by Ruthie Knox
He’d never gotten over it because Leo turned into a pompous asshole who’d grown three inches their junior year in high school, taken possession of his father’s three-year-old Mercedes, and started escorting girls to the movies in Fenimore.
But maybe that wasn’t much of a reason, either.
Carson shrugged.
Leo squinted at him.
He had green eyes, the best feature left in a face that wasn’t aging with much grace. Piercing, intelligent eyes that Carson had sometimes felt could see further inside him than anyone else’s.
“Are you back or not?” Leo asked.
Carson shrugged again.
“Are you going to break her heart this time?”
Digging his wallet out of his pocket, Carson stood up. He dropped a ten on the table. He’d nearly cleared the door when he heard Leo’s last words.
“If you decide to stay, look me up. We could use somebody with your skills in this town.”
Carson stalked up the street, away from the meager offerings of downtown Potter Falls.
Fucking Leo Potter. Lord of the manor. King of the Chamber of Commerce.
Hard to feel anything but animosity toward the guy who’d been banging Julie not too long ago.
Especially when he’d once known you better than anybody.
Especially when you were afraid he might be right.
Carson had made it a personal goal to seduce Julie in every room of the mansion.
There were a lot of rooms.
It helped that she was airing them out, changing all the linens in preparation for the arrival of guests in a few days. He would find her when he got back from his morning poker match with his dad or after he finished whatever chores she’d given him to do—put the star on top of her Christmas tree, strip a wallpaper border from the guest bathroom on the first floor, build custom shelving for a small, triangular closet wedged into a weird angle of the kitchen that Julie wanted to turn into a pantry.
This afternoon, a fine coating of sawdust covered his arms, and he found her on the second story, vacuuming under a bed. She sat up when she heard his knock, took one look at his face, and said, “No way. I’m all grimy.”
“I like grimy.”
“I stink.”
“So do I.”
She snorted. “That’s not exactly an enticement.”
Carson sank to his knees behind her and widened his thighs to straddle her bent legs. He coaxed her back against him and wrapped one arm around her waist.
“It’ll be primitive and nasty,” he said against her ear. “That’s the best kind.”
“Only men think that’s the best kind.”
He took her breast in his hand and rubbed his thumb over her nipple. “You can bite me if you want.”
“I bet you taste like salty meat.”
“With sawdust on top.”
“I’m getting wet just thinking about it.”
He took a chance and unzipped her pants. She was. “You’re such a pervert.”
“Takes one to know one.”
He slipped his hand through her folds, his finger over her clit until she moaned and bumped her ass back into him with a light collision.
“Your hands drive me crazy.”
“Your everything drives me crazy.” A harder bump. “I’m going to fuck you from behind now.”
“God, the sweet nothings.” But she was panting, and she sounded happy.
“Until you grunt.”
“I never grunt.”
He grinned and dropped his zipper. “You will this time.”
She did, too. Afterward, he helped her finish the room, cleaned them both up over the course of a long, slightly depraved shower, and made her dinner in repayment.
Carson had finally figured out how to get his father out of the house. The magic words turned out to be “Julie needs your help.”
It was sort of true. Or at least within range of the truth. He’d been fussing with the triangular closet shelves for a couple days, but he wasn’t happy with the way they were coming out. Bruce reminded him in an excessively casual way that when it came to custom work, Martin did the best carpentry of anybody in town.
As if Carson hadn’t known that already.
“Lazy Susan,” his father said when he got a look at the space.
“Those are round. This is triangular.”
“Don’t try to teach me geometry, boy. I know what I’m talking about. Even once you make shelves that fit in here—and it looks to me like you need to take another whack at that, since I can see daylight at the back of this one—they’re not going to be much use to her. She’ll want to store spices and bottles and jars in here, and she’ll be knocking them over when she tries to reach the ones in the back. Give her two lazy Susans and a shelf with risers, like a staircase, for her spices or canned food. Then she’ll be able to use it.”
Carson stood back and took another look at the closet.
“You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. Go down to Bruce’s and tell him what I want. He’ll get you the hardware. Tell him I said no cheap stuff for Julie.”
By the time Carson got back, his father was making cuts on the table saw Carson had found in Julie’s shed.
“Knew this saw would come in handy,” Martin said.
Carson had noticed that Julie had a lot of good tools. He hadn’t bothered to wonder where she got them from. “You gave it to her?”
“I told her what to buy. Renovating a big house like this, you need decent tools. Bruce and I helped her out.”
“When was that?”
Martin looked at the overcast sky. It was in the low twenties. So much warmer than it had been, it felt balmy. “Three years ago? No, four. You were off in Micronesia or some such.”
“Jakarta,” he said.
“Yeah. That was a good one.”
“What was?”
“That embassy. Had a lot of flair.”
“Didn’t know you’d seen that.”
“Sure. I seen all of them. Your mother always showed me.”
Carson bounced the paper bag clutched in his hand, making the hardware jingle. “I have everything for the lazy Susans.”
“Why don’t you go on in and figure out the dimensions for those risers? Then you can get that going.”
“Sounds good.”
They worked together for a few hours, until they had all the pieces measured and cut, checked for size, sanded and primed for painting. It wasn’t until Carson noticed his dad’s limp getting more pronounced that he realized they hadn’t argued. His father had kept his criticism to a minimum, and Carson was actually enjoying himself.
He liked working on Julie’s place. Liked it far more than he’d liked any work he’d done in years.
And the recognition brought down that feeling again—the heavy, dark Potter Falls pressure he had to breathe through, looking at the sky, telling himself it didn’t mean anything, and he could leave whenever he wanted to.
He forced his dad to take a break in the kitchen and to eat a few of the molasses cookies Julie had made. She was trying out recipes for Christmas. The cookies had lemon frosting, which should have been weird but wasn’t.
She came into the kitchen, stirred something on the stove, and passed behind Carson. Without thinking about it, he snaked an arm around her waist and pulled her up beside him.
“We’re making you lazy Susans,” he said.
“For your pantry,” Martin explained. “So you can reach.”
“Sounds perfect. Thank you. How’ve you been?”
Martin shrugged, and Carson recognized the gesture more by instinct than by sight. He made that same recalcitrant movement of his shoulders when he felt threatened and didn’t trust his own words. “Been worse.”
Julie arched an eyebrow. “When, exactly?”
Martin polished off his cookie, and the question settled around them. Carson surprised himself by hoping his father would say Before my son came home.
Bec
ause he was doing better. Only marginally better, but he was here. They were working. They hadn’t argued all day. And even at his own house, his father had seemed different the past week or so. His sniping had a pro forma quality to it, and he’d gotten livelier during their poker match.
He needs you, Julie had told him. Just you.
Maybe she was right. He had to admit, she was right most of the time.
“It’s hard to lose a wife,” Martin said finally, looking out the window.
“Especially hard when she’s Glory, I imagine,” she agreed.
Martin glanced at her. “You have no idea.”
But Carson had some idea. A faint inkling of what it would be like to have the center knocked out of your world.
The knowledge didn’t make him happy.
Chapter Nine
“How quiet do we have to be?” he asked.
The first Christmas guests had arrived. Carson figured he was officially in the B&B on sufferance, so he needed to be on his best behavior. Julie hadn’t made him fork over money for the room yet or threatened to make good on her original threat to kick him out after three weeks, but he wouldn’t put it past her if he ticked her off.
It was midnight, and they lay stretched out on the couch in her attic apartment, watching some chick flick and drinking eggnog spiked with a very expensive bottle of brandy he’d found in Julie’s pantry. Which he realized after he’d opened it had probably come from Leo.
He kissed her neck, loving the way she felt against him. Soft and rounded and drowsy-warm.
“Vewwy, vewwy quiet,” she said. And giggled.
“Are you drunk?”
“Certainly not.”
But she lolled her head back and just about fell off the couch.
“You’re wasted.”
“Not a chance.”
“On eggnog. I didn’t know it was possible to get wasted on eggnog, but you’ve done it.”
“I’m mildly tipsy.”
“All right, Miss Mildly Tipsy. I’m putting you to bed.”
“Aren’t you going to take advantage of me?”
“I take advantage of you when you’re sober. When you’re drunk, I hold your hair.”
“I’m not going to puke.”
“Your credibility disappeared when you started speaking in that Elmer Fudd voice.”
“Aww, Wabbit. I wuv you.”
Carson ignored the thing that was happening in his chest and maneuvered around until he could get her in a fireman’s carry. “Don’t knee me in the nuts.”
“If I really were drunk, carrying me like this would be a bad idea,” she observed.
“If I carry you frontways, you’ll try to seduce me.”
“I’m going to do that anyway as soon as you get into the bed.”
“I’ll be stoic and unseduceable.”
“I’ll go down on you.”
“That’ll probably get the job done. But I’ll regret it in the morning.”
He set her on the bed. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I’ve had sex with you six thousand times in the past few weeks. There’s no reason to think I wouldn’t consent if I hadn’t had those four glasses of eggnog.”
“You had four?”
“They were tasty.”
She pulled her shirt over her head and walked to the bathroom in her bra, hips swaying, hand trailing over the front of his jeans as she passed him by.
A six-inch diagonal stripe of pink began east of her belly button and crossed her side to end at her back, right beneath her ribs.
Carson’s eyes stung.
The scar still gave him trouble.
He shook his head to clear it and stripped to his underwear while she brushed her teeth. She stopped halfway through to ask around his toothbrush, “Duh I gub gud hub?”
“What?”
She spit and rinsed out her mouth. He climbed under the covers. Julie kept the house warm, but the attic needed better insulation, and when the temperature dropped below ten, you could see your breath in her bedroom. She compensated with an electric mattress pad that she turned on long before bedtime. Her thick, lofty down comforter trapped the heat.
Carson wanted to marry the damn bed.
Julie came out of the bathroom. “Do I give good head?”
“You give fantastic head.”
She beamed and took off her pants, bracing herself with one hand against the doorjamb to keep from falling over. He couldn’t help but smile. What a picture she made, in her mismatched underwear and giant wool socks. Goose bumps covered her stomach, but she wasn’t feeling the cold. She was happy.
She made him happy.
What if she did love him?
Julie ducked her head underneath the covers down by his feet and crawled up his body. Her breath hit him in hot bursts at midthigh, stomach, chest. When her face poked out fast, he wasn’t expecting it, and she knocked her forehead into his nose.
“Motherfuck!”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He hunched over, covering his nose with his hand.
“Are you bleeding?”
“I’m okay, really. Just surprised me.”
Julie laughed. “It’s possible that I am a little drunk.”
“Just possible.”
He stopped cradling his nose, and she pushed his shoulder until he lay back down, and she could snuggle her head into the spot she liked at the top of his chest.
She felt good.
They lay there for a while, and her breathing slowed and evened out. He thought she’d fallen asleep.
“Wabbit,” she whispered. Followed by a contented sigh.
A dark worry snaked through his chest, and he pulled the blanket higher, tucking it tighter around them.
When he rolled over in the night and reached for Julie, she was gone.
Carson sat up. It was dark in the room, too dark for her to be awake already. Too soon for her to have left.
“Jules?” His voice held a note of panic he didn’t approve of.
“Shh. I’m over here.”
Then he saw her by the window. She’d wrapped herself in a blanket, and she was looking out at the yard.
“What’s wrong?” he asked more quietly.
“Nothing. Couldn’t sleep. It happens sometimes when I drink too much.”
He got up and padded barefoot across the floor to place his hands on her shoulders. “Is there something out there?”
“No. It’s just pretty in the moonlight.”
He wrapped himself around her and looked over her shoulder. The night was clear and cold, the snow covering everything with a brittle, fragile crust.
“You could freeze to death out there in about four minutes.”
“I know.”
Carson shuddered. “Come back to bed.”
She turned around and opened the blanket, inviting him inside. “I’ll keep you warm.”
She folded him in a cocoon, and she was soft and warm and welcoming. Everything it wasn’t outside. When he kissed her, she dissolved against him, and there was something dreamlike about it, a fuzziness in his head from the brandy or from still being only about two-thirds awake.
Something so easy, he let it happen.
Her tongue still tasted minty, her body supple and languid. The kiss went on for a long time as his cock rose to press against her belly, seeking. She tipped her hips up and rubbed against him.
They didn’t usually do it this way. Face-to-face, standing on equal footing, and Julie with the sheltering arms. Usually, he took her, and she let him, and she made it clear just how much she liked it that way. They had an equal inequality, if such a thing was even possible.
But this felt different. He thought there was something not quite right about it, something forbidden to him, but he accepted it anyway.
He stroked his hand up the gully of her spine, over the flare of her hip.
“Come back to bed,” he said again.
“All right.”
She dropped the
blanket, and he grabbed a condom from the table before they burrowed beneath the covers. When she took it from his hand, he let her roll it on, and then he let her climb on top of him and take him inside her.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Shh.”
“You feel good.”
She put her hands on his chest and rode him, teasing him with a shallow thrust, another, another, then sinking all the way down so he was buried to the hilt inside her. He gripped her hips hard and pulled her down harder, searching for the mastery he wanted.
She wouldn’t let him have it. She dragged his hands away, pulling them up to her nipples. “Here,” she said. “Touch me here.”
The moonlight turned her hair white and slanted across her side, across her scar, and she rode him and took the pleasure she wanted, pushing his hand down between her legs when she needed more sensation. “Now here.”
Her mouth went slack, and her hips got more frantic. It was too dark to see her eyes clearly, but he could imagine what they looked like. All pupils, hazy and unfocused. She turned inward as her climax approached, went inside her head somewhere where he couldn’t get to her.
He took his hand away.
“Please,” she said. “Please, Carson.”
“Not like this.”
He withdrew and slapped her hip. “On your back.”
“You tyrant.”
“Damn straight.”
When he moved inside her again, her back arched up off the mattress. He cupped her head in his hands, dulling the impact of his weight and force.
This was how he loved to have her best, spread out beneath him, her legs a cage, her mouth wet and open. Her eyes on him.
This was how he got to her.
He took her slow. So slow that her breathing settled, and her pupils dilated, and then her hands came up off his back and began to stroke him, light and languid.
His chest. His sides. He took her faster, harder. Her hands clutched at his back, and she kissed him, openmouthed and messy, until she couldn’t take it anymore. She turned her face away and came hard and long, tightening until he thought he would die from the pleasurable agony of it.
When she finally relaxed, she went back to stroking him. His shoulders. His arms. She touched his face, staring up at him with pleasure and trust and love in her eyes and in the set of her mouth.
