“I’m not shocked. I just…”
“What?” He rocked her back and forth, his erection pressed against her.
“I must seem pretty…staid.”
“I’d say you’ve probably had staid lovers.”
“Maybe…” She was trying very hard not to panic. He had probably done women all over the city in all kinds of wild and spontaneous places and she’d completely killed the moment worrying about beds with clean sheets, for God’s sake. She needed to work to recapture the feeling in the butterfly exhibit, where she’d truly managed to drop the control freak, let go and be in the moment.
“You don’t remember our night together, Alana, but I do. Every second. Trust me, I was not bored. Never did I feel the need to nap. Not at all. Even on drugs.”
She laughed and felt better. A little. No, a lot. She was going to fix this.
“If you’re not comfortable here, we can—”
“I’m very comfortable.” She pulled her dress off, stopped herself from folding it and hanging it carefully across a chair. In fact, she tossed it onto his half-finished nightstand, then unhooked her bra and did the dress on the night table one better, by tossing it carelessly onto the floor. She didn’t even look to see where it landed.
Sawyer made a surprised and helplessly aroused sound that turned her on even more—and increased her confidence. “You sure you want this here, Alana?”
She smiled seductively, put her hands to the elastic of her panties, eased them down, kicked them across the room. “Do I look sure?”
He sucked in a harsh breath, lunged forward and lifted her onto him. “You look incredible.”
“Thank you.” She wrapped her legs around him, somehow sounding cool and calm when she was wildly, breathlessly excited. She’d never done anything like this. It felt freeing and dangerous and safe all at once—which was the only type of danger she could handle.
Sawyer carried her effortlessly over to a worktable, which she promised herself she wouldn’t inspect for cleanliness, but couldn’t help one peek.
“Wait.” He put her down, whipped off his shirt and spread it on the table, then lifted her onto the soft fabric, nudging her legs apart.
“Are you always this thoughtful?”
“I thought I was being practical. Get splinters in your butt our first time and you won’t want me again.”
She cracked up. “That is such a guy thing to say.”
“Isn’t it? So is this.” He knelt between her legs, his breath warm, kissed her intimately, his tongue and lips wet and wonderful. “You have the most beautiful—”
“Mo-om. I can’t find my Spore disk.”
“Did you check your backpack?”
Sawyer leaned his head despairingly on her thigh. “If it’s not drugs or too-public places, it’s children.”
“We’ll get it right.” She stroked his hair affectionately, lingering on the curl around his ear, the thick strands at the bottom of his neck. She loved that when things went wrong he laughed and rolled with the punches. She could learn from him.
“All we have is today.” He gazed up at her; the emotion smoldered, sparked, then burned clear, bright and steady until she had to look away again.
If this wasn’t love, she had no idea what it could possibly be. She’d never felt anything like this before.
One day. Only one day to explore it.
He stood, moving his hands leisurely along her thighs, kissed her with increasing passion. She unsnapped, unzipped his jeans and pushed them down; he caught them with one hand behind his back and extracted a condom from the pocket.
“Ah, took me for granted?” Her fingers entered the fly of his boxers, catching his hard length in her fist.
Breath hissed between his teeth. “A man can always hope.”
She leaned into his broad chest, played with his nipple, teeth and tongue causing soft moans that pleased her as much if not more than her touch pleased him. She loved the power she had to make him this aroused; the power he had to affect her so deeply. Her hands kept stroking his erection, exploring the juxtaposition of baby-soft skin and jutting hardness, until her need to feel him inside her began to be desperate. She shoved the material of his boxers down and away, setting him free. He was so beautiful, generous and smooth, sleek and eager.
“Now,” she whispered. “While we can.”
He rolled on the condom, then knelt and used his mouth to lubricate her. She arched her back, hands landing hard on the table behind her, while his tongue thrust inside her, painted the outside of her opening with moisture. Her breath accelerated; her heartbeat followed. Oh, what she’d missed that first night together by being asleep.
“Sawyer.” She stopped for a whimper of pleasure. “I’m ready. Please.”
She couldn’t wait, wanted him inside her before they were interrupted, before she stopped to think how much more she’d love him after they were joined this way…and before she got so turned on she started screaming her frustration.
“Yes.” He stood between her legs, wide shoulders, slender hips, solid and so male. One hand steadied her waist, the other guided the head of his penis. He paused as his breath released, then started a slow, strong slide inside her, setting nerve endings on fire.
What she thought would be most distasteful about having sex in a basement turned out to be the most arousing. She loved the hard, unforgiving surface under her, the occasional ache in her tailbone, the creak of the table, the wood and stain smells mingling with the heat they generated together. The sex felt rawer, more powerful, more urgent and animal, which turned her on out of her mind.
Or maybe it was just this man.
She brought her knees up high, loving the depth he could get in that position, loving even the flashes of pain when he moved deeper. She cried out, cried out again. His hand landed on her mouth, his thrusts increased speed. Alana blew out breath, felt the resulting dampness on the palm firmly denying her volume. The suppression, the mildest most innocent version of bondage possible turned her on even more. She grabbed his hips, urged him on. Just when she thought she’d explode with the desire to climax, his finger found her clitoris and within seconds the orgasm rocked her, filling her body with starburst sensations.
Instead of coming down, she was hit with a frenzy of fresh desire. He slowed to give her space to recover, but she shook her head, mumbled, “Keep going,” behind his fingers.
He took his hand away. “Am I hurting you?”
“No,” she panted. “Keep going. Keep going. Don’t stop.”
He groaned and increased his pace. She loved every sweaty, lustful minute.
Leaning back, she caressed her breast in a seductive circle with an open palm, watched his face responding, tightening, going blank as he withdrew into his own climax, then coming alive again as the peak tore through him.
Then his eyes met hers, he was breathing hard, face alight. She returned the smile tremulously, feeling dangerously vulnerable. All the more because of the new, deep emotions giving those feelings a solid foundation.
Please tell her he felt it, too…
“You okay?”
“More than.”
“Did you miss a bed?”
“I will never use one again.”
He chuckled. “They have their place. Come here.”
She put her suddenly shaky legs back down, wrapped her arms around him, laid her head on his warm chest, inhaling his scent, trying to capture the moment, a mental snapshot she could keep forever. He held her tightly, stroked her hair, kissed it gently. “Don’t move to Florida, Alana. Stay in Milwaukee with me.”
Alana stopped breathing. Panic erased her bliss. “My grandparents need me. Gran fell stepping off a curb or something. She could have broken her hip. I would never forgive myself if something happened to either of them and I wasn’t there to help.”
She stopped the second she realized she was babbling idiotically. What was with that?
“I know. I understand.” Sawyer kissed her, dre
w his thumb from the corner of her mouth across her cheek. “I’d beg for one more day together, but I have a feeling we could be together a hundred more days and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
Alana hid her face, nodding mutely in agreement, trying hard to calm herself, and trying harder not to hear Melanie shouting her told-you-so.
12
CANDLES. SAWYER FOUND the cabinet he’d opened his first official morning here, when he’d shared Raisin Bran with Alana, and pulled out a box of candles, hoping Mel and Alana would excuse his thievery—no time to buy any. He added the candles to the insulated bag he’d prepared while he was cooking Alana’s breakfast, packed with dinner he’d take to his family’s summer house on Lake Wishkitba, where he planned to spend what could be his last night with Alana. It didn’t seem possible he could feel this deeply about someone and, having just found her, be preparing to say goodbye.
A glance at his watch told him he’d better hurry back to Milwaukee’s lakefront to meet her for picture-taking. Half an hour ago he’d left her in the basement, pretending to need the bathroom, but had made her promise she’d check out the new drawer of his bedside table, as if he were wildly proud of it and needed admiration.
Inside the nearly finished drawer had been the last invitation. To meet him at Bradford Beach, where she’d taken that one incredible winter dawn picture. He wanted to give her the chance to recreate the picture, to have another memory of the city to torment her in Florida. Then he’d get her to the lake house for dinner and in-bed sex with candles the way she wanted, the way circumstances had prevented them from having yet. Alone. Uninterrupted.
He zipped the cooler closed. If anyone had told him even a week ago that he’d be planning to decorate a room to make it sweet and romantic for sex, he would have given whoever it was a manly sock in the jaw.
Alana had him. Any idea that she wasn’t his “type” had been firmly subjugated to the intensity of his feelings. Never before had he felt this…much.
After the candelit sex he wanted to hold her all night, and when it was time for her to leave the next morning, not let her go.
He couldn’t keep her here. She felt she had a duty to her grandparents, which he understood and admired, even though he’d spent so long struggling to where he could finally understand that he also had a duty to himself. And he also suspected she was gun-shy about getting too involved too quickly, which, given her mother’s apparent behavior, he also understood. If that were the only thing keeping her from staying, he’d do whatever he could, playing fair or foul to change her mind.
But…
He would love the chance to convince her to stay. Another day. Another week. Even if, by then, he’d be so crazy about her it would hurt ten times more when she left.
The house phone rang. He hesitated. Calls for him would come to his cell. But Melanie wasn’t home, and the helpless grandparents could be calling again. He strode over to the wall phone, checked caller ID. Yes. Edwin P. Hawthorne, aka Grandad. “Hello?”
“Oh…. Who is this?” The voice was surprisingly firm and cheerful. For some reason he expected Alana’s grandmother to sound at death’s door.
“Sawyer Kern.” He wasn’t sure he should identify himself as Melanie’s roommate in case she hadn’t told them a man was living with her.
“Of course, Sawyer dear, it’s nice to talk to you finally, Melanie’s been keeping you from me. This is her grandmother, Edith Hawthorne.”
“Nice to talk to you, too, Mrs. Hawthorne.”
“No, no. Just Edith.” She sounded younger than he expected, too.
“Edith. Is Cynthia gone yet?”
“Oh, yes. Just passed.” She sounded completely matter-of-fact.
“Must have been frightening staying through it.”
“I don’t know, I found it quite exciting. Nature’s power is truly awesome.” A deep voice rumbled in the background, Edith’s voice murmured a response. “Yes, tell the girls we’ve heard from the president of the association and our condo survived just fine. They shouldn’t worry, though I’m sure Alana has anyway.”
He chuckled. “Maybe a little.”
“Poor thing. She gets so worked up. Always has. How are the girls getting along?”
“Uh.” He had no idea how to tackle that one. “Okay.”
“Not good, huh. I’d hoped by now…Well, it may take a few more years, but they’ll end up best friends, you watch. They’re more similar than they realize.”
Interesting. He wanted to ask more, but wasn’t sure it was his place. “Alana’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“Ah. Yes.” She sounded distracted. “When is she coming now?”
“She’s planning to leave in the morning.”
“I see.” She passed along that information in a loud whisper. The rumbling in the background responded again. “Thanks for letting us know.”
Enthusiasm was missing from her tone. Sawyer’s hope perked up its eternal ears. “That’s not convenient?”
“Oh. It’s fine. We’ll adjust. She is so anxious to move down here…”
Sawyer walked to the window. “But?”
“Nothing, really. Edwin and I are a bit concerned about the timing.”
“Because of your injury?”
“My what?” She sounded so astounded he started questioning whether he was mixing this story up with someone else’s. Except Alana had mentioned it barely an hour ago.
“The leg you injured after your fall.”
“Oh, that.” She laughed dismissively. “I put a Band-Aid on the scrape, had bruises for a few days, that was it. I was back in my skates within a week.”
“Your…skates?”
A louder rumble in the background. Edith gasped. “Oh, I wasn’t supposed to tell. Rollerblades. Edwin and I have taken it up. We’re having a ball down here.”
Sawyer took two beats to be absolutely flabbergasted, then started grinning. “Do Alana and Melanie know how you hurt yourself?”
She cleared her throat uncomfortably; he grinned harder. “We…didn’t want them worrying, imagining accidents and so on. We wear helmets and all the padding. All the folks do down here. It’s very safe. I only fell because someone bumped into me while I was bent over fastening my skates. I’ll do that in a chair from now on.”
“Good idea.” He rubbed his forehead, pacing the room now, not sure how much was appropriate to ask, but his immediate future—and maybe his heart—depended on her answer, and he wanted that answer spelled out in plain English before he’d trust it to be true. “So…you aren’t relying on Alana to take care of you?”
She sighed. “Alana needs to be needed. Her mother, our daughter…well, maybe they’ve told you.”
“Some, yes.” He still didn’t have what he wanted, but that was close enough to make him want to leap around like a complete fool. Alana wanted someone to need her? He was all over that. “You mentioned the timing of her visit being off.”
“Oh, yes. See, after the hurricane settles down, we’re planning to drive to Lake Wales to try our first time skydiving. But if she’s arriving soon, we’ll postpone it.”
“That would be a shame.” Shame—something he was completely without at the moment. “Can’t you go after she gets there?”
“Well, to be honest…” She laughed uneasily. “I’m not sure she’d let us. We’ve always wanted to do this. I suppose it’s on our bucket list, like it was on Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman’s in that movie, except we’re not ill, just not getting younger. After we moved down here, we were talking one day and said why not do it? You can talk things to death, but sometimes you have to get up and act.”
“I agree.” Skydiving! He was nearly as crazy about Alana’s grandmother as he was about Alana. “So if I’m getting this right, you’re afraid Alana moving to Florida will cramp your style.”
“Oh, no, no no, of course we’re dying to see her, we adore her and Melanie both, and it will be wonderful having Alana close by…”
“But?” S
hameless. He’d even stopped feeling guilty for pushing her. At this point, he was a shark who’d smelled prey and would circle relentlessly until he got what he was after.
“Well, to be honest, we’ve gotten used to being independent. We’re finally having that delayed empty nest, you know, and…well, I feel terrible telling you all this. Edwin is sitting here shaking his head, scowling at me for rambling on. But then you’re practically part of the family.”
He hoped to be. Maybe. Someday. If everything worked out with Alana the way he felt it should. “I completely understand. I won’t say a word to either of your granddaughters about the skydiving. That’s yours to tell. But I might be able to help you keep the nest empty, at least for a while longer.”
“Oh? Yes? What do you think we should do? Talk to her, I suppose.”
Sawyer laughed. His mood had turned around one hundred and eighty degrees. The gloves were off. He’d do whatever it took to keep Alana here in Milwaukee where she belonged. “Tell you what, Edith. Why don’t you and your husband leave all that up to me?”
“YOU DITCHED ME again.”
Sawyer grinned. She was gorgeous, standing patiently waiting for him at the fairly crowded beach house. Even more gorgeous than she’d been so recently when he ‘ditched her again’ in his basement. She’d changed back into the red shorts that exposed her shapely legs—strong thighs, round calves, trim ankles—and the soft yellow top, which hugged her hourglass figure and made it difficult to remember he owed her a response.
“Hey, you know, I’m a love-’em-and-leave-’em kind of guy.”
“That right?” The tiniest anxiety in her voice.
“Actually, no.” He bent and kissed her soft mouth. “Leaving’s your job.”
“I know.” Her features saddened. He tried not to smirk. Alana didn’t know it yet, but she wasn’t leaving. Tonight’s mission was to get her promise to stay another day or two…or three. Buy him time to visit the foundation and put his hat in the ring for the director’s job—a formality, given his father’s influence and desire he take the position—and work out the rest of the details for supporting Debbie’s artist-studio building, see if she and her partners would agree to hire Alana to manage the building. A form of nepotism maybe, but she was well-qualified, having not only management experience but the artistic bent, as well. Until the property was renovated, she could work with him at the foundation. Or relax and let him be her sugar daddy for a while, not that he thought she’d agree to that arrangement.
While She Was Sleeping... Page 15
