by Amy Faye
After all, a year of dust was a lot of cleaning to do. So she’d have plenty of time to be who she was now. Plenty of time that she didn’t have to worry. And by the time that it was time to worry, she’d be used to the new house. She’d be in a new routine. Hell, the freedom of the new place would turn her into… something. Maybe it wouldn’t be a miracle cure, but it was something. Better than nothing, that was for sure at least.
Time passed. Harper worked. She ate. She slept a little bit. Her phone beeped beside her, and she forced herself out of bed. She slipped into her old clothes. They fit as well as could be expected, except that they felt loose after a year of clothes that fit close. Too casual.
And Daddy was nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t been all day, since he left the three hundred and sixty-fifth list for her. Karen Akita waited at the bottom of the steps. She hadn’t called up, and as far as Harper was able to tell she hadn’t had a moment’s doubt that things would go exactly as expected.
They trundled together into the back of an expensive luxury car, and Harper was whisked back off to the airport. Whether this was a nightmare or a dream that she was about to wake up from, the airplane trip home felt strangely symbolic.
So naturally, like she did whenever things felt strangely symbolic, she slept through it. That was the best way to get around. And when she woke up, she wasn’t in wonderland any more, and it was just as cold as it had been when she’d left.
Twenty
The weeks passed. The house was empty. The city was empty. Harper, for the most part, was empty as well, except after meals. The world tends to give you what you expect from it, and Harper had expected nothing more than for things to go wrong when she got home. The fact that it was every bit as wrong as she’d expected shouldn’t have surprised anyone. It didn’t surprise her.
She let out a long, low breath. It was supposed to be warming up by now. “Should” never featured very heavily in the real world, though. So she was still wearing her heavy winter coat, even though by March she always remembered thinking when she was just a girl that THIS YEAR she’d be able to go swimming on her birthday.
It never happened, and barring a trip to an inside pool that she knew she wouldn’t make, it wasn’t going to happen today, either.
Her third birthday since Dad died was going to be just like the last two: no different than any other day. She let out a long breath and waited patiently for the line to move in front of her. The cashier smiled at her politely, checked out her items, and read the total off the screen for her, as if she couldn’t read it herself.
She paid for it, kept her head down, and carried everything out to her car. She was walking into a hard headwind and it hurt her face. Which meant that there was really only one answer: keep her head down, and hope that it stopped sooner rather than later.
That was how she made it through most things since she’d gotten back home. Keep her head down, and hope that things got better. Eventually, they’d get better, or she’d die. The wind was the same, except that she was less likely to get killed by the wind than by someone who wasn’t paying attention to where they were driving.
Which was why she didn’t notice the large man walking up. Which was why she didn’t stop or move out of his way. She kept her eyes on her feet, until another pair of feet stepped into her view and stopped. She followed the feet up to their legs, and up to their waist, and up the man’s body.
He looked at her the same way that he’d always looked at her. The way she wanted him to. Her heart leapt into her throat.
“You really should watch where you’re going,” Daddy said. “How have you been?”
The Surprise
Secret Baby Bad Boy Romance
Amy Faye
Published by Heartthrob Publishing
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Here’s a preview of the sexy love story you’re about to read…
Even through a zipper and several layers of denim, folded up to make a nice, heavy-wearing garment I could feel her touching me, and I could feel the electric sensation of pressure driving me up a wall.
“You like that, don’t you?”
It was my turn for my breath to catch in my throat, to sound ragged and needy and demanding. “Don’t tease me.”
She looked up at me and batted her eyelashes demurely. “No? Why not?” Then she started to drift down to her knees, her hand still rubbing the front of my jeans.
“God… I just… don’t.”
“After all those years that you teased me?”
“Don’t hold high school against me.”
“I’ll hold whatever I want to against you, David Collins. And if that means…” She paused to bring her face dangerously close to my crotch without ever making a real move to take my hardness out of them. “If that means that you get teased, then you get teased.”
I sucked in a breath. “You sure that’s what you want?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You might end up regretting it,” I say, trying to make my voice sound vaguely threatening.
“Who says I’d regret it?”
She let the question hang in the air a moment before reaching up to undo the button of my jeans, and then worked the fly until I was standing proud of the opening of my jeans, my hardness straining against the fabric of my boxers.
“God,” I growled. “I should have done this years ago.”
She didn’t respond to that, just pulled the boxers down a little bit, enough that my cock sprung loose and stared her in the face.
“You think so, huh?”
I took a deep breath in and leaned back against the counter. It didn’t creak under my weight.
“Yeah,” I said softly. An image flashed in my mind, halfway remembered. Something about the smell and the sensation of her hand gripping my shaft aroused a memory, faint even in focus.
Then she took me into her mouth and I lost my mind and the memories it held. The only thing that existed was the feeling of her lips wrapped around my shaft and giving me the pleasure that I needed. Pleasure that was all-encompassing and impossible.
“God, that’s good,” I growled. It was an effort not to take her hair in my hands and force her to move faster.
I let her move at her own pace for a minute. But the temptation grew, and grew. I pulled her away and looked her in the eyes.
“I’m going to move, now,” I said.
She didn’t respond except to start sucking again. I grabbed her head and thrust my hips. It caught in her throat and she made a soft choking noise as I pulled back. My body wanted to keep moving, keep going deeper and deeper until I was practically all the way to her stomach. But I forced myself to stay to a slow, controlled rhythm.
Then I pushed her away.
“No more,” I said. My breaths were coming hard and fast and my head needed to clear. But even then I had trouble controlling myself. Even knowing what was still to come. “Stand up.”
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One
Dave
I always hated my home town. There’s a reason that I left, and I used to tell myself afterward that there wasn’t going to ever, under any circumstance, be a reason I came back.
But when you’re a teenager, things are a little different, I guess. You don’t have responsibilities. No sense of responsibility. So I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, looking back, that I was wrong. Because I was a teenager, making brash declarations that I was going to make everything different this time, and I was just as wrong as every other teenager who thinks that.
When I was seventeen the whole thing seemed small. I knew every little nook and cranny of Woodbridge as if it were a part of me. As if I could know the whole place by sheer intuition, and there was nothing that I needed to know aside from that.
Coming back, after so long in so many other places, I ca
n tell that it’s not as small as I’d given it credit for. When you’ve seen tiny villages, fewer than a hundred people, you start to gain a sense of perspective for how many moving parts their are, even in a town that I thought was impossibly small when I left.
I took a deep breath, and let it out slow. My hands gripped the steering wheel, and my foot eased down onto the gas pedal. The car beneath me groaned and started to move forward at a snail’s pace. The rental car wasn’t my favorite, but I had my entire life in the back of it, all three bags of it, and I needed to trust it even if I didn’t like it.
There were changes everywhere. The impression I got was that it was almost all change: nothing seemed to be all that familiar, or to have stayed the same after all that time. The houses were different colors, they’d been replaced with new houses, with massive additions. The middle of town is the worst of all; Tom’s Hardware closed, and it’s been replaced with an Ace, same as any other hardware store in Michigan these days it seemed.
Everywhere I look, it feels like the local flavor’s gone and it’s just another town. Might as well be two miles out of Detroit, for all the difference it makes. At least then you’d be able to get some business going, rather than living in some dead-end place where there’s no work and no future for much of anybody.
Eight years is a long time for anybody. For someone who said they were never coming back, not for nothing or nobody, though, it wasn’t nearly long enough.
With a long, deep breath, I pulled off the main road and towards the house. The town had changed, or at least the paints of coat that it wore had. But the skeleton was still the same. Alverson onto Washington, left turn onto Scott. The fourth house on the left. It hasn’t changed at all. The old Ford is still sitting out front, right where the old man left it. Only, I suppose he didn’t leave it there this time.
I put the car in park. Maybe this is a mistake. I could get out of here. There’s no reason that I have to come into town for the funeral. Mom can handle it. She’s handled plenty of other stuff without me, this is just one more thing, right?
My jaw sets. Not this time. I’m not going to keep running away like this. Not if I can help it. I push the door open and step out, and breathe in the air.
I didn’t realize how different the air here is from other places, until I left and saw half the world, and realized that not everyone has this damp smell in the autumn. The smell comes off the lake. Even though it’s almost two miles outside of the edge of town, and there’s no beach, you can’t escape the smell of damp lake water when the humidity is up, and the humidity never seems to go down after August.
I heft one of my bags onto my back and start the short walk up the stairs. It’s the longest three steps I’ve ever taken, and at the top of it there’s nothing to be done but knock. My hand comes up, and then it goes back down.
I can still leave. I’ve got enough time to get back into the car and go. Keep my promise, never go back to this little dead-end town.
The door opens and a woman looks out at me. She’s young. Too young to be Mom, that’s for sure.
“It’s you,” she says. I recognize the voice, long before I recognize the woman. She doesn’t look anything like herself, not any more.
“Laura?”
“You could’ve called.”
“Is my mother home?”
Laura steps away from the screen door without a word. I open the door and look around.
Everything around is changing. There’s new development, and stores are getting bought out and replaced all the time. But not my mother’s house. It’s a testament to the fact that almost thirty years can go by without a damn thing happening. A boy is born, grows up, leaves, and comes back, and nothing’s moved except the trash can liners.
“Mom?”
She’s sitting on the sofa with her fingers gripping her knee. She turns when I speak, even though I know she must have seen me come in.
“David.” She purses her lips with a worried half-smile. “I didn’t know if you’d be coming.”
“Of course I came,” I say, as if I weren’t just thinking about leaving without even stopping in for a moment.
“I wasn’t sure you would, after the way… well, whatever.”
“How are you holding up?”
Her smile doesn’t become any more convincing, but it does become slightly wider. “I’m doing alright.”
“She’s barely eaten,” Laura says from the other room. “Since Mark passed.”
“Mom, you have to eat.”
“I eat when I’m hungry,” she says defensively. “I’m not going to stuff myself just because someone says I’m not eating enough. And besides, I just… don’t like to cook.”
I frown. There’s a lot to digest here. Mom looks ragged, like she hasn’t slept in a week. Maybe she hasn’t. I don’t know what her and Dad’s relationship was like when I wasn’t around, but when I was around, it was strained. Maybe that’s not the right word.
Strained sounds as if they were having temporary difficulties that would eventually, with a little effort, be resolved. Their relationship was tuned up like a piano wire, and if you hit it with a hammer it would make a nice clear note. It was so strained that it had taken on the strain like it was a permanent characteristic of all relationships.
“Is that what Laura’s here for?”
“Laura,” Mom said softly, “is here to tell me that I don’t eat enough, and I need to leave the house more, and that I’d feel better if I put some work in.”
“You would feel much better,” Laura intoned from the other room, obviously drawn by the comments from Mom, “if you just worked at it.”
The sound of pots and pans banging around as they were shifted out of the lazy Susan made as clear a sign as there could be that she was cooking. I pushed myself up. “Do you need anything from me, Mom?”
She shrugged.
“A bullet to the head?” Then she gave one barking laugh and shook her head.
I purse my lips and look down at her. Her hand had worked itself loose on her knee, and moved now to wrap around herself, both hands holding her body like she was worried her front might start wandering away.
I step through and around the couch, and into the kitchen.
“You need any help in here?”
Laura takes a pan full of something white and liquid and puts it on the stove. A moment later, underneath the pan, the flame burner kicks to life.
“No,” she says. “I can get along just fine.”
I look down at her. Some parts of her are still the same. She’s still got a knife-shaped nose. She’s still got large, voluptuous lips. She’s still dark-haired, and she’s still almost a foot shorter than I am.
That’s where the similarities end. Her hips are wider, now, and her bust heavier, as well. When she steps across and fills another pot with water I take a moment to look at her. Hourglass, I suppose you’d call her. When I was in high school, I’d always thought of Laura as a thin woman, maybe even twiggy.
The decade I’d spent away from her had been kinder to her than it had to the rest of the town. I looked at her left hand, where all five fingers were bare. Then I took a deep breath.
“So how have you been?”
She ignored me and turned back with the pot of water. “I have to get this pasta on the boil,” she said by way of explanation. “Or nobody’s going to eat in this house until the cows come home.”
Two
Laura
I could feel the blood pressure rising. I didn’t like the feeling, and I liked thinking about what’s causing it to rise even less. So I ignored it, because that’s what I’ve always done when Dave Collins is around. This time, I told myself, I was going to keep my wits about me. I wasn’t the same girl I was in high school, and I was never going to let myself get wrapped up in his bullshit again.
Dave stood in the doorway and watched me cook. I could feel those eyes on me the whole time, no matter what I was doing. Even when he finally turned to go back into the
front room, and I could finally breathe easy, I still felt the weight of his gaze on me, as if just having been looked at by him was enough to have a lasting effect.
I let out a long, low breath. I had the sense not to fall into this trap again. I wasn’t the same girl I was then. I was an adult, and I knew how to have the sense that God gave a rock. Dave wanted to leave, and in three more days he’d be back on the road again. No need to get wrapped up in his orbit again.
The food was a welcome distraction from my thoughts. If I wanted to, I could cook without thinking at all. I’d been making pasta since I was ten years old, and I could practically do it while I took a nap. I could do it while I had to think hard about something else, in fact—which I knew intimately, because I had to do a surprising amount of my coursework over the stove since I went back to school.
But there’s nothing that says I had to do it without thinking. I took as much care as I could manage, preparing everything I would need and getting it into the right place. Checked the pot. Not boiling yet. There’s still more to be done before the sauce is ready, though, so I didn’t have to stop yet. I didn’t have to face the other room. I guess we were all coping with our own problems in our own ways.
Instead, I test the edge of the large chef’s knife on my thumbnail. It skitters easily across the hard surface without ever even thinking about digging in. I fish out the sharpening steel and start making long, smooth, even strokes up and down. Three out and three back. I tested the edge again. It’s getting there.
Two out, two back, and then one out and one back. Tested it a third time. It’s not sharp enough to shave with it, but I don’t need it that sharp. I’m happy if it will cut instead of just squishing the vegetables under the edge.
So I set the knife aside and picked up the cheese. The feeling of the cheese in my hands is heavy, hard, and dry. Exactly what I wanted to feel. I pressed hard into the grater and started rubbing. On the other side of the grater, a pile of cheese began to form.
