Touch of Fondness: A New Adult Romance (Stay in Touch)

by Joy Penny

  She leaned forward and pressed her nose to his, her breath hot. “Do you need more help to get in the mood?”

  Almost as if on cue, she felt him harden, his jeans and hers between them. Her thighs and calves tingled and she was overwhelmed with the urge to rip everything right off him, but then she realized her legs had fallen asleep, that despite her overpowering desire, she was starting to lose feeling. She laughed and scooched backward, fumbling to bring out her shaking legs to let her feet touch the floor.

  He swallowed, watching her, his arms falling down limply. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be…” She stumbled and he leaned forward, his hand shooting out to provide her some support as she tried to stand up and get some more feeling back in her legs. She laughed. “I just think… We need more space.”

  “Bedroom,” he breathed.

  She turned, practically running down the hall, then thought better of it and reached for her purse before she went. “Just in case…” she said, rummaging through and pulling the condom she kept in a buried pocket of her bag for “just in case” types of situations.

  He stared at her. She unbuttoned her pants and took them off, shaking her butt as she did, knowing she was imitating virtually every male director’s gaze when it came to the simple task of women undressing.

  That little shimmy had its uses.

  Archer reached out toward her, but she took a step back, grinning. “I’ll be waiting.” She power-walked down the hallway to the bedroom, giving him time to appreciate the contoured black panties covering her ass.

  Running over his own T-shirt with a wheelchair only registered with Archer when his wheel got a little stuck and he had to back up to maneuver around it and the pair of jeans Brielle had left beside it.

  He couldn’t stop staring at Brielle as she walked away, couldn’t stop gaping after her even as she turned into the bedroom, leaned over the side of the frame, and smiled before vanishing out of sight.

  But once she’d been out of his line of vision for half a minute, the panic set in. He’d left his braces on—half on, for one of them, he noticed, seeing that the one he’d partially unfastened had shifted even more after—and he really didn’t know what to do. He’d pictured himself standing to kiss her, but he wouldn’t be able to stand up for long, couldn’t hold her as he did.

  And then there was the fact that his braces made it hard to remove his pants.

  Even though he knew she was waiting for him, he decided to remove them right then and there. The wrinkly slip of paper still on his kitchen table—the paper with her name and number on it—caught his eye. “So,” he called loudly down the hallway, “you want to work in a museum?”

  Stupid. That was stupid. But he didn’t want her to think he’d forgotten about her. Good god, he could never forget the way she’d sashayed down the hallway.

  “Maybe,” she called, and Archer realized that with the mood his mother was in and the fact that he had that piece of paper right there on the table, his mother was never going to get her that referral. As he put his first brace down, he grabbed the paper and crumpled it into his fist, tossing it on the chair so it’d be out of sight. He couldn’t risk her disappointment ruining what was shaping up to be one of the best days of his life. He’d tell her tomorrow. Or depending on what she wanted to do tomorrow, maybe the next day.

  You do have a deadline this week, too. But he couldn’t imagine ever wanting to do anything else again, as stupid as that thought was.

  “Does it matter what kind of museum?” he asked, getting to work on the second brace. “Or like, are you considering places other than Chicago?”

  “Archer,” she called out loudly down the hallway. “Less talking. More kissing.”

  He didn’t have to be told twice.

  Free of his braces, he considered shimmying out of his pants, but he just couldn’t picture himself wheeling in there in his boxers, or god forbid, without anything on, and it somehow being sexy.

  He knew his top was pretty toned, but he really wasn’t ready for her to be staring at his legs. He shifted his pants legs down and headed down the hallway.

  Brielle was lying on his bed, her dark hair popping out against his white sheets, framing her face like brush strokes. She got up a little, leaning on her forearms and shifting her hair to one side. She drove him crazy every time she touched her hair like that.

  “How should we…?” she asked, studying him.

  He wheeled to the grab bars at the side of his bed, self-conscious of how her eyes followed every move he made. “I just need to shift up there,” he said, trying not to think about how mood-killing it would all be.

  She got up and swung her legs over the side of the bed, watching him. “Need help?”

  He cleared his throat. “No,” he said, fully aware he’d never done this before with an audience. Even Pauline usually had her eyes diverted on the rare instances she needed to watch him get in or out of bed.

  Heart thumping, he slid himself into position and grabbed hold of his rails, pulling… Then slipping as the chair went sailing backward. He’d forgotten to lock it. Again. She was such a distraction. His hands grabbed hold of the bars tightly despite the strain in his muscles and though he sank downward, his legs, unprepared for the weight, collapsing beneath him, he at least didn’t fall back swiftly.

  “Oh my god!” said Brielle, jumping up and crouching beside him.

  Panting, he made sure his rear was close enough to be let down gently and he allowed himself to fall all the way down, lowering himself slowly. He would catch his breath and try to pull himself up by the grab bars once in a better position. He knew Pauline would have been able to help—she had the arm strength necessary to help her patients after a fall—but he couldn’t imagine Brielle’s thin arms doing the job.

  “I’m fine,” he said, falling back onto his elbows in imitation of how she’d greeted him from his bed. He laughed between jagged breaths, almost too mortified to even care anymore. He’d always known something like this would happen during his first bedroom encounter. That was partly why he’d been so afraid of it.

  Brielle examined his front and his back, her brows scrunched together. “Did you hurt anything, though?”

  He waved a hand at her. “I fell too slowly for that.”

  “Good,” she said, sitting on her calves and placing her palms on her thighs. Her naked, smooth, amazing thighs.

  “Mood killer?” panted Archer, afraid of the answer.

  She startled. “No! I just… want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  They stared at one another, his breath quieting, but his heartbeat growing louder and louder.

  “Fuck the bed,” she said, and she crawled onto his lap. She cradled his face with one hand, leaning in for another kiss. He let his hand dance up and down her thigh and he felt himself about to explode. It didn’t even matter that he hadn’t seen her completely in the nude (yet). It didn’t matter that he’d screwed up so bad she was now straddling him on the hardwood floor of his bedroom instead of on that soft, comfortable bed.

  He melted at her touch.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Liquid courage was overrated. Brielle was so glad she’d had full control of her senses, so happy to be fully in the moment with Archer and not have to think about everything that was bothering her. Once she started riding him on the floor of his condo, not once did thoughts of her stalled job hunt or her putrid ex Daniel flash through her mind. She didn’t worry about what had happened with Pembroke or wonder if Lilac and Gavin weren’t telling her everything she ought to know about what was bothering them. She didn’t think about screaming sisters, mothers with misdirected anger, or raised voices and slammed doors. She was so over worrying about the brusque, difficult client with whom she’d gotten off on the wrong foot. She realized it’d been days since she’d even thought about Mrs. Tanaka and her surly cats.

  “You doing all right?” she as
ked, not sure if all the activity was bad for him. He hadn’t cried out in pain or anything, but he’d just taken a fall before she’d gotten carried away and she’d kind of forgotten the newness of the situation when they’d gotten into the thick of things. She laughed. There she went overthinking everything again.

  “I’m fine. Better than fine.” He winced a little as he shifted, as if to contradict his own words. “What’s so funny?” He rolled over by reaching up to grab on to the bed’s handlebar, his legs falling into place after. The way his gaze roved over her naked body, she had no doubt he’d been satisfied.

  Her neck ached as she lay on the white shirt she’d turned into a pillow—only after she’d climaxed and slowly, ever so slowly, rolled off of him to lie down. She realized it was unlikely he could ever do missionary, but she wasn’t so sure that was a bad thing. She chewed her lip, considering the possibilities of enjoying her new client-turned-friend-turned-sex-buddy.

  Because she so wasn’t in the right frame of mind for him to be anything else.

  He poked her. “Earth to Elle,” he said.

  “Please,” she said, “call me ‘Bri.’ He called me ‘Elle.’” She regretted the words almost as soon as she’d said them. Like she needed a reminder of Daniel after a lay like that.

  “Bri,” he said, clearing his throat. He traced the line between two pieces of the hardwood floor, averting his eyes. “That guy at the comic store… He was your ex?”

  Daniel was the last thing she wanted to think about right now. But she kind of had herself to blame. “Yeah,” she said, hoping that might be the end of it.

  His fingers stopped moving. “So your friend dated your ex without telling you.”

  “It wasn’t so much that as me knowing what a huge dick he is and that still not being enough to keep her away from him.” She rolled onto her side to face Archer. “And he literally sprung the news of some fiancée on me last week, only to show up in my life with a new girlfriend a week later.” She rolled her eyes. “And I thought I could finally get away from him.”

  “Maybe he made up the fiancée to make you jealous.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged, letting her hair fall down over her shoulder. “I don’t even care.”

  Archer met her gaze at that. “That bad?”

  “That bad.” She’d have thought the debacle at the store would have made that clear enough. “What about you? Any crazy ex-girlfriends I should know about?”

  “No. Remember? No kiss before last week…”

  Brielle licked her lips. “I stole your first kiss.” She laughed. “You would have no crazy ex stories. You having your pick of the litter and all.”

  He leaned forward more, shifting some of his weight to the palm of his hand. “I can’t even tell when you’re joking,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Brielle, wondering now that she thought about it if he thought she was saying she was the pick of the litter, too. She knew she was no Lilac, not that she thought she was unworthy, but she didn’t exactly have to bat them off with a stick most of the time. “Sorry.”

  “No, I mean… I’ve had no exes. No girlfriends. Remember? Which means…”

  The hard floor was starting to make her arm ache, but Brielle couldn’t tear her eyes to look away. “You were a virgin?!” She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of that. D’uh.

  He rolled onto his back, the loss of tension in his arm muscles obvious. She leaned over to get a better look at this face; his expression crinkled and his gaze flicked downward. “Do you regret what just happened?”

  “Hell no,” said Brielle, kissing him on the cheek. “I find that rather hot,” she whispered, even if she knew that complicated things.

  Because she knew from experience that former virgins tended to get a little too attached to their cherry-poppers. If hers hadn’t dumped her in high school, she probably would have gone mad following him around with puppy-dog eyes forever, laughing shrilly at his stupid, immature jokes, forever stifling her own feelings of apprehension and regret whenever he acted like an idiot and she felt she was supposed to support him.

  But then again, she’d never known a twenty-five-year-old virgin. (Pembroke was close, but she was twenty-two. And who knew with her now…) Perhaps he’d be mature enough to handle it.

  Because she didn’t want this to end anytime soon, but it couldn’t last forever, either.

  They fell into a silence only broken by the sound of a phone from somewhere beneath them.

  “Mine,” said Archer, shifting himself away. He reached for the grab bars above him again to pull himself into a sitting position, then tried reaching toward the pocket of his pants, which were somewhere down around his ankles.

  Brielle shot up and grabbed his phone for him, gently pulling his boxers and pants higher up his legs once he took it from her. He watched her without even looking at his phone screen.

  “Should I?” she asked, his boxers halfway up his legs. She realized despite what they’d just shared, this moment felt more clinical, more intrusive somehow.

  His gaze fell down to his legs and Brielle’s did, too, finally looking at his bare legs for the first time. They were skinny—skinnier than she imagined even through his pants—at odds with his torso. There were some bruises along one shin and the other thigh, and Brielle worried that she’d hurt him.

  His eyes flittered away from her and she wondered if he could read her face. She hadn’t meant to be surprised, hadn’t meant to think anything negative, but there was no explaining that, not when she hadn’t said anything anyway. “I can manage,” he said, clearing his throat. He finally looked at his screen. “I should probably…”

  She jumped up, grabbing her panties, bra, and shirt from off the floor. “I’ll give you some privacy,” she said and instead of heading to the master bathroom, she went for the guest one to put more distance between them.

  It took Brielle a second after she stepped out of the bathroom, freshened up best she could without a shower, to remember where her pants and sweater were.

  Somehow, in their haste, they’d left a bit of a trail from the front door to the bedroom. She stepped over Archer’s braces to snatch up her jeans, sliding them on while searching for her sweater. Archer’s voice carried down the hallway, although he was speaking in hushed tones and she couldn’t make out what he said clearly.

  She was pretty sure he mentioned his mother, which was reason enough to not strain to hear more, after what she’d just done with the woman’s son.

  After a moment, she heard her own phone buzzing and retrieved it from where she’d left it in her purse. Her sweater was nearby and she slid it on awkwardly one arm at a time, shifting the phone from one hand to the other. She saw a message from Pembroke first and she took in the words “I’m sorry,” but her notifications disappeared when she saw her mom calling.

  Oh. Lovely. Nothing like a couple of young adults chatting with their moms right after they’ve had sex.

  The incessant buzzing of the phone in her hand made it tempting to ignore the call. But when it went to voice mail and her mom called back seconds later, she figured she’d have to answer and just pretend she’d spent the day in the library scouring the classifieds for job listings in a different environment to reenergize her job search. It was sort of how she’d originally seen this day going, which is why she’d felt okay about putting off doing much during the week. She was hopeful about Archer’s mom’s contact at the museum but practical enough to know it promised little more than nothing. Maybe this is about Archer’s mom firing us. Mom probably wants to know if I know any reason why. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Finally!” exclaimed her mom, even though there were no signs Brielle had missed more calls from her. “Is Nora with you?”

  “No,” said Brielle, almost sucker-punched by how different a turn this conversation was taking than she’d expected. “What’s wrong?”

  The sound of her mom taking a deep breath almost said it all. “She left. She was gone before I got up this morning. Sh
e isn’t answering her phone, either. I just thought… Maybe she went somewhere with you? Or told you where she was going? I didn’t want to panic when I got back at lunch, but some of her things are missing.”

  “No.” Brielle felt her palm holding the phone getting clammy. “I haven’t even talked to her in days.”

  “She was here last night…” She never had asked Brielle where she’d been, but Brielle supposed it was a good thing she hadn’t been too nosy.

  Brielle felt her blood run cold. “Does this have something to do with that language camp?”

  A moment of silence hung over the line. “Do you think she went to see your grandmother?”

  “With what?” asked Brielle. “Lita doesn’t have a ton of money to spare, whatever Nora thinks.”

  There was audible rifling going on on the other side of the call. “I can’t find my debit card.”

  “She knows the pin?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, probably. She’s seen me use it.”

  Nora, are you freaking serious? “Let me see if there are any flights to Puerto Rico out of O’Hare today.” She brought up the browser.

  “What if she already left?” It was the first time in a long time Brielle had heard that twinge of hurt in her mom’s voice without it being drowned in anger.

  “Can you call the police?” asked Brielle. There were two flights to Puerto Rico from Chicago today. One left at 5 in the morning. But the other wasn’t going to fly out until 7 p.m.

  “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours since she left.” Always practical, even when her teenage daughter was off doing something stupid. “And she’s almost eighteen, I don’t know what they’d say…”

  “They’d say she’s not an adult yet, and you have every right to deny letting her leave the continental U.S. without permission.” Brielle took a deep breath. “She could have left at 5 this morning…”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t sleep well these days and she was still here at 6 when I got up. I’m sure of it.”