I shook my head and shoveled in a mouthful of eggs, which were delicious. “No, no, and no.”
“Anybody ever plan a coup? Active or passive? Anybody ever sketch out the downfall of an existing government on a paper napkin?”
I choked on my eggs and shook my head, pressing my palm into my mouth. “No to that, too.”
“Your heritage sounds like Yawnsville, hon.”
“Pretty much,” I said, with my mouth still half full.
Grandma ripped open a packet of hot cocoa and filled up her mug partway with the boiling water spigot on the faucet. “Mmmm.”
“I was adopted,” I told her. “So what I know about my adoptive parents has nothing to do with…” Now it was my turn to give some scare quotes. “…my people.”
She narrowed her rheumy eyes at me and fished a tiny sad marshmallow out of Idris Elba’s bathwater. “Adopted,” Grandma repeated, slowly chewing the marshmallow. “So, you could be from…anywhere?”
I nodded vehemently, feeling delighted that I was probably out of the running for a full-on royal heritage examination. Is there a test for royalty? Is it like witches? Is she going to put me in the tub and see if I float? Grandma sighed and dabbed at her nose with a tissue that she produced from inside her sweatshirt sleeve. Desperate for a subject change, I opted to steer clear of Lenin and pointed at her mug. “I’m a fan, too. You know there’s a new season of Luther coming soon? Might even be out now. I could check online if you wanted.”
“I do love me some Idris,” Grandma said wistfully, staring longingly at nothing in particular, it seemed, somewhere in the middle distance. “What a hunk of man he is. Why they didn’t cast him as Bond, I’ll just never know. Fools!”
“And how,” I agreed, thinking to myself, But he’s got nothing on your grandson!
Grandma did look tempted by my offer about Luther, but just as quickly as she looked lured, she redoubled and shook her head. “No, honey. I can’t be watching television this early in the day. It’ll put me into a stupor like an epileptic dachshund. How do you feel about board games?”
The truth was, Not awesome. For the life of me, I could never win a round of Monopoly, and no matter how many times someone tried to teach me chess, it never stuck. But in that moment, I felt better about board games than whatever other plans Grandma seemed to have on tap. Like putting my hair into a potion or something. We were up to our eyeballs in snow, and I figured we’d have to do something to pass the time. “Sounds good to me.”
“Excellent,” Grandma said. She shuffled off to an antique hutch at the far end of the kitchen and crouched down to open a cabinet. She made pained noises as she did and gripped one knee.
“Here, let me help you,” I said, putting down my coffee and going to help her. I knelt and put my hand to her bony back. The air smelled strongly of baby powder, mixed up with Bengay.
“No need, honey! I got it right here,” she said, standing up and beaming. “Maybe we can ask the powers that be about your heritage!”
She gave the box in her hands a shake. And that’s when I saw it.
A Ouija board.
Oh no.
10
Dave
In my whole life, I’d never seen snow like that. Heavy as concrete and with drifts past the tops of the garage doors. I got out the shovel and the snow blower and got to work, yard by painstaking yard. I had no sense of how long it took me to clear a path from the garage to the generator shed, but by the time I got back inside, I saw that shit had taken a serious turn for the worse.
Grandma was standing next to Lisa, with her wrinkly hand on Lisa’s smooth forehead, while on television played reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. Lisa stared at me, blinking hard. “Oh, Dave! There you are,” she squeaked. “Hi! Hello!”
Christ. “Gram, you’re freaking her out.”
“No, we’re all good!” Lisa said, her voice high-pitched and panicked and sounding exactly the opposite of all good. “Took us a while to get a…signal?” With this, Grandma nodded slowly, and Lisa looked back at me with even more panic. “But so far, we’ve discovered a man named Stand With Knife is buried underneath the house, and a lady named Jane Gunderson killed her second husband with a cast-iron pan in the kitchen in 1899.” Lisa blinked hard and raised her feet onto anxiously pointed tiptoes beneath her bent knees. “The more you know!”
“But not a goddamned peep about you, honey bunny!” Grandma roared, making a frustrated alphabet soup with the planchette.
Lisa scrunched her eyes shut and sucked in a breath from between gritted teeth. “Never know what’s coming up next! Third time might be the charm!”
I had to hand it to her. Not every woman could stumble into an alternate reality with so much grace, and I felt somehow proud that, even though I’d only known her a little while, I could read right between her lines to hear her say, Oh my God, help me! I mean, it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out, but still. I liked the secret language.
After a couple of long strides, I was prying the planchette out of Grandma Katrina’s hands. “Prude!” she snarled. “No sense of occasion! None!”
“I think you might need a nap,” I told Grandma, looking her in the cataract-clouded eyes.
“You need a nap! And a shave!” Grandma said.
I widened my eyes. Listen, Baroness…
There was a flicker of laughter at the corner of Grandma’s mouth. Hell on wheels. “Fine! All right, fine,” she said and snatched up her iPad. As she padded away, barely picking her slippers up off the wood floors, I heard the ding-ding of an app, followed by her asking, “Okay, Google! How do you test for royalty?”
Lisa snort-snickered as she boxed up the Ouija board, minus the planchette. I took Lisa by the hand and led her into the kitchen. “She’s intense,” she said, ruffling up her hair with her fingers. “I like her. But holy moly!”
I totally got that. As a preemptive measure, I put the planchette on the top shelf of the glasses cabinet, too high for Grandma to reach it even with her mechanical arm. “Did she freak you out too badly?”
Lisa ruffled her hair a bit more. “Naw, nothing a few sessions with my therapist and some hypnosis won’t fix.” She was totally deadpan. Absolutely killed me.
“I’ll pay for it,” I said without cracking a smile.
“Big shot.”
And then we both dissolved into hushed laughter. But all kidding aside, I was a bit worried about her. I was pretty sure Lisa had never been accosted by some old lady who wanted to ask her a thousand questions about her bloodline, for God’s sake. “You sure you’re good?” I asked.
Lisa gave me a little smile and then made some hair-smoothing moves like she was putting herself back together. Finally, she blew out a long breath and nodded. After that, she seemed to have totally regained her composure and was somehow even prettier than I’d remembered her from an hour before.
“You hungry?”
“Always.”
“My kind of woman, but I’m not talking about lunch.”
“My kind of man!”
I wrapped my arm around Lisa’s waist and pulled her into the walk-in pantry. I pressed her up against the shelf full of pasta sauces and oils and vinegars. “Full disclosure, Grandma doesn’t actually live with me. In case you were worried about that.”
A tickled smile started to show on Lisa’s face. “And why would I be worried about that?”
“Don’t know.” I dropped my voice. “But maybe because when you come, it’s like a fucking earthquake. I’ll bet you made the needles shift at the USGS.”
Lisa tried to shove me, but I didn’t budge, and instead, I just pressed my chest back into her hands, crowding her up against a row of chutneys that I got in a gift basket from my investment banker. Lisa said, “She really is a piece of work. I just don’t know why she wants to figure out my heritage.”
I couldn’t help myself and moved my hand around behind her ass. I gave it a squeeze, and Lisa moaned, then pushed her hips into my thighs. “She wants to get me married off, that
’s why.”
Sizing me up carefully, she shifted her puckered lips to the side. “Is that so?”
Nodding at her, I bent down, nudging her cheek with my nose. I crowded her space a little more, and the glass jars shifted behind her. “But I’d rather find the one myself.”
I hoisted her up on one of the pantry shelves, and a box of crackers tumbled to the ground, followed by a bag of pasta. Lisa reached up and hooked her arms around me. “And how do you plan to do that?” she asked as she hooked her ankles around my ass and raised her eyebrow.
Goddamn it, what a pistol. Perfect in every way. “One step at a time,” I told her and then put her down to give her a piggyback ride up to my bedroom.
* * *
When we got to the master suite, I let her slide off of me onto the bed and then went down onto my knees between her legs. I hooked my fingertips over the waistband of her leggings and pulled them down. No panties now—God bless this motherfucking blizzard.
“Won’t she wake up?” Lisa whispered, propping herself on her elbows and glancing at the door, which I’d closed and locked.
“She’s out cold, at least until midafternoon, and she couldn’t hear us anyway. She’s in a different wing.”
Lisa’s eyes flashed with that word, wing, and her gaze moved around the master suite, darting from the ceiling to the long silk drapes to the leather sofa on the other side of the room and up and down the posts of my bed. “This place is really amazing.”
“You know what else is amazing?” I brought my tongue to her clit, tracing the edges and tasting her for the first time so far. “This.”
She moaned up at the ceiling, and I pushed her thighs open wider. I got a little obsessed with the idea of my cum still inside her from last night—fucking dirty, fucking lewd—but I let myself go there. Her smell was the trip wire, her taste the fuse. I’d seen it last night, and I had the bite marks to prove it. She was sweet as frosting on the surface, but underneath was a whole different story. As I sank down deeper, giving her more of my tongue, her fingertips moved softly through my hair. Her toes curled below me, gripping the rail of the bed frame.
I slid my first two fingers into her, and her body bucked off the mattress, her ass squeezed tight. I worked her clit slow and firm and eased her back into submission. Inside my pants, I was rock hard. Wiping my mouth on her thigh, I grazed that soft skin with my stubble. “I’m going to make you come like this, and then I’m going to get inside you, where I’m going to come again. And again. We clear?”
Her grip on my hair tightened. She lifted her face to meet my stare, and she said, “Crystal.”
“But I need you to be a little bit quieter than last night.” I dragged her ass closer to the end of the mattress, the seam of the edge making a line in that perfect flesh. “Because I don’t want any interruptions.”
Lisa pursed her lips, holding back a laugh. “Sorry.”
“Don’t you dare fucking apologize,” I said and got back to business.
11
Lisa
Having to be quiet was…the best thing ever. It intensified everything, not being able to let it out. After he spooned me right through a nap and back, I tottered to the master bathroom. I felt like a newborn foal on a nature show—like my legs didn’t work right at all. He’d made me come so hard that my knees were actually knocking together. I braced myself on the edge of the sink and looked at his reflection, him watching me from the bed. His eyes moved down to my bare ass, and he shook his head. Smug. Satisfied. And totally entitled. I spun to get a look, and there, in glorious pink welts, was his handprint.
He rolled out of bed and followed me into the bathroom. Just as he was about to close the door, though, we heard a clattering of pans from downstairs.
Dave pinched the bridge of his nose. “I love her, but I’d really rather that we’d ended up here snowed in, just the two of us.” He pressed into me from behind so that the marble edge of the countertop made a cold line against my thighs. “Because there’s a pool table in the basement, and I really have to see this body on that felt.”
With that thought making me shudder—fingers tangled in rope pockets, on my knees, goodness gracious—I turned to face him. “Dave, I need to be straight with you. I don’t usually do things like this. Actually, I never do things like this. I’ve got a three-date minimum before things move to the bedroom.”
Dave didn’t seem fazed by this at all. “Wait. So you don’t usually find yourself in the middle of a once-in-a-century natural disaster, stumble into a stranger’s house, and have the best sex of your life?”
Little did he know that the most exciting date I’d had recently was a round of speed dating cut short by a restaurant kitchen fire. Smoking hot! “Not since George W. was in office. And even then, it was only a tropical storm.”
He snickered and pressed his still half-hard cock into my belly button. “Me neither, actually. I have the shittiest luck with women. It’s like a sitcom.”
Out of nowhere, I got a flash of jealousy. Him. With other women. I didn’t like it. No, I did not. But I didn’t have a claim on him, I knew that. How silly. How ridiculous. That a man like this, with a mattress empire and an estate, would want anything to do with little old me.
Except, before I could make some self-deprecating crack to let him off the hook, Dave said, “Listen, I don’t want to go too far toward the Ouija board side of things, but I gotta tell you, Lisa…” He dug his hands into my ass more aggressively, and I watched his thick eyebrows shift into a serious line. “Maybe it’s crazy, but I really just…like you. And I want to see where this goes.”
Seven thousand butterflies took off in unison in my stomach. I raised my eyes to him, and he hoisted me up onto the countertop. “You do?”
“Fuck yeah, I do. Don’t you feel it? The sparks?”
Sparks! Please. I could feel it in the heat between us and every time he touched me, but sparks wasn’t even close. “More like a fire at a fireworks warehouse.”
“You’re goddamned right about that. So, what do you say? You want to set fire to this and see what happens?” He gave me another thrust. “Because I don’t think we can fuck like we do without getting…” His eyes moved over my face. “Attached.”
This man. He was over the top. He was clearly a die-hard romantic. He was also lovely and respectful and made a mean scrambled egg. He did things to me in bed that I didn’t even know were possible. And he was some sort of prince!
“I’m not opposed to attached,” I whispered, so overpowered by the moment that even my voice was unsteady.
“Good. And I love my grandma, but I don’t give two shits about where you come from. I just want to get to know you. And fuck you senseless every chance I get. How does that sound…” He lifted my chin so he was looking me in the eye. “…princess?”
If he hadn’t had me perched on the countertop, I think my knees would’ve gone straight out from under me then. “Pretty much perfect.”
“Good girl,” he said, tipping me back for a kiss.
But before I got lost in him all over again, I stopped him. “I’m determined to win her over, Dave. I won’t let a lady in a Lenin hoodie scare me away.”
“I’ve got no fucking doubt about that at all.”
* * *
We came downstairs to find Dave’s grandma on the sofa, with a hilariously huge bowl of popcorn in her lap and her mug of whipped cream nearby. On the big flat-screen television, Idris Elba as DCI John Luther was strolling through the wet streets of London with his hands jammed into his blazer pockets. I glanced at Dave, with his dimples and his brawn and his kind eyes, right then looking in the refrigerator and scratching his stubble thoughtfully and considering what looked like a whole roasting chicken for dinner. I glanced at Idris, still with his hands in his pockets and strolling along. Dave put the chicken on a cutting board and looped an apron over his head. Sorry, Idris. No comparison. Not to me.
“Honey! You were right!” Grandma said. “New season!” She s
macked the sofa next to her, signaling for me to come take a seat. I glanced at Dave, and after sizing up the situation—appearing to scan for, I don’t know what, a stack of tarot cards and Witchcraft for Dummies, probably—he gave me a reassuring look to say, Yeah, go ahead. “You want coffee? Tea? Something stronger?”
“Ooh,” I said, taking a peek at the clock. “Can we drink at two p.m.?”
“All’s fair in love and storms,” Dave said, patting my ass. “Two hot toddies, coming up.”
“Remember how I made them?”
Dave clicked his tongue against his teeth. “I watched your every move.”
Heavens.
I made my way into the huge living area off the kitchen and took my place next to Grandma on the sofa. She thrust a fuzzy throw blanket into my arms and nudged an ottoman toward my feet. Then she offered me the popcorn and grabbed a remote, licking butter from her fingers. She pressed something, and the blinds went down on the row of huge picture windows. Instant home theatre. See also, awesome.
“Listen, honey,” Grandma said, “Didn’t mean to scare you earlier. I get a little carried away.”
She didn’t look at me when she said it. I felt like we were two cops on patrol, both looking out of the windshield as we cruised along.
“That’s okay.”
“It’s just that he’s my only little prince. His folks are gone, only child. Same old story.”
Turning, I watched Dave in the kitchen, where he was crushing some garlic. He wiped the knife off on a dish towel and programmed something into the oven, giving me a perfect view of his yummy buns.
As if he could feel me looking at him, he met my stare and winked. He made a bottoms-up gesture and pointed at the stove, and then he gave me a single finger in the air to say, Coming right up.
A bony elbow jabbed me in the side. “You listening, hon?”
“Sorry. What was that?”
She passed the whole container of whipped cream to me, her eyes locked on me. Like a test. I considered the can and thought about going to get a spoon or a bowl or something. But, what the hell. When in Rome. I squirted a big dollop onto my tongue, and Grandma hooted. “I just want to make sure you’re the right kind of girl.”
Glamour Page 24
