. Not even a spark. Or…well…there was a little spark, or maybe a rather big, shivering spark, but it had to be just a memory of what had happened earlier. Before she had learnt, as always, what a loser she was.
Noticing her lack of response, Ben let go of her, slowly.
“Leonore? Is there something wrong?”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“How can you ask me if anything is wrong?” she almost sobbed, tears in her eyes. “You were there too. In the cellar. Listening to Kelly repeating your own words. And you ask me if there is something wrong?”
He took a step back, looking at her, puzzled. “Are you making fun of me, Leonore? You can’t possibly believe I would ever say anything like that about you. And in front of Kelly, too?”
“Are you saying your daughter is a liar?”
“She is a teenager!” His strained voice reeked with disbelief. “They don’t live in the same dimension as we do. Heck, they don’t even speak the same language! You think you say, ‘Go clean your room,’ or ‘Go do your homework,’ but all they hear is, ‘Go to your room and spend your time in bed watching videos of some really foul-speaking youngsters, or playing games on your cell phone.’ ”
It did make sense, what he’d said. Really, it did. She wasn’t so oblivious to the surrounding world as to not have encountered the strange human breed known as teenagers.
But then again…what Kelly had said…
Leonore had heard Paul tirelessly paint the same picture of her too many times, in too many ways. If Kelly had lied, then she’d have to be clairvoyant, at the least, because she had nailed Paul’s version of Leonore bang on.
To think that Ben thought the same of her…
Ben, who in one day had turned her whole world upside down and made her, from out of nowhere, suddenly have hope for the future.
Ben, who looked at her as if she were a newly baked apple pie, ready for him to devour, and had her willingly, mentally, bathed in vanilla sauce just to make the experience even sweeter.
Ben, who had always been there, safe and down to earth, someone both she and Granny had trusted completely, which was the one and only reason she had gone down into the cellar with him.
It hurt.
“I can’t believe this.” Ben sighed, frustrated, dragging his fingers through his hair. “I-I know we sort of just met, and that we did a hell of a lot more than I’ve ever done on a first date before, but this… H-how can you believe that I would have said those things about you? I don’t even know you. The Leonore I know is the highly beloved granddaughter of a woman who couldn’t praise you enough. But frankly, now I don’t think she knew you at all either.”
He stood there, looking just as confused and sad as she felt, and her heart cried because she didn’t dare believe him. What if Kelly had said the truth? What if the true liar in the house was the man standing in front of her, looking all honest and handsome?
She didn’t know what to say. If only she could turn back the clock so she could do what she’d instinctively wanted to do this morning—refuse to go with him. She would not have experienced the wonderful sex, the extraordinary fulfillment they had found together, but in the end that really didn’t matter to her. Because refusing him would have meant no heartache, and she would never have fooled herself into thinking herself worthy of this man.
Now she knew better. Paul had spoken the truth all along, and if she had listened more closely to him she would have remained in blissful ignorance. But instead she had followed Ben like an apathetic zombie, falling into the depths of despair, as one of her favorite heroines once had said.
In the end, she didn’t have to say anything. The storm outside ripped a huge branch from one of the trees in the yard and tossed it onto the roof of the barn, which had Ben spending the rest of the evening trying to secure the roof as well as he could until the storm died enough for him to do it thoroughly.
She stood by the kitchen window, watching him carry planks up a ladder while fighting the heavily falling snow and the taunting wind. It was a hard job for a single man, but he had refused the help she’d offered.
“What good could you do out there?” he had asked, stone-faced, before going outside, dressed in as many layers as an Inuit.
Something. Anything.
She felt insulted, brushed aside as if she were nothing more than an annoying fly. She could have carried the planks from the snowy pile, across the wind-filled yard, so he just had to climb up and down the ladder, saving him time because he wouldn’t have to do everything by himself. But no…Benjamin Emerson didn’t want help from a boring nitpicker with a fancy stick up her bony ass. He obviously would rather perish all by himself than accept the help offered.
“I can’t sleep. It sounds so weird in my room.”
With large, worried eyes and in pajamas covered in colorful horses, Kelly didn’t look like the angry teenager who had unleashed her fury over them earlier. Instead she looked like just a little girl in need of a hug.
“The storm is fading. Soon it will have passed, and everything will go back to normal,” Leonore said, matter-of-factly, forcing her arms to stay folded over her chest.
“Dad looks lonely. Why don’t we go out and help him?”
“He says no.”
“Yeah.” Kelly snorted. “I guess we would only be two more things for him to worry about outside. Now, at least, he knows where we are and that we’re safe.”
She hadn’t thought of it like that. Blindly she had jumped to the conclusion that he thought her useless, but Kelly did have a point.
“I’m sorry I lied to you. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“What
?” Leonore lost her breath.
Kelly made a cute grimace that clearly showed the beauty she was turning into, just like her mother had once been. “What I said about you. About the boring stick and that. Dad didn’t say anything like that. He sort of likes you, you know. Just like I like…Dave… It’s just that Natalie Dawson does, too, and she is so sneaky. And pretty. Too pretty. And…I was just a little worried and sort of lost it. Sort of…”
A trembling sense of relief flooded through Leonore’s veins as she heard the confession. Was it true? Or was this just another lie? Maybe Ben had ordered Kelly to say this to Leonore, to erase the awkward situation.
She wanted to believe in him; really she did. Every last part of her desperately needed to believe in Ben and what they might have together. But Paul had meticulously destroyed her ability to trust anyone. Everyone but Granny. But Paul had left her, and so had Granny, in her own way. Left was Leonore, with no one to lean on. No one who would tell her what to do or what to think.
She spent the night on the couch in the living room, and the next morning a quiet Ben drove her back into town, not saying a word as they drove through the wintry landscape. After honking their way through town, he stopped outside her house and turned off the engine.
Meeting his unreadable eyes, she didn’t know how to handle this situation they had created. What had started as awkwardly comfortable had quickly become hot and yearning—until it had crashed into something she couldn’t describe as anything but no-man’s land.
“Thank you for cleaning the kitchen,” Ben said quietly, breaking the silence. “Pa will be very pleased when he comes home.”
“It was nothing.”
He shrugged, seemingly indifferent. “All right. If you say so.”
Again they sat silent and uncomfortable, side by side. Just as Leonore couldn’t stand it anymore and was mentally preparing to dive out of the truck, he turned slightly toward her, looking as if in pain.
“I’m sorry about yesterday, Leonore.” He sighed. “Hell… Nothing turned out the way it was supposed to. I promised your grandmother that we would be together on Valentine’s Day, and here I am, dropping you off at your home to spend the evening alone.”
Please Be My Valentine Page 4
