by Whitley Gray
“How long have you been here?”
“Today? Since eight.”
Following me, he whistled. “That’s a hell of a day.”
I stepped on the water pedal and shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. You do long days too.”
“Sometimes, but then I sleep for twelve hours the next day. Are you off tomorrow?”
“Saturday? Hell, no. It’ll be busier. All the nine-to-fivers come in for the inspections and oil changes they put off all week. And I’ll still have this one to toy with.” I shot some industrial grade cleanser into my palm and reached for the scrub brush on the shelf. I glanced at Aaron. “This might take a while. You can sit in the waiting room…” Meanwhile I could slip out the back, hop into Rosie, and pray he didn’t know my home address. My name was on the garage website so I knew how he’d found me here, but while I knew where he lived, I hadn’t gotten around to sharing that bit of information with him. The beauty of having such a short-lived relationship. If what we had was a relationship in any sense.
He unbuttoned the jacket of his uniform, shucked out of it, and hooked it on the side-view mirror of a nearby sedan.
He took the brush from my hand and said, “Let me.”
“What?” I couldn’t get the brush back from him.
He met my eyes. From deep in that impossible blue, something shot warm and tickling through me like a heat-seeking missile straight down to my crotch. I was breathing like I’d finished a sprint around the block.
“Let me do this for you.” He bent into the sink and lifted my now limp hands into the water before squirting more cleanser into his own palm. He massaged lather between my fingers and over my joints and wrists, working his way up my arms. Though the water was only warm, my skin sizzled with every inch he touched.
“You don’t have to,” I said softly as he continued his work. “I’m a big girl now. I can wash my own hands.” Even as I said it, I let him wash me. I watched his tender attention performed carefully, stroking and brushing the dirt from the surface of my skin. Little by little, the grease fell away, leaving my skin pink and soft again. Lucky for me, he couldn’t see it tingling under the surface.
He raised my palm for inspection, shaking his head when he found still more between my fingers.
“You know how to get dirty.” He smiled at me before returning to his task.
I was too paralyzed to respond. His gentle touch threw my body into chaos. I’d missed him and seeing him again made me crave his touch as badly as I had when I was in California. There was something more to it this time. I couldn’t put a name to it, but he compelled me to the point that I wondered if he’d hypnotized me somehow. I was helpless to fight him, and all he’d done was wash my hands. A simple task I did myself numerous times a day, but this time it stirred me with a frightening desire.
One by one, he brushed the tips of my fingers so that the bristles cleaned under what there was of my fingernails. I banked a smile, remembering the look on his face back at the restaurant.
“Do you do manicures too?”
He looked into my eyes. “If you want me to.”
Thank God my hip was leaning on the sink, or I’d have crumpled to the floor.
“Oh.” I thought I said that, but I wasn’t sure that was my voice. His gentle touch wore me down until my resistance burned out of me like a supernova. Could there be anything more seductive than having this gorgeous man patiently wash my hands?
We weren’t going to work out, but the rest of my anatomy knew what it wanted and had no reservations about going for it. One more night wouldn’t kill me. My heart, for its role, would just have to keep silent.
When he finished caring for my other hand, he looked around. “Towels?”
I took my foot off the water pedal. A gallon of water had probably gone down the drain before I realized he was speaking. I nodded to the shelf beside the sink. “Right there.”
His brows creased as he unfurled the white sheet of paper. “You need better than this. It’s not soft enough.” Still, he used it to wipe my hands off, taking care not to leave a molecule of H or O anywhere. Finally, he let go, resting my hands on his palms. “Better?”
I looked at my hands. They were clean. I did that all the time but never like this. The tingling in my palms vibrated all the way up to my breasts. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He leaned down and kissed the backs of my hands, each in turn. “You look great. I didn’t say that before.”
“I’m in overalls.”
“I see that. I assume you don’t wear those to go home?”
“Sometimes. If it snows. It’s kind of warm in here tonight.”
His brow shot up. “Is it? Need to cool off?” I stood there, paralyzed. When I didn’t answer right away, he reached for the zipper. My breath caught and his hands stopped. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
Yes, very much so. I shook my head.
Oh, that smile. If he’d done that first, I’d have peeled out of the one-piece before he even asked.
He pulled the zipper down. His voice was low. “You look scared. Is that why you ran away from me?”
How had he managed to scramble my brain cells? Nothing in my head made sense. Probably because I was tired, but still, it was going to be hard to find my way home this way.
“A little.” Way to stay strong, Grace. I’d planned to say no, but the way he looked into me, I had a feeling he’d see if I were hiding something from him. I wanted to hate that he might know me that well, or maybe I was just too weak to resist.
“Why?” His hand was parallel with my breasts which, being traitors, all but cried out for a moment of his attention. Even my breathing seemed to be in league with them, upping their pace to push my breasts almost into his hands. Looking down, he must’ve noticed this and licked his lips. Definitely change of panties time. Or better yet, I could make the ones I was wearing disappear.
He looked at me again, and his lips almost curved. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me now. You can tell me when you’re ready.” He lowered the zipper more and then looked down. “I’m going to need to take your boots off.” He let go of the zipper and knelt in front of me. The move almost set my panties on fire. Carefully undoing the laces, he looked up at me. “Put your hands on my shoulders. I wouldn’t want you to fall.”
I stooped over. Gently, he tugged first one boot from my foot and then the other. Standing in the garage in my socks wasn’t the weirdest thing I’d ever felt. Having a man dressed in most of a naval officer uniform while he slowly undressed me definitely topped that list.
He reached up for the zipper and pulled it the rest of the way down, which happened to stop at the front of my hips. Close as his head was to my pussy, he had to know how ready I was. He reached up and tried to push open the top of the coveralls. “Can you shrug the rest of the way out of that for me?”
I swear I didn’t move. Instead the fabric fell off me entirely on its own, slipping to hang off my wrists and leaving me restrained by the cuffs. This was dangerous. Even more dangerous than that time in the parking lot at the airport. This was my home ground, and if I weren’t careful, we might do something I’d regret.
Well, no. Of all the things we’d done, sex was one thing I didn’t regret. I was human, he was willing, and it was already well known I was lonely. We had scratched each other’s itch. What was the harm in that?
My mind raced with a million thoughts both good and bad. Absently, I muttered, “I need to get doughnuts in the morning.”
Aaron chuckled. “Well, okay. I had some other ideas for us, but we can put that on the to-do list if you want.”
I desperately needed to know what else was on his to-do list. “The security cameras. If Jeff thinks anything unusual happened while I was here tonight, he’ll check the footage. If I bring in doughnuts, he’ll be too busy stuffing his face to think about what I was doing here so late.”
He rose to stand, a breath away from me, his eyes soft, his smile ten
der. “Nothing’s going to happen here.”
When his words sank in, I could’ve wept. “What?”
“Not here. I’ve waited a week for you and a month before that, and before that I waited my whole life. I can wait a little while longer.” He looked at my lips longingly and lovingly before leaning in for a warm whisper of a kiss. “You’re worth waiting for,” he said, “but I think we need to talk first.” He kissed me again. “I promise I’ll make it worth your wait.”
Chapter Eighteen
Aaron followed me home in his rental car. I offered to check under the hood for him first, but he insisted this one was fine.
The time alone gave me a chance to cool off and get my head back on. Even as my body trembled with frustration, I knew not getting closer right away was a good thing. It gave me the time to put the right words together to make him understand this wasn’t going to work. It was a fun fantasy in the mountains and on the beach, but this was the real world. My real world. That kind of thing didn’t happen here. Here was where nice people met nice people and they settled for each other, bought nice houses, had nice kids, and paid their nice bills. Beginning, middle, and end of story. Nobody here met movie stars, fell madly in love, and lived happily ever after. That was the dream world, not my world.
Yet somehow, that didn’t matter when Aaron was within touching distance. I forgot all the “can’t-haves” and “can-never-bes”. Being around him made me feel like someone else, someone bigger, stronger, and braver. He made me want things. Not just sex. He made me want more than just my simple vanilla life.
I signaled for the turn into my condo complex and parked in front of my building, then motioned for Aaron to park beside me. I hesitated about getting out of the car because it meant I’d have to face him with my faculties intact once again. It was so much easier to be around him when my only thought was my next orgasm.
He looked up at the building. “Nice place you got here.”
I shrugged. “Condo sweet condo. I only rent. The builders got the bright idea of marketing it as an investment property, so half the owners bought with the intention of renting it out. It’s quiet enough. Most of the owners who did buy to live here are long past retirement age.”
“Is it soundproofed?”
“Um…I don’t know. I’ve never had to test it out.”
“Never?” He picked up my hand and pressed his lips to my palm. “There’s a first time for everything.”
I regretted bringing him back to my apartment. Not enough to send him away, but he rattled my nerves. I didn’t care about the mess. I wasn’t that messy, all told. I’d seen worse, but I’d also be revealing myself. He’d see my private sanctuary.
He pressed my hand between his. His smile was so open and comfortable that my misgivings disintegrated.
“I showed you mine,” he said. “Now you show me yours.”
Before I could laugh, he kissed me. On the lips. In front of my apartment. Where my neighbors might see and very possibly they soon might hear. Well, maybe not. Either my neighbors had better lives than I did and they were out having fun, or they had no life like I did and they were home, watching television. In either case they probably weren’t spying on the parking lot during prime time on a Friday night.
I picked through my keys for the one that opened the front door. Once inside, I headed for the stairs to the second floor, but Aaron pointed to the row of mailboxes on the wall. “You’re not going to check your mail?”
“Probably the same old crap. Bills and catalogs. I can get it tomorrow.” When I knew he wasn’t behind me on the stairs, I stopped midway and looked back. “What?”
Did he look sheepish? “I want to know.”
I mulled that for a second—was that odd, sweet, or maybe creepy?—but I went back down to the boxes and unlocked mine. As predicted, bills and catalogs. I leafed through it and then handed it to him.
“See? Nothing special.” I went back to the stairs which, given my growing fatigue, were getting steeper by the minute.
He took the small bundle up the stairs with him. “But it’s yours.”
“Feel free to pay any of the bills,” I said lightly, finding the door key. When he said nothing, I turned to him before unlocking the door. “I didn’t mean that. I can pay my own bills, thanks.”
“I know you can.” His heat filtered through my clothes, muddying the mental clarity I’d only just regained.
“So we’re clear.” I opened the door and walked in. Nothing to be heard but the ticking of the wall clock and the neighbor upstairs, vacuuming. “Are you hungry? I can put in a pizza.”
“Sounds good.”
I turned to see him walking slowly through the foyer, checking out the place like it was a museum. “It’s not that big a deal, really. Two bedrooms, a fireplace. I don’t use it, though. It’s a pain in the ass to clean.”
He snapped his fingers. “Damn. That would be fun. You, me, the fireplace, and some Cabernet.”
I gripped the kitchen countertop to keep myself standing. “No, that would not be fun.”
I felt his rich laughter inside me. “Why not? It was fun back in the Catskills.”
“That was a fantasy. This is reality.” I turned on the oven and pulled out a frozen pizza. A glance over my shoulder told me he stood outside the L-shaped kitchen counter, watching me. “The remote’s on the coffee table. Feel free to turn on the TV.”
“I don’t want to watch TV. I want to watch you.”
“Making pizza?” I tried to sound flip, but inside I quivered. “You need more of a life than I do.”
“It looks to me like you have a good life. You’re comfortable here.”
Not when Aaron Elias was within a five-mile radius. “Yeah, I guess, but it’s nothing like your place on the beach.”
“Certainly this is easier. No paparazzi. Stores are nearby. You don’t commute an hour to get to work. I’ll bet the taxes are lower. It’s quiet.”
“Not always. On Sunday nights I get a light show. Around ten, the freight train passes by over there in the woods. I can stand on the balcony and wave to the conductor.”
He looked to the sliding glass doors on the far side of the living room. “No kidding? I used to love trains as a kid. I’d like to see that.” The oven door slipped out of my hand, slamming shut and surprising us both. “You okay?”
My voice was higher. “Fine. I’m sorry dinner’s not something better. Sunday is my grocery day.” I dug in the refrigerator for something that might constitute a salad. Mustard and maraschino cherries probably didn’t qualify.
“Don’t worry about it.” He peeled out of the uniform jacket again. I was breathless, watching the way his body moved like a finely tuned…something. My brain forgot words every time I saw him move. He draped the jacket over the side of the couch and settled in. Again, in mere seconds, he looked like he belonged there. Like he’d never not been there. “You’ve got a nice place.”
“Thanks.” I learned that sticking my face in the refrigerator cooled me off, inside and out. Too bad I couldn’t spend the night that way. “Can I get you a drink?” Whether I was unnerved or not, my mother would kill me if I wasn’t a good hostess.
“Sure.”
I checked the fridge again because I’d only looked ten seconds ago, and I had already forgotten what was in there. “Beer?”
“How about water?”
I stood. “Really?”
“I’m trying to work out funding for a play in New York,” he said as he got to his feet. In just a few steps, he stood beside the counter. “I’d have to take my shirt off. I don’t want to get a beer gut.”
“You don’t get a gut from one beer.” A play? New York? Ninety minutes from here?
“True, but still, no point in starting something I can’t finish. Water’s fine.” He walked into the tiny kitchen, filling up the space by breathing. “Relax. You don’t have to be nervous around me. We were fine in California. Why is it different here?”
I shut the ref
rigerator and turned, leaning back on the door. “I don’t know. It just is.”
“It shouldn’t be. We know each other pretty well already, don’t you think?”
“Outside the bedroom?”
He flashed a smile. “You’re still answering questions with questions.”
“That proves nothing. Cumulatively, we’ve spent less than a week together. One night in the mountains and three days in California. If you take out the time spent in bed, we’ve talked for, what, a few hours?”
He sighed. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like much, but we talked on the phone nearly every night for the month in between. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I like you and not just because we’re compatible in bed. I like a lot of things about you, and what I don’t know, I want to know. I want you to know me better too. I know it’s asking a lot when we live in different worlds, but—”
“That.” I pointed at his chest. Focusing on what I pointed at distracted me. I missed it, and I craved the feel of it under my hands again. The thought faded but left pictures in my head of his perfectly sparse chest hair, his skin, the curve of his pecs, and the way his heartbeat sounded under my ear. I could’ve cried. “We do live in different worlds and different sides of the country. I can’t hop on a plane every weekend and neither can you. We can’t pretend we understand each other’s worlds.”
“You mean you can’t understand mine.”
Frozen, I met his eyes. Yup, there would be tears at some point tonight. High chance they’d be mine. The cracks in my heart were already forming. “Yes.”
“Why not?”
I waited for my brain, my heart, aliens, or something to give me an answer that would make him go away so my life could go back to normal or at least whatever it used to be. Instead I got nothing, not even a snappy comeback.
“I can’t get used to it.”
“You were there for a few hours. It’s not like that all the time. Hell, sometimes it’s even worse. I can’t get groceries without someone taking my picture on their cell phone. I practically have to wear a disguise to go run. And then there’s the premiers, awards shows, and interviews where I have to stand there and let them take a million pictures. But that’s a fraction of my life. Do you deal with difficult customers every minute of every day you’re at work, or does it only happen once in a while?”
