by Holley Trent
He shifted his attention to the road. Jerry was doing a fine job of pretending to scan the ground for his “lost” possession, which Ben had actually seen him tuck into one of his cargo shorts’ pockets. Trinity was bent at the waist, ankle-deep in mucky grass.
Tell her not to worry about it. That would be the honorable thing.
He cleared his throat. “I think it’s silver and has waves engraved around it.”
“Okay. Silver.” She hopped down and cringed as her feet met the soggy earth, but started running toward the already-searching duo.
Ben followed behind her, shaking his head at what he was about to do. When he got close enough, he saw Jerry’s sly wink, and in a synchronized maneuver, wrapped his arms around Daisy’s waist at the same time Jerry wrapped his around Trinity’s. Before they could react, they rolled as units into the full, deep ditch.
He held his breath as he fell back into the water with Daisy’s backside pressed to his front. It all happened so quickly that she didn’t struggle until they’d been in the water a moment, at which point she scrambled to sit up. He pushed her upright, and stood behind her, bracing himself in the waist-high water as she turned around to face him.
Her expression was one of shock. Dismay, even.
He thought perhaps she’d slap him, but before she could conduct herself in that way, they were both distracted at the sight of Jerry and Trinity, out of the ditch and now wrestling in the muddy grass several yards from where they stood.
Jerry knew his woman. Knew how she’d react. Knew that eventually she’d come around, and she had already, judging by the way she laughed and tried to press his face against the drenched soil.
Ben scrambled out of the ditch and extended his arm to Daisy.
She grasped it and accepted his aid back up into the yard. Once steady, she took a deep breath and started toward the house.
“Daisy, I…”
She turned around and pelted him in the face with a mound of soft mud. “You were saying?”
He nudged dirt from his eyes and slowly opened them to find her standing hands on hips, staring at him with her lips set in a tight line.
Ouch.
He put his hands up in a consoling gesture. “Sorry, I was saying sorry. It was childish of me. I’m getting better.”
The tension in her face eased and her shoulders relaxed from their high position near her ears. She blew out a breath and nodded. “I don’t like being taken off-guard,” she said. She opened her mouth to elaborate, but a flash of lightening crashed to the Earth very close to the property and suddenly Jerry and Trinity were blurs passing them.
“I think the storm’s moving this way!” Jerry shouted back.
Ben took off after him, grabbing Daisy’s arm and pulling it on his way past. It was as if she’d been rooted to the ground.
Halfway to the house, one or both lost traction on the soft soil and tumbled into a particularly large mud hole.
“Verdomme!” he murmured, struggling up onto hands and knees, then onto his feet. He pulled Daisy, now shivering beneath her muddy coating, up to her feet and pulled her along.
Yeah, this was a bad idea.
Although it was thirty yards farther from the house, his instinct was to pull her to the garage apartment he’d been making his home for the past couple of months. They pounded up the exterior stairs and he shouldered the unlocked door open. He pulled her into the pristine lodging and shut the door against the sideways rain.
They stood there, muddy, dripping on the terra cotta tile floor for a moment until he found his wits and nudged her toward the bathroom. He urged her into the shower with her clothes on and turned on a warm stream of water.
“We’ll have to get you something to wear, but at least you’ll be warm,” he said, stepping in behind her and readjusting the nozzle so the spray was from higher up and water showered down onto both of them.
She scrubbed muck off her face and turned around to tip her chin up so the front of her hair got wet.
He took off his shirt and twisted it between his hands to wring out muddy water. “Do you want some shampoo? It’s probably not as good as you’re used to. I buy the dollar stuff. Works fine on an inch of hair or less.”
She nodded.
He tried to ignore the bright blue of her bra through her sodden shirt as he reached around her, but it was hard to miss. It was his favorite color. He grabbed the bottle out of the shower hanger and handed it to her.
“Thanks.” She turned her back to him and began to work the hair sticking to her neck out of her collar, and he realized shampooing wouldn’t do her a bit of good if her neck and shoulders were filthy.
“Uh. Let me just get my clothes rinsed out and I’ll leave you for a proper shower. I’ll run over and see if Trinity has anything you can fit.”
Shit. What did Jerry say about make-up sex?
“I doubt she will. She’s kind of small.” She wound her long hair into a wet, messy bun at the nape of her neck and unbuttoned the first fastener of her shirt.
“Well, she’s short, so…” He stared dumbly as she loosened more buttons and slipped her sleeves down her arms. He couldn’t resist peeking over her freckled shoulder to see if the pattern continued down into the cups of her bra. No, it didn’t. Just creamy, smooth skin that gave way to dark pink areolae visible just over the top edge of her bra.
Shit.
She probably wasn’t even aware. She simply reached for the bar of green deodorant soap and lathered her neck, shoulders, and arms.
Shit.
He moved faster, splaying his toes to get the mud out and nudging down the cargo shorts he didn’t even know anymore if were his or Jerry’s. Now down to his briefs, he wrung out the shorts and tossed both them and his shirt over the top of the shower door and heard them splat on the floor. He could finish his shower later.
With a hand on the door handle and back turned to the shower spray as he prepared to exit, Daisy tapped his shoulder and pressed the soap to him.
“Can…can you get my back?” she asked. “So I can shampoo?”
He turned around and almost missed the slight widening of her eyes and the intake of breath as her gaze momentarily drifted downward. She probably hadn’t realized how much he’d disrobed.
Her own state of disrobing made the blood in his head drain to things much further down. He turned his gaze up to the ceiling as he wrapped his fingers around the soap bar. “Certainly.”
She turned, blessedly, and he worked the soap over her skin in meticulous circles from her shoulders, down her arms, the sides of her ribs, and back up to the space above her bra band. He put the soap in the little indention in the wall designed for that purpose and used his hands to spread the lather down to the small of her back.
There. That was everything, except that one little spot at the crook of her neck he perhaps hadn’t paid enough attention to. He placed his hand flat against it, and pressed his fingers around the tight muscles, kneading, massaging, until she lolled her head to the side.
“You’re all wound up,” he said, putting his other hand on the neglected shoulder of the other side.
“You mean high-strung?” She put her chin against her chest to facilitate his caressing of both shoulders at once.
“No, I don’t think so. Just…stressed, maybe?” He took a step closer and let the palms of his hands trail down her spine. “If I’d thought tossing you in the mud would upset you as much as it did, I would have shown more restraint.”
She gave her head a small shake and said in a small voice, “Stressed, yes. I’m always stressed.”
When his hands paused at her bra band she picked up her head.
“I wasn’t upset about you being playful. I just had a bad memory about something and being in the ditch reminded me of it.”
“Oh.”
He wanted to press—find out what exactly had happened in a ditch that had stunned her so badly, but wasn’t sure if she’d respond well to the inquiry. Usually he could tell when
women wanted him to probe. Usually women wanted to talk…and talk…and talk some more. This one, though… This one didn’t seem interested in sharing, and he didn’t know if it was because she genuinely didn’t like him enough or if something else stilled her tongue.
He removed his hands from her back as she picked up the shampoo again, and was about to step out when she said, “Not long after I got married, my ex-husband thought it would be fun to push me into an open septic tank.”
He stilled. “I’m sorry? You mean, a tank for waste?”
She nodded and unwound her bun. “They’re common out here. Jerry probably has a couple since he’s too far from town to get county sewage and water service.”
She squeezed a copious amount of shampoo into her palm, and then set the bottle into the caddy.
“Anyhow, we were visiting his grandmother. She lives out near Gates. I’d gone into the back yard to get laundry off the line for her since she’d been having problems with her arthritis. I had to go in and get a second basket for the sheets. I walked behind them to fetch it, and didn’t see him darting out from the side. He just kinda hip checked me, and down I went.”
Ben didn’t have a single word of consolation to offer for that. What grown man would do that to someone he supposedly loved?
She shrugged and worked suds into the ends of her hair. “We were young. Barely nineteen, I think. He was drunk off his ass.”
“That doesn’t excuse it.”
She turned, expression serious as death, and nodded as she rinsed her hair. “I know that now.”
He hoped her words were truthful. She was a woman worth something, even if she didn’t know how much herself.
When the last of the suds were rinsed away, her hands moved to the catch of her shorts. With an apologetic shrug, she nudged the fastening free, revealing a dirty horizontal line of demarcation of skin needing a good scrub. She unzipped as she turned, and before she peeled her shorts down to her ankles, Ben fled the shower.
Shit.
“I’ll leave you some towels on the toilet,” he said with his swimming head inside the linen closet. “Try to save me some hot water, ja?”
“Thanks.”
Maybe the cold water would be better for me.
He placed two fluffy white towels on the back of the commode and fled the humid room with his wet clothes tucked under his arm.
CHAPTER TEN
“Look,” Jerry said, extending his tablet computer for Ben’s perusal.
Ben turned the device sideways and studied the position of the dot on the map. Their mother’s flight had left Brussels. In a bit over twelve hours, she’d be in Norfolk.
“Are you sure she boarded the plane?”
“Pretty sure,” Jerry responded. “I was worried about the same, so I called her just before her flight was scheduled to start boarding. Sounded completely off-kilter, even for her.”
“I wonder why.”
Jerry shrugged. “Was probably worried I’d tell her never mind, don’t come.”
Trinity appeared in the archway between the kitchen and greater living area and gestured toward the other room. “Dinner is served. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for any of it. As patient as Daisy is, eventually she gave up on me in regards to the chicken. But the mashed potatoes? I mashed the hell out of those.” She pointed to her small, but firm, bicep and cocked her chin up.
Jerry goosed her rear end on the way past. “That’s all right, pix. We can’t all be good at everything.”
Daisy, dressed in a pair of Ben’s gray Belgium Olympic Team staff sweatpants rolled at the waist and legs, an N-by-N T-shirt she found in her car trunk, and with her hair swinging in a long braid down her back, wiped her hands on a dish towel and bobbed her head toward the stove.
She grinned and Ben wanted to pull her into his arms and reward her with a squeeze. Instead, he jammed his hands into the pockets of his shorts and leaned his rear against the countertop edge.
“It’s nice cooking on a stove that heats evenly,” she said. “I think the one at my house needs to be taken out back and shot.”
“Did you just make a joke, Daisy?” Jerry asked as he pulled four plates down from the cabinet. “I’m pretty sure you did, but maybe my mind’s playing tricks on me.”
“Hey, Daisy has a sense of humor.” Trinity pulled open a drawer and extracted four forks. She pulled open the one beneath it and retrieved cloth napkins. “You remember last year when Juan couldn’t figure out why all of the packing boxes were inside out?”
Jerry guffawed as he handed Ben a plate. “Yeah, he would show up for work in the morning and all the boxes he’d brought out of the shed would be assembled so the seams showed. He swore we had a ghost.”
“That was Daisy.”
Jerry made an appreciative grunt and grinned at her. “Why’d you do it?”
Daisy blushed then stared at her bare feet. “I’d been walking around a full day at work with my shirt inside out, and no one had noticed until Juan. He thought it was funny. Wouldn’t let it go.”
Now it was Ben’s turn to grunt his admiration of the trick. It sounded like something he would do, but he would have stuck around to receive his credit for pulling it off. Daisy, on the other hand, was content with anonymity. She’d done what she needed to, and backed away gracefully. She made a point without having to harangue. Hadn’t she done the same thing earlier after being unchivalrously dunked in muddy water?
Maybe she wasn’t meant to be redhead, after all. Certainly lacked the disposition.
* * *
Daisy couldn’t remember the last time she’d had such an enjoyable meal, even if she had cooked it herself. In fact, she mostly picked at her meal. The food was fine, but she was so overwhelmed by conversation, her hunger took a backburner to her curiosity. It wasn’t that Trinity, Jerry, and Ben were talking about anything particularly fascinating, but the energy between the three of them was just so infectious, it was difficult for her not to cling to their every word. And then Jerry, always the diplomat, had worked so hard to ease her into the conversation, although she would have been perfectly content with just being an observer. She didn’t have much to say, but when she talked, they at least pretended to be interested.
“Looks like the rain’s finally giving up,” Trinity said from the counter. She stood on tiptoes, staring out the window as she waited for the coffee decanter to fill with water.
“Where’s it moving, south?” Jerry asked. He closed the freezer door and clutched a half-gallon of butter pecan ice cream.
“Yeah, that’s what my weather app said. Shouldn’t affect your mom’s flight.”
Daisy stood and gave her back a good stretch. She gathered up her dishes and carried them to the sink. “Ben, if you think my clothes are dry, I guess I’ll head home. I know you guys have a lot to do tonight.”
Trinity stopped her filling of the coffeemaker, edged closer to Daisy at the sink, and cleared her throat.
Daisy raised an eyebrow and whispered, “What?”
Trinity gave her head a tiny cock toward the center island where both men were engaged by ice cream.
Daisy shook her head, not understanding.
Trinity said quietly through clenched teeth, “He’s pretending he didn’t hear you.”
“Why?”
“Jesus Christ.” She went back to the coffeemaker and gave Daisy a bug-eyed look.
“How many scoops do you want, Daisy?” Ben asked, twirling the scooper through his fingers and offering her a small smile.
“Um, one. Thanks.”
“Two it is.”
“I—”
Trinity bumped Daisy’s hip her on her way to the drawer to fetch coffee filters, effectively silencing her.
Once the ice cream was scooped and coffee poured, Daisy followed the trio into the living room where they clumped on the sectionals. Jerry fiddled with the remotes.
“You get to pick, Daisy, since you’re the guest. Guts, glory, comedy, or romance?”
&nb
sp; “Hmm.” She clucked her tongue. Which choice would make conversation least likely? It wasn’t that she didn’t like talking to them. She did. She was just talked out for the day. “Let’s go with glory.”
“All right! Superhero flick it is.”
She’d made a good choice. They were all so captivated by the fantasy and non-stop action that no one said anything for a while. They just ate, sipped, and when dessert was gone, stared at the screen.
Trinity slipped away about halfway through and returned with four glasses on a tray and a bottle of schnapps. She passed a drink around to each, and the silence continued until the bottle started making its way around, too.
Daisy lost track of how much she drank. The schnapps was so sweet she probably didn’t pace herself the way should have. At one moment, she was staring at some action figure leaping from one skyscraper to a ledge far below, and the next, she opened her eyes to find the living room dark and eerily quiet.
She sat up slowly and flexed her hand for the drink that’d been in it, but found her fingers free of it.
Given it was summer, the darkness meant it must have been past nine. The quiet of the house implied that it was probably far later.
Shit. I have to go to work in the morning.
She tried to turn her body, which had been sideways and laid out on the sofa, but her left leg met resistance as she moved it toward the floor. The firm object gave way and the pillows she thought were behind her shifted and groaned.
She turned her head as far around as she could and found Ben at her back rubbing his eyes.
“What happened?” she asked, though she could guess.
He eased back to give her some space, and she realized she would have preferred for him to stay put, pressed against her like that. He felt nice there.
“Perfect sleeping conditions,” Ben said. “Physical exertion, stormy weather, heavy meal, and alcohol.”
“Hmm.” She squinted at the red digits on the satellite dish receiver. Well after one a.m.
“I should get home. I have to get up early and go to work.”
