by Viv Daniels
“Still waiting for the tow truck?”
I looked up. The handyman—Boone— stood on the walk, his magnificent arms crossed over what I knew was an equally magnificent chest.
“I’m going to be here a few hours.” My voice was raspy, like there was something in my throat. Well, other than that pesky lump.
“That so?” He regarded me. “You okay?”
“Aside from being stuck out here? Peachy.” I reached into my purse for my sunglasses. I didn’t like how he was looking at me now. It wasn’t the appreciative stare from the rooftop, but something more.
“Come on,” he said, and he held his hand out to me. “You need to get out of here.”
“I have to wait for the tow truck.”
“Which won’t be coming for a few hours?” he reminded me.
“Yes, but—”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Good. Then you need to get out of here, and you need a drink.”
Four
It wasn’t a total dive bar. There were two different beer taps, and three kinds of whiskey, and two kinds of every other liquor, and one of those trays where they keep twists and cherries and olives for martinis. But when I ordered a glass of white wine, both the bartender and Boone made a face and told me I didn’t want to do that here.
“Fine,” I said. Probably came out of a jug, anyway. “Vodka cranberry.”
Boone had a beer.
“I usually drink wine,” I explained when the drinks came. “I was in Europe this year, and I really developed my palate.” Oh, crap. Why had I said that? Boone didn’t care about my foodie creds. That was all Dylan.
“No beer?” he said. “Not even in Germany?”
“Riesling.”
“Britain?”
I stirred the straw in my glass and shrugged. “Everywhere I went in Britain had decent wine.”
“Oh yeah?” Something about the way he said it seemed a slight, like I didn’t go to any of the cool places. “Where did you go?”
“Why? Have you been to Britain?”
He nodded and took a sip.
“London,” I said. “Bath. Edinburgh.”
“Cool.” I’d expected him to tell me about his visit, but he didn’t.
I took a long drink from my vodka cranberry for fortification. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
Deep breath. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
Phew. I don’t know why hearing that he wasn’t some thirty-year-old grown man made me feel more at ease, but it did. He was like any guy on the Canton campus.
That was idiotic. He was like zero guys on campus.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Twenty-one.”
“Baby,” he joked.
“Old man.” I smiled. “So what are you doing to my neighbors’ roof?”
“I’m building some stadium seating,” he deadpanned. “I thought it might be nice for your audience to watch in comfort.”
“But what will your audience do for entertainment once you’re done?” I replied.
He chuckled. “Fine. But I do want to make sure we’re on the same page. I’m not some Peeping Tom. You started it, watching me. You’re a…Peeping Tammy.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“You made it a thing.”
I considered that. “I prefer to think of it as a mutual admiration society. You look very nice with your shirt off.”
“You look very nice in a bikini.”
“See?” I held up my hands. “Nothing creepy. Just two people appreciating the view.”
Before we’d left the yacht club, I’d gone to one of the managers and left a message for the car service to wait for me until I got back with Boone. I’d pointed him out to the manager, who’d just nodded. He probably knew Boone from his work at the club.
See? Nothing dangerous. I watched too many horror movies.
I dipped my head to take another drink, and realized there was nothing left but ice.
Boone still had half his beer. He eyed my empty glass. “Should we maybe get some mozzarella sticks or something?”
“Yes, please.” I tapped the rim. “And another.”
“You sure?”
“I have a car service driving me home,” I said. “I might as well take advantage of it.”
“Good point. So, Hannah, what do you do when you aren’t being ferried around in a town car or hanging out at your beautiful backyard pool?”
“I go to Canton. I’m a junior.” I braced myself for what would come next.
Boone didn’t disappoint. “What are you studying?”
But I surprised myself by being honest. “I don’t know.” Usually I just said whatever my last major was. Marketing in this case.
He nodded and took another drink. I watched the muscles of his neck move. Now there was something you couldn’t see from across the fence. He was a work of art. “Yeah. Buddy of mine tried college. He was two years and 30K in before he realized he didn’t have a clue why he was there.”
That was it exactly. I didn’t know what I was doing at college other than it was the thing I was supposed to do after high school. I didn’t know what I was doing at Canton other than it had been a Swift tradition for nearly a hundred years. I was just checking boxes, but as soon as I got to the only box where I was supposed to choose for myself, I was utterly lost.
“What do you want to do?” Boone asked me as the bartender set another glass at my place.
“Not a clue.” I tossed the straw and took a real drink. You know, I wasn’t sure if I liked vodka cranberries. It’s what my friends and I ordered at bars, but it was…tart. Especially when you had a big mouthful instead of a ladylike sip out of the tiny cocktail straw. “What do you want to do?”
“Get the boat done by fall. Find some other issue with the roof that needs me up there every afternoon, so I can keep watching you.”
“You don’t need the roof as an excuse now,” I said softly. “We’re here.”
He turned to me, and there was a question in his pale eyes. “Yeah. Well, I never thought that would happen.” Then he tilted back his head and drained his glass.
I laughed, and he looked at me.
“What?”
“The way you said that and then took a drink. It sounded like you meant the opposite.”
“What, like I was playing ‘I Never’?”
“You know ‘I Never’?” I cast him a skeptical glance. I’d only ever played it at slumber or sorority parties.
“I did grow up in America, Hannah.” He rolled his eyes and gestured to the bartender. “You make an ‘I Never’ statement, and anyone that it’s not true for, including you, has to take a drink.”
“Right, yeah.” Suddenly, I felt very twenty-one. Boone probably thought ‘I Never’ games were stupid, spoiled, college-kid crap.
The bartender put down two more drinks in front of us. Boone picked up his beer, gave me a long look, then said. “I never took a ride from a good-looking stranger.”
I drank. So did Boone.
Staring at him, I said, “I never took my shirt off just because I knew someone was watching.”
He laughed and took another drink. “So no Mardi Gras then?”
I affected shock. “What do you take me for?”
He looked me up and down. “You’re right. You aren’t the kind of girl who’d strip for plastic beads.”
“I never stripped,” I said. “Not for anything.”
Boone drank again, and I blinked in wonder. Maybe I was in over my head, here. Twenty-two or not, Boone wasn’t like most guys I knew.
“I’m beginning to wonder if I could ask any question you’d keep your glass down for,” I mused.
“I never picked up a girl at a bar.”
Glasses down.
“No?” he asked.
“A girl?” I shot back. “Never.”
He shook his head. “Your turn, smartass.”
I
worried my bottom lip with my teeth. Okay, Boone. Let’s see where we’re going with this. “I never tried to pick someone up at a bar.”
Drink. Drink. Our eyes met over the rims of our glasses and a luscious heat flooded my body.
Boone studied me for a moment, then said, “I never had sex in a pickup truck.”
Too fast, buster. I practically snorted as he took a drink, then said, “I never had sex in the coat room at a black-tie dinner.” I sipped as his eyes grew wide.
“Is there a story to go with that one?”
“I was at social with my freshman year boyfriend and we were bored.” I shrugged. “Nothing to tell, really.”
“Too bad,” Boone said. “If there was nothing to tell, why was he your boyfriend?”
“Because maybe I care about more than sex.”
“Right.” He nodded. “I’m sure you want to know their major, their career plans, and the balance in their bank account.” His tone had turned harsh.
“Ouch.” I leaned back on the stool. “No. In fact, my last boyfriend wasn’t particularly rich.”
“He’s at Canton?”
“Yes.”
“He’s rich.”
I supposed it was a matter of perspective. Dylan’s family had been comfortably middle class, but both his parents worked hard, and Dylan had taken out plenty of loans to pay for school. Still, he was better off than Tess had been, who’d needed a scholarship to even think about attending Canton. And I supposed they were both doing better than Boone the handyman.
“I don’t care about money,” I said softly. “Or career plans or whatever. I just… I never had a one-night stand.”
Boone stared at me for a moment and then, a smile stealing across his face again, he took a drink.
“Oh,” I blurted, as I realized what I’d said.
“Oh.”
I cocked my head at him. “In a pickup truck?”
“No,” he admitted. “That would be a new experience for me.”
Something must have happened to the air-conditioning in this bar. Why else could it have gotten so hot in here? My skin felt flushed, and the fabric of my sundress chafed against my nipples. I wondered if Boone could see them through the bodice. I usually liked being small-breasted enough to get away with not wearing a bra with strappy dresses, but when I was as turned on as I was now, it left little to the imagination. I shifted on my stool and looked down at my drink. Little more than ice left, but there was still an untouched vodka cranberry on the counter in front of me. I wondered where those mozzarella sticks were.
“I never wanted to have a one-night stand,” Boone said now. He watched as I picked up the fresh glass and took a sip. It was true. I’d tried plenty of times in Europe to get into the swing of things, but it hadn’t worked out. I wasn’t that kind of girl.
When I was done drinking, I glanced at him. He hadn’t taken a sip. “What, you never wanted any of the one-night stands you were a part of?”
His gaze was piercing. “Not until tonight.”
“This isn’t a one-night stand,” I insisted.
“Not yet.”
I straightened. Forward, wasn’t he? If he thought I was going to let him into my pants just because I kind of liked it when he watched me swim, he had another think coming. “I never had sex with a guy I just met.”
“I never had three orgasms in one night,” he shot back, then took a big gulp of his beer.
“Should I be impressed?” I scoffed. “Better would be if you’d made someone else have three orgasms.”
“I’ve done that, too.” He clinked his glass against mine with a knowing smile.
I scowled…but did not drink, which only made his smile wider.
“Those Canton boys don’t know what they’re doing, huh?”
How was I supposed to answer that? I had very few complaints about my sexual experiences thus far. Sure, I was disappointed I hadn’t had that crazy European affair like in the movies, but I wasn’t frigid or anything. I’d had sex. I’d had good sex, even.
I mean, I thought I had. I thought Dylan and I were having good sex, before everything went south last fall. But no, I’d never had three orgasms…
“You know what?” I said, and put my drink down. “I call bullshit on that.”
“Want to bet?”
“No.” I sniffed.
“Because you don’t want to sleep with me or because you know you’ll lose?”
I gaped at him. “I—”
“I’m just trying to figure out where you’re coming from, Hannah,” he said casually. “The last thing in the world I want is to put any pressure on you. Slightly above that is playing games. I mean, other than ‘I Never.’”
I admit it, I did smile at that.
“But obviously I think you’re really hot, or I wouldn’t have done that whole routine for the past few weeks. I think you feel the same way.”
“Yes.” I jerked my head up and down, while staring resolutely into the bottom of my glass. “You’re very hot.” I was very hot. The straps of my sundress cut into my shoulder blades. The clip in my hair felt like a vise. My thighs were pressed together so tightly I was probably building muscle tone, and my breath was so shallow I was surprised I wasn’t seeing stars.
“And if that’s all that was, that’s fine, too.”
I dared to look up at him. His face was calm, kind, but his eyes on me were intense and intimate, like he could see right through my dress to everything that was going on underneath, like he could see right through me. Yeah, this guy could give me three orgasms. He was practically giving me one just by looking.
This was the point, in Europe, where I usually backed out of the whole situation. I mean, nothing had ever been as blatant, as wild as this. Boone hadn’t even touched me, and I was ready to melt. In Europe, it had been the usual flirtation, maybe some drunken making out. But then I’d always made my excuses and gone home to my hotel alone.
Because that’s what Hannah Swift did. When it came right down to it, I’d never pulled the trigger on the crazy, bohemian European fling because I thought I wouldn’t be able to come back to my proper life afterward. That it would change me, that checking that one box, that taking that one drink in every “I Never” game ever after, that it would make me not Hannah anymore. Not the Hannah I was supposed to be; the good, sweet Hannah my parents had raised me to be.
Except I wasn’t that girl anymore, was I? Now I was the girl who knew exactly how false it all was, and whose dad wasn’t going to be proud of her no matter what she did, because she knew the truth and she’d made him pay for it.
I could become a nun and it wouldn’t make me sweet little Hannah Swift ever again.
I took a deep breath. “I never want to sleep with you.” I drank, looked at Boone and smiled.
He took a drink, too. In fact, he finished off his beer, threw some bills on the counter, and turned to me.
“I think we should get out of here.”
I knocked mine back as well, though I knew it wasn’t the alcohol making me feel so light I thought I might float away. “I think so, too.”
Five
We got out to the parking lot, out to the truck. I went around to the passenger side, expecting Boone to unlock the door when he got in. Thrills were running up and down my spine, and my knuckles had turned white from the grip I had on my purse strap. I was doing this. I was really doing this.
“Hey.” I spun around to see Boone standing inches away.
“Hey,” I whispered.
He cupped my face in his hands, his rough, callused fingers weaving through my hair. “I haven’t kissed you yet.”
“Oh. Yeah, do that, please.”
His mouth covered mine, his lips full and slightly parted. I slumped against the door of the truck. My purse dropped to the gravel. I slid my hands around his neck, feeling the spiky ends of his shorn hair. His tongue traced along my lower lip, then dipped inside my mouth to touch mine. I sighed and pulled him more tightly toward me and he sm
iled against my mouth and deepened the kiss. He wasn’t touching me anywhere but my face, but I was alight from my top of my head to the bottoms of my feet. His hands were so large, I felt he might be able to crush my head between them, but so gentle it was like he was cradling an orchid between his palms, not a person. And the things he was doing to my mouth…
I moved my hands down his back, grabbing up fistfuls of his T-shirt and trying to pull him closer.
Boone lifted his head. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
I let out a shaky breath. “Good idea.” Any more of this and I might have ripped his clothes off here in the parking lot. I’m not sure why I wasn’t nervous, like with all those failed one-night stands in Europe, but I wasn’t. Boone’s touch melted all the fear away.
Once we were back on the road, I asked, “Where are we going?”
“I figured back to the yacht club—”
“No,” I blurted. “I can’t go back there.”
“Do you have another idea?”
I glanced at the bed of the truck, then back to Boone.
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
“You said you’d never done it.”
“True.” He thought for a moment. “Okay. I know where we can go.”
A few minutes later we were bumping down a set of sandy twin tracks through a wooded copse, which let out unexpectedly onto a narrow, deserted beach strewn with driftwood. Behind us, the setting sun painted the sky violet and periwinkle, and the heat of the day gave way to a cool sea breeze.
“Will this do?” He gave me a wry smile.
I nodded, because I wasn’t sure what to say. Yes, thanks, seemed silly and insufficient. The beach was beautiful.
“How did you know about this place?”
“I’ve camped here before. It’s pretty private…” He trailed off then, almost sheepishly. Boone hopped out of the truck, came around to my side, and opened the door. “Shall we?”
I took a deep breath, my nerves suddenly back. “You aren’t, like, a serial killer or anything are you?”
His eyes widened. “Damn, you caught me. I keep my chainsaw in the back.”
