by Moriah Jovan
“Geez, Vanessa,” he murmured. “I barely touched you.” She swallowed, the tears coming now, and her mind flashed through her to-do list. “Stop it,” he said. “I know what you’re doing. Deep breath. In through your nose and hold it.” She did that until her lungs felt they would burst. “Now out through your mouth.” Vanessa obeyed. “Do it again.”
But her list wouldn’t leave her head. Emotion flooded her: the remnants of her little-girl hurt, her regrets and insecurities, her anger with Knox and the guilt it caused, and her fears—for Whittaker House, for Eric, for Eric’s far more important future. Finally, she began to sob into her pillow, but Eric said nothing. He continued to dig deeper into her muscles, down lower into the flesh of her bare buttocks, and then her sobs had nothing to do with pain.
Just release.
With every knot he found and worked, she sobbed harder.
“Breathe, Vanessa,” he whispered from time to time, and only then would she realize she’d been holding her breath.
Slowly her tears dried up and she was too spent not to relax, not to let him do whatever he thought needed to be done. She’d never cried in front of her lovers before; she’d had no reason to.
They weren’t Eric.
* * * * *
35: Minutes In Idleness
The warmth of the sun streaming in through her windows and touching her face awoke her. Vanessa sat up abruptly and looked beside her to see Eric on his back, asleep, one arm over his forehead and the other hanging off the bed.
She turned the other way to look at her clock and she gasped. Eight o’clock! She scrambled to throw off the covers, but a warm hand wrapped around her wrist and pulled her back in bed.
“You’re taking the day off,” Eric rumbled from where he lay, still relaxed, his eyes still closed. “Lie down. Loosen up.”
“But—”
“Vachel’s in charge today.”
She gaped at him. “You went behind my back!”
“I did.”
Her anger was instant and hot. “Eric—”
“Oh, shut it, Vanessa,” he snapped. “You’re going to work yourself into an early grave and you know, I don’t want our whole relationship to be based on your to-do list. I want to have fun with you, see if we can have fun together— Fuck, if you even know how to have fun.”
Her brow wrinkled. “I have fun every day.”
“Yeah, I know. Maybe it’s time you tried a different kind of fun. You know, like trying a different food from your favorites in case you’re missing something.”
The anger gave way slowly, teensy bit by teensy bit, as she reluctantly opened her mind to the idea of spending the day with Eric like two normal people involved in some semblance of a courtship.
“What about your murder one case?”
He shrugged. “It’ll still be there on Monday.” She stared at him, confused, until he opened his eyes and looked up at her. “See, that’s what you don’t get. Not really. It’ll still be there.” Then he went in for the kill. “What would Mrs. Wilder say about your work habits?”
Vanessa glared at him. “Don’t you use her against me!”
Eric flashed her that pretty, pretty smile that had always made her want to smile, too. “Which only means you know exactly what she’d say.” He tugged at her until she reluctantly lay beside him, his arm around her, holding her close. “C’mon, Vanessa,” he whispered against her temple, kissing her there. “Relax. I didn’t get all your knots out last night, but I got a good start. Don’t waste it.”
She sighed against him, adoring the way his hard, dark chest felt against her. She ran her fingers through the dusting of fine black hair and ran her finger around the flat of his nipple until it puckered for her.
“Deep breath,” he said, “in through the nose, out through the mouth.”
If Vanessa were honest with herself, she did feel languid enough now to understand better how tense she’d really been. She’d never had a massage before; when she’d had the time, she hadn’t had the money. Once she had money, she hadn’t had time.
“This feels funny,” she murmured against his skin. “The way my body feels. I’m not sure if I like it or not.”
“You need to get used to it. For cryin’ out loud, Vanessa. You built a spa across the street and you don’t use it?”
She sighed.
“I’m taking you to Silver Dollar City today,” he said. “And we’re going to hold hands and ride rides and see the shows and eat cotton candy and funnel cakes and ice cream and hot dogs. If you have a problem with that, well, that’s just too damned bad.” Vanessa laughed. Just a little. “Tomorrow,” he continued, “we’re going to Fantastic Caverns.”
Vanessa started to rise again in protest, but he tightened his hold. “Tomorrow? But—”
“No buts. Look, if I have to call Knox and get him to come down here, I will.”
“That’s dirty,” she growled.
“I’m playing to win here, Vanessa, and no, I’m not above playing dirty.”
She huffed.
“And I have no compunction about telling him to dig in and give you some real help. I have been telling him what to do for six years. So either come along quietly or I’ll haul out the handcuffs.”
Her nostrils flared. “I don’t know if I can have a good time with a blackmailer,” she grumbled, then scowled when Eric laughed.
“Technically, it’s extortion.”
“Whatever,” she snapped, but couldn’t put any real emotion into it. Fun. Silver Dollar City. Holding hands and riding rides and eating cotton candy. “Okay,” she sighed, letting the whole concept seep into her mind.
Intellectually, she knew she worked too hard, but she really did enjoy her work, her routine, especially because it was productive. She didn’t know if she could enjoy herself doing . . . well, nothing . . . when she could be having fun doing something.
“I want to know something,” Eric murmured, his fingers tracing across her back, making her shiver and sigh.
“What?”
“If you’re—” Vanessa screamed with laughter when his fingers attacked her ribs. “—ticklish.” She squirmed and rolled onto her back, trying to curl up, breathless with laughter, but he followed her. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
But he stopped, kneeled over her, and she looked up into that handsome face. She laid her palms on either side of his face and said, “I remember— That day, I wanted you to give me a little kiss, a peck. On the cheek, maybe on the lips.” His smile faded and his black eyes glittered when he lowered his face to hers, barely brushing her lips with his.
“Like that?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she breathed. “It never occurred to me you’d want to avoid little girls altogether. I’m sorry.”
“We’re here. It’s all good.” Then he bounced off the bed abruptly and said, “Move it, lady. I’m going to teach you how to have some good, clean fun.”
She sat up and a pair of white denim shorts smacked her in the face, then a pink gingham peasant blouse landed on the top of her head. Vanessa jerked her clothes off her face to see him disappear into the bathroom. Water began to run in the shower and the sink, almost simultaneously. “Clean?” she called.
“Clean,” he called back. “No sex for you until you demonstrate that you know how to have fun.”
She squeaked, at once offended at his audacity, yet deeply touched. It didn’t take him long to shower, and he came out with the towel half covering his face as he dried his hair, but then he stopped short when he saw her.
Vanessa stared at him, eyes narrowed, and defied him to resist her, the way she had leaned back against the wall, her knees up and legs wide so he could see her neatly trimmed mons—and the fact that she had both her hands there, stroking herself.
Eric gulped, riveted at her show. “Oh, God, Vanessa,” he breathed.
“I can have sex if I want to,” she said in her best nanny-nanny-boo-boo voice. “Even if I have to have it with myself.” She cast a poin
ted glance at his rapidly engorging cock. “I dare you.”
He snapped to, looked in her face, and began to laugh. “Oh, no. That doesn’t work on me, sweetheart.” Vanessa, at once aroused and amused and frustrated, watched as he turned to drop on the side of the bed and start dressing. Boxer briefs over those long muscular tattooed legs—
“You don’t go commando?”
“Naw,” he muttered, then cast her an ornery glance. “Sensitive skin.”
Vanessa burst out laughing and gave up. “All right, all right. You win.”
Eric was fully dressed in a simple tee shirt and cargo shorts when she came out of the shower. He still sat on the bed, hunched over his iPhone and, from the looks of it, reading a book.
She dropped her towel and walked right in front of him. He looked up at her from under that dark brow, and his mouth twitched. “You’re beautiful. But you know that already.”
She huffed and grabbed her clothes with feigned anger. “How can you do that?”
“Do what?”
She sat down on the bed beside him to dress. Snuggled up to him. “I was masturbating for you and you just . . . blew it off.”
He chuckled and kissed her cheek. “Along with everything else I picked up at BYU, I figured out how to control myself. I had to learn how to have really creative dates without any expectation of sex, and I dated a lot. Had loads of fun even though I knew I wasn’t going to get laid.”
Vanessa stared at him, dumbfounded. But why should that surprise her? He’d slept with her nude for a week without sex . . . “Did you get laid at BYU at all?”
“Not much, no,” he said. “Dirk’ll tell you different, but I exaggerated a lot just to watch his head explode. He thought I was taking advantage of all the sexually ill-equipped Mormon girls in Provo. But . . . I did get enough practice to stop being the selfish asshole I was in high school. Getting a really skittish girl into bed is mostly more trouble than it’s worth, but with some— It was frustrating at first, but I learned how. It’s kind of, well, an art.”
“Like tickling trout.”
He stared at her.
“Tickling trout. You can seduce a trout right out of the water by hand if you’re patient and you stroke him just right. Curtis taught me how, taught Vachel. It’s a dying skill.”
“Oh. Well, okay, yeah. So think of it that way.”
“Did you date seriously?”
He nodded. “Even a couple of girls I would have been willing to wait until marriage for, yeah, but they decided they couldn’t marry a non-member.”
“So you’ve been engaged before Annie?”
“No, but almost. Thing is, you’re surrounded by a bunch of girls— Gorgeous ones, too. God, Mormon girls are hot. Anyway, you’ve acquired a taste for nice girls, so you know before you even ask one out that she wants to get married, right? And you know they want to be virgins when they get married, right? After a while, it doesn’t seem like such a sacrifice. You go out, you get to know each other, you talk. It turns out not to be such a bad system and the great thing about it is that you’re looking at a career in politics, and you’re going to stay squeaky clean by default.”
“Okay,” she drawled warily, “so what did you do?”
“I told you. Had fun. Bowling. Mini golf. Regular golf.” He shrugged. “Karate. Laser shows at the planetarium. Long weekends in Vegas and L.A. Camping in Yellowstone. Shooting the Snake River. Skiing. A lot. I miss that. Symphonies, plays, concerts. And you’re sober the whole time ’cause drinking’s verboten, so you have fun without alcohol. Without sex. Oh, and dances— I learned how to dance at BYU. Mormons . . . it’s like . . . what they do, dance. The hottest girls are in the ballroom dance classes, so I took one every semester.”
“No, I mean . . . ” She blinked, unable to fathom what he was telling her, so unable to reconcile this sensual—sexual—man beside her with the visual of a nice boy dating nice girls. Ballroom dancing? “What did you do?”
“Oh. Made out.” He smirked. “Necking and petting. I got laid more in high school than I did at BYU. But don’t tell Dirk. He’ll laugh at me.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened. “You— High school— You did half the females under age thirty in town.”
“No, more like under age forty.”
“But at BYU— You didn’t—? That—” She pressed her knuckles against her mouth to try to stave off giggles, but didn’t succeed. “That’s just so . . . surreal.”
He cast her a grin. “You’re going to be an entire Dalí painting by the time I’m done with you this weekend.”
Snickering, she finished dressing, her body feeling much lighter than usual, as if she’d just set down a thirty-pound backpack full of textbooks.
She couldn’t say why.
* * * * *
36: Seven Days Was All She Wrote
It was eighty miles from Mansfield to Branson and it took Vanessa exactly ten of those to fall asleep. Her rich turquoise eyes had dimmed as her eyelids drooped, and her smiling mouth had relaxed. She still smiled in her sleep, but only faintly.
Eric didn’t mind. She deserved it.
And—surprisingly—she hadn’t put up as much of a fuss over his commandeering her for the weekend as he’d expected. Was it possible that she hadn’t been on a date before? Or at least since she’d moved to Mansfield?
Yet there she sat in the deep leather bucket seat beside him, trusting his driving enough to allow herself to fall asleep. After the knots he’d worked out of her back and very delectable ass the night before, he doubted that happened a lot. In fact, he doubted she ever allowed anyone else to drive her anywhere.
I’ve never held hands with a boy before.
Twenty-eight, sexually adventurous and completely uninhibited, but hadn’t held hands? That didn’t scream “boyfriend” to Eric. About the time Sebastian had hit his third shot of tequila, he’d started to wax sappy about his wife, recounting his entire history with her in excruciating detail. Not a word about Vanessa, even in his blinding intoxication; thus, Eric had had to concede he had no reason to resent Sebastian. Wild, Wild West was eight years old. Sebastian had married his blonde bombshell muse, kept her perpetually pregnant, and rarely went anywhere without his children. Monogamy and fatherhood definitely agreed with the man.
Nash Piper had thrown Eric for a loop, but when one man cheerfully and immediately steps aside in deference to another man, the relationship has to be considered a wash. Considering Piper’s destination, mode of transportation, and his apparent goal of removing the “ex” from “wife” once he got there, Eric knew that man had no lingering interest in Vanessa whatsoever.
The possibility that Vanessa’s relationships with them hadn’t been . . . well, relationships . . . hadn’t occurred to him. Eric had met very few women who didn’t equate sex with love, at least for a little while, or who didn’t use sex to earn love. After Heather’s library-only companionship, the girls who knew the score held less and less appeal for Eric and the girls who didn’t were sitting ducks for a man of Eric’s prowess. He’d grown uneasy with that kind of power imbalance, so he’d been fairly careful in the girls he’d chosen to have sex with—and had had to learn how to seduce with patience and care and strategy, acquiring what he considered to be a valuable skill. As for the girls he’d dated seriously and long-term without sex, well, he liked that for what it was: a real chance to get to know a woman without sex to disguise incompatibilities.
Vanessa had a classification of her own and it was entirely foreign to Eric. Had neither Sebastian nor Piper ever taken her anywhere? Taken her out, showered her with fun and conversation and laughter? And if not, why not? Had that been at her insistence or theirs?
Considering Vanessa’s eagerness to get down to business the minute he’d shown up at Whittaker House, he now began to wonder if either of them had even bothered to seduce her at all—or had just railroaded her into bed. Sebastian was sixteen years Vanessa’s senior, his sexual history splashed on canvases around the world
, and she’d been twenty. Piper was ten years her senior and would have been used to groupies and immediate satisfaction. Eric could see how she could have been completely overwhelmed by both men, with no chance to think, much less say no.
Eric had tried that tactic a few times himself, but it had never turned out well.
He looked to his right and saw this woman, sleeping. Snoring. Just a little. His mouth quirked.
There was no trace of the little girl whose hope had shone bright in her face, the one he’d walked away from.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Eric had thought, perhaps, his obsession with Vanessa would wane if he spent enough time with her. That, perhaps, it really was gratitude driving this train and that it would fizzle out before it crashed, and if not that, then he’d end up tripping over that damned painting, the Esquire and Maxim covers. Whittaker House.
Her fame, her beauty on display, her accomplishments, all of which might have intimidated him, except . . .
Your job . . . it’s so much more important than mine . . . I’m a . . . luxury. You’re a necessity.
. . . this successful woman valued him, his accomplishments and goals, believed in his potential.
She shifted toward him. Snorted.
Eric hadn’t planned to come to Mansfield this weekend at all. Being alone all week with his thoughts, very little email or phone contact between them—and none initiated by Vanessa—had fostered doubts and insecurities in him he hadn’t had since he’d run up against uncompromisingly chaste Heather his first week at BYU.
A couple of times, he had allowed himself to fantasize about living his life with Vanessa. It was so easy to see her at his side, the nice, pretty lady he’d met at Chouteau Elementary that night. Vanessa would lend him credibility because of what she had built, because of her unflagging graciousness and charm, because of her exquisite sophistication. There would be no stern looks from the governor as to the behavior of Eric’s dinner companion, that was for sure.
