by Roz Lee
“How are things going with Becky? She seemed shocked at the reading.”
Ford searched his mother’s face for any sign she harbored ill will toward Becky Jean and found none. “That’s an understatement. I take it you knew all along?”
“Your father discussed it with me years ago when her father became ill. I agreed it would be a nice thing to do.”
All kinds of possible reasons for the bequeathment to be the right thing to do flitted through his mind—none of them good. God, could Becky Jean be a half-sister? Shit! Given the thoughts he’d been having about her, the idea made him sick to his stomach. “What do you mean?”
“It means just what it sounds like.”
He sure as hell hoped it didn’t, but he kept the thought to himself.
“I had been dating Jess Parker when I met your father. In fact, if he hadn’t brought me to a dance at the Community Center, I wouldn’t have met your father. Kenneth and Susannah were there together. I took one look at Kenneth and knew I would marry him one day. Jess took one look at Susannah, and practically forgot my name. I left with your father and Jess left with Susannah.”
He’d never heard the story of how his parents met, or if he had, he didn’t remember. His father and Becky’s mother? Becky Jean and he were the same age. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. He couldn’t understand how his mother could be so nonchalant about the fact her husband had recognized an illegitimate daughter in his will. Appetite gone, he dropped his fork and sat back.
Helen Adams pointed her butter knife at him. “Ford Adams! I know what you’re thinking, and you’d better get it out of your head this minute.” His mother’s scolding voice shook him out of the funk he’d sunk into. “I led your father on a merry chase, but Jess and Susannah married right away. They didn’t have Becky Jean until years later. Your father said he could never repay Jess for taking me to the dance. Providing for his widow and daughter was the least he could do, and I agreed.”
Ford dabbed at the sweat dotting his brow then placed his napkin back in his lap. Several years ago, leaving Becky Jean a percentage of the company would have been a nice thing to do, but today, not so much. Ken Adams had set out to do something good and inadvertently destroyed any chance Becky Jean had of financial success—unless Ford pulled a miracle out of a hat—or shoved one up the ass of every adult in the United States. More than ever, the pressure to turn Adams Manufacturing around weighed on him.
“She’s a lovely young lady, don’t you think?”
He recognized the tone of her voice. He’d have to nip his mother’s matchmaking in the bud if he wanted to have any peace. He cut his mother a look meant to squelch her meddling. “I’m sort of seeing someone, Mom. Besides, Becky Jean is a business partner.”
“Who is the person you’re seeing, and why haven’t I met her?”
He spent the next ten minutes dodging his mother’s bullets. He’d never once considered bringing Veronica home to meet his mother. They didn’t have a meet-the-parents kind of relationship, but he’d gladly throw his fuck buddy under the bus to shut his mother up.
He sighed with relief when, halfway through dessert, his phone rang. Glancing at the screen, he excused himself from the table. “Gotta take this—work.” Out of earshot, he accepted the call. “Hey, Becky Jean. Everything alright?”
“No. Everything is not alright. Get down here. Right. This. Minute.” Her angry tone immediately conjured an image of her cheeks flaming with color, her blue eyes shooting lasers at him.
“Where are you?” Visions of the plant going up in smoke filled his mind.
“My house. Now, Ford. If you aren’t here in five minutes, I’m going to hunt you down and murder you with my bare hands.”
Okay. So the plant hadn’t burned to the ground. “What’s going on? I’m having dinner with my mother.”
“I don’t care if you’re having dinner with the queen herself. Get here, pronto.”
Ford pulled the phone from his ear. How had she managed the equivalent of an old-fashioned phone hang-up with her touch-screen cell phone?
“Neat trick.” He stuck his head in the dining room. “Sorry, Mom. Gotta run. Something’s come up.” Before she could protest or inquire as to the nature of his emergency, he headed for the door. Not bothering to stop at his place, he took off down a path he’d frequently used as a kid when he walked or rode his bike into town. Where the driveway wound back and forth up the grade, the path cut a straight swatch down the face of the butte, ending up on the alleyway running behind the houses on Becky Jean’s street. Without thinking, he knocked on her back door.
“Becky Jean? It’s me, Ford.”
He heard her stomping through the kitchen then the door swung open. He’d seen hornet’s nests look less volatile. He took a precautionary step back.
“It’s about damn time you got here.” She grabbed a hold of his sleeve and pulled him inside, slamming the door shut behind him.
“I came as soon as I could.” True. Nothing short of a jet pack strapped to his back would have gotten him there sooner. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong, mister. This thing you invented is wrong!” Her face red, her shoulders drawn up tight, she looked ready to explode.
“Calm down.” He reached for her, intending to guide her gently away from the kitchen and the block of knives on the countertop, but she jerked out of his reach. For the first time, he noticed the pink Texas Rangers T-shirt and denim cutoffs she wore. Damn, he’d never found the wholesome girl-next-door style to be sexy before, but she rocked the look.
“Don’t touch me!”
Hands in the air, he tried his best to appear harmless. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? I can’t fix what I don’t know.”
“The thing you invented,” she said through gritted teeth.
“The butt plug?”
“Yes, you idiot. The…. It’s stuck.” He thought it impossible for her face to get any redder, but he’d been wrong.
“Stuck where?”
She crossed her arms in front of her and tapped her bare foot. Her cotton-candy-pink toenails momentarily distracted him. “You know where.” Her voice came out so small he surely misheard.
“You mean?” He glanced down to her hips then back up to her face. Tears tracked down her cheeks and her bottom lip trembled.
“Yes. I got it in, but once I removed the key, I can’t see to get it back in. I tried and tried….”
All humor gone, Ford stepped tentatively forward, arms open. She flung herself against his chest. He closed his arms around her, holding her while her tears soaked his shirt. “I tried to call Roseanne, but she’s not answering her phone.”
“There, there. It’s going to be all right.” He rested his chin on top of her head and patted her back, inhaling her intoxicating scent—simple and clean—not even a trace of the expensive perfume Ronnie favored, and often made him sneeze. He had no business being attracted to Becky Jean. She wasn’t his type, but the more time he spent with her, the less it seemed to matter. Knowing he would soon see and touch her ass set his blood to a slow boil.
“Why couldn’t it just slip out like the others?”
Grateful they were back to talking business, albeit sex-toy business, he smiled at the confirmation his design worked. Gloating, however, didn’t seem like a good idea. “Is it uncomfortable?” Severe discomfort could explain her panicked state and signal a design flaw that would end any chance of his plan working. But the opportunity to see her ass made the experiment worthwhile.
“No. It’s…. I…. When Roseanne didn’t answer, I didn’t know who else to call.” She sniffed and hiccupped at the same time. He gave in to a crazy impulse and kissed the top of her head.
“Give me the key.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Not ready to take it out?”
She socked him in the ribs.
“Ouch! Why did you hit me?”
“You deserved it for putting me in t
his situation. I hate you.”
He was dying a slow and painful death—torn between wanting to gloat and howl at the success of his invention and wanting to see what he had no trouble at all imagining. But first he had to calm his test subject down. “No, you don’t. You hate the position you’re in, and I completely understand.”
“This is all your fault.”
Ford rubbed his chin on the top of her head. “I take full responsibility for your predicament.” He held her for a few moments, waiting for her to calm. If she didn’t stop trembling, he’d never manage to fit the tiny key into the lock mechanism, and he figured he’d only get one shot at it before she murdered him.
“You can’t tell anyone about this.”
He knew men who liked to talk about their conquests, but he’d never been one of them. The way he saw it, if a woman let him see or touch any part of her, he owed her the favor of keeping the details to himself. “I promise. Not a word to anyone.”
“Okay, then.”
When she didn’t move out of his arms, he asked, “Where’s the key?”
She loosened her hold on him and stepped back. Without making eye contact, she turned and headed down the hall. “I left it in the bathroom. Come on.”
Ford filled his lungs, holding the air in as long as possible before letting it out in a swoosh before following her sexy ass down the hallway. This sure beat the hell out of dinner with his mom.
She led him through a bedroom he presumed to be hers to a large, modern bathroom. Someone had updated the century-old house to include the trendy en-suite. They’d done an excellent job blending vintage and modern together. Knowing how difficult the effect was to accomplish, he appreciated it even more. “Nice,” he said.
Becky Jean glanced over her shoulder at the bathroom. “Oh. Yeah, Bobby and Chrissy put this in. I love the way they used modern touches but kept the vintage feel of the house.”
“Me, too. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it had been here since the house was built.”
“I didn’t ask you here to admire my bathroom.”
Ford laughed. “Sorry. I recently finished a complete remodel on my house in New York. I did something similar there.” She didn’t share his amusement. He wiped the smile off his face and held out his hand. “Key?”
She dropped the tiny piece of metal into his palm. “No looking at anything else. Don’t touch anything you don’t have to. Are we clear?”
“Perfectly.”
She dropped her shorts and bent over the counter, providing him with his first up-close-and-personal view of the ass that inspired him to create the plug in the first place. The sight of those perfect globes were enough to bring him to his knees, but add in the three-inch strip of black plastic wedged between them, and he held onto his good intentions by the thinnest of threads.
“Are you going to use the key today?”
“Huh?” He jerked his chin up. Their gazes met in the mirror and held, and, for a second, the ground beneath him shifted. Her contradictions baffled him. Brave and confident, yet vulnerable. The urge to make her his in the most elemental way hit him in the solar plexus. He sucked in a sharp breath.
“Ford!” Her gravelly growl had to be the sexiest thing he’d ever heard, but it snapped him out of the lust-filled haze he’d become lost in.
He took a step forward. “Yeah. One sec.”
His fingers were numb, probably from lack of blood since most of his supply had diverted to his groin the second she dropped her drawers. He fumbled around trying to get a grip on the tiny key. “We need to make the heads on these keys bigger.”
Becky Jean made a sound—part sigh, part groan—and wiggled her butt. “Just get on with it, will you?”
“Okay. Got it.” He dropped to one knee behind her. “Is it okay if I touch you? I mean… I need to part… can’t see.”
“Just do it!”
Ford willed his hands not to shake. As careful as a man handling a bomb, he parted her cheeks enough to see the lock mechanism. “Here goes.” With a little push, he slid the key home then turned it 180 degrees counterclockwise. “There.”
Rising, he wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. “All done. You can do the rest yourself, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
He made it as far as her bedroom before he had to stop and lean against the wall for support. It had taken every ounce of self-control he possessed to walk out of Becky Jean’s bathroom without doing something monumentally stupid. Like remove the plug and replace it with his cock. He managed to hold onto his control, but the feel of her skin and the erotic image of the toy he’d created with his own hands seated between her cheeks would stay with him until his dying day. And, at the rate his heart raced, he could die any minute.
The sound of running water reminded him he needed to get the hell out of his partner’s house, but his legs were in no shape to carry him anywhere just yet. Besides, he’d feel like the worst sort of human if he didn’t hang around long enough to make sure she hadn’t suffered any ill effects from the untested device. Thinking he could have caused her harm sent a bolt of fear through him. Eventually, the door opened and Becky Jean stepped out. Other than a rosy flush to her cheeks, she appeared to be fine.
“You okay?”
She slicked her hands down the sides of her denim shorts. “Fine. I’m fine. No harm done. Sorry I panicked.”
Relief loosened the glue holding his feet to the floor. He pushed away from the wall and smiled at her. “Understandable, under the circumstances.”
“I suppose so. At any rate, your device works.” Her gaze darted around the room as she spoke, eventually coming around to land on him. “You know what you said about making the key bigger?”
“Yeah.” He held up his hand, fingers spread. “It’s a little small for someone with big hands.”
“Well, I got to thinking, what if we made a key with a flat head on it, sort of a thumbscrew design that would stay in all the time. So, if someone used the device solo, like I did, they wouldn’t have the issue of trying to get the key back in. All they’d have to do would be turn the thumbscrew.”
After all she’d been through, she still had the wherewithal to find a way out of the situation she’d found herself in. Amazing. “I think it’s a great idea. I’ll ask Scott to design one as an option.”
Becky nodded. “Good. Good. It would solve the problem, then.”
He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her, tell her how special she was, do all the things to her he’d envisioned over the last few days. But he couldn’t. They were business partners—a fact he’d do well to remember. “I’d better be going.”
She walked him to the back door.
“See you in the morning.”
Every step back to the gatehouse was pure torture.
CHAPTER TEN
“Where were you last night? I called the B&B and your cell phone and got a recording.” Becky eyed her best friend across the antique oak table in the kitchen of The Yellow Rose.
“Sorry. Ford’s friend is staying here. He’s… demanding.” Roseanne picked a potato chip off her plate and snapped it in two. Something seemed off about her friend, but Becky couldn’t put her finger on the change. Usually attentive to every detail, today she seemed… distracted.
“So demanding you couldn’t answer your phone? What if it had been an emergency?”
“Was it?” She jerked her gaze to Becky as if checking for visible injuries.
Becky shrugged. “It seemed like it at the time.” She’d never forget the moment she realized she couldn’t get Ford’s invention out of her body without help. When she hadn’t been able to reach Roseanne, she’d contemplated calling her mother and dismissed the idea as beyond insane. For a brief moment, she’d considered driving to the twenty-four-hour emergency clinic, but scrapped the idea as soon as she realized she’d have to sit in the car in order to get there. Ford had been her last, and only, resort.
“Everything’
s okay?”
“Fine. Just fine.” Ford has seen my ass, up close and personal, but, no biggie, I’m good. She’d come over on her lunch hour to vent to her best friend, but for whatever reason, she wanted to keep what had happened the previous evening to herself. The night had been embarrassing, but the way Ford had handled the situation made her want to hoard the moment. Once she’d calmed down enough to tell him why she’d demanded he come over, he’d been wonderful—tender and not at all condescending, as she had expected him to be. After she’d bent over the bathroom counter, he’d inserted the key, disengaged the lock then left her to remove the plug herself. The expression on his face when she found him lounging outside the bathroom door had been… complicated. She’d lain awake most of the night trying to decipher what it had meant, and come up with absolutely nothing. Until she made sense of it, she’d rather keep the incident to herself.
“Tell me about this Scott guy. He didn’t seem like the demanding sort when I met him yesterday.”
“Hon, you have no idea.”
Becky finished the salad she’d brought for her lunch while her friend listed off the demands made by her Yankee guest. None of it sounded particularly out of line to her. Water on the bedside table, turndown service. Other than the request for a specific brand of coffee, it all sounded like things any guest might expect from a Victorian B&B. She didn’t say it out loud, of course. She’d never tell her friend how to run her place of business any more than Roseanne would tell her how to make baby bottle nipples. Instead, she let her friend vent. Scott Ramsey couldn’t be the first demanding guest Roseanne had played hostess to, and he wouldn’t be the last.
Besides, Becky had her own problems, of which she couldn’t speak. She and Ford had yet to tell the employees the severity of the situation, and until they did, she had to keep the details to herself. She trusted Roseanne not to say anything, but the woman clearly had enough on her plate without worrying about the last major employer in town closing its doors. And, lord knew, she didn’t want to talk about what had happened the night before. If Roseanne had answered her phone, it would have been different. Ford’s involvement would have ended with him asking her to try out the plug—something she could explain away as the crazy idea it had been. Even if the plug turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to the adult toy market, she didn’t see how it could to save Adams Manufacturing. How many could they sell, anyway?
