53. Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Three
BEN
Monday morning I stand on the porch of the honeymoon cabin with two coffees and send Ella Lockhart a text.
Come find me. There’s something I’d love to show you ;-)
The reply comes in under a minute.
Ben Callahan. What did you do?
Come find out.
Her boots hit the track before she comes into view. Then she rounds the big lilac and stops dead at the bottom of the porch steps. I watch her clock it all at once.
The curtains are open.
They’ve been drawn since June. Every window, every day, all those weeks and change, this cabin sitting shut up at the edge of the property like a tooth nobody wants to bite down on.
This morning the windows are bare, light pours straight through them, and the door is standing wide open.
“You aired it out,” she says.
“Since five.” I hold out her coffee. She takes it and doesn’t drink it, which I expected. Coffee in this family is mostly a thing you hold. “Come in.”
She stops on the threshold. Takes a breath. Then she steps through, and she takes it all in, corner to corner, and stops on the wall by the bed.
“You painted.”
“Same color. Deke matched it off a chip. Powder pink, which took some explaining at the counter, I want you to know.” I lean in the doorframe. “There were scuff marks.”
She looks at that wall a long moment. She knows what made them. So do I, now I have the whole story.
“Ben.” Her voice is careful. “Why are we here?”
“Because this cabin works for a living,” I say.
“It’s the best-built thing on this property, your grandmother’s flowers are all around it, and next season there’ll be brides who want their wedding night in it.
It’s an asset of Something Blue, and it’s been sitting in the dark paying for something it didn’t do.
” I shrug. “Seemed to me somebody should open the curtains. And it seemed to me it should be us.”
She’s quiet, reading me the way she does. So I carry on, because we made a rule yesterday on a mountain to be completely truthful.
“It aches some. Being in here. Right now, while we’re talking about paint. There. That’s mine for today. Don’t make a fuss.”
“Then here’s mine.” She looks at me a long second. “I’ve walked the long way around this cabin all summer. Every single day. Ten extra minutes to the north beds so I never had to look at it. You knew that.”
“I did.”
“Knowing’s not the same as me saying it.”
She sets her coffee on the sill. Walks the room slow. Touches the dresser, the window frame, the footboard, like she’s shaking hands with all of it. When she turns around, her eyes are wet and her chin is up.
“Okay,” she says. “What’s left?”
“One thing.” I nod at the bed. Bare mattress, fresh set stacked on the chair. “You made this bed once for the wrong wedding. Figured you’d want to make it again for the right ones. Paying customers. Good tippers. People we like.”
And there it is. She laughs, grabs the sheet off the chair and throws me the other end.
We make the bed.
She’s fast and I’m precise, which sums us up in one chore. She snaps the flat sheet as if she’s breaking a horse. I square my corners.
“Hospital corners,” she says. “Who hurt you?”
“Caleb came back from the army folding towels in thirds, and it spread.”
“It’s a guest bed, Callahan, not an inspection.”
“Every bed’s an inspection when you’ve got paying guests.” I tuck the last corner and step back. “Forty-five degrees. Look at that.”
“I’m looking at a man flirting with a bedsheet.”
“Jealous?”
“Of a bedsheet?” She smooths the quilt down her side and looks up at me across the mattress. Something in the room changes pressure. “A little. Yeah.”
I come around the bed. Slow. She holds her ground, chin still up. When I get to her, I take her face in my hands and kiss her. She makes a sound into my mouth, grabs the front of my shirt, pulls. I walk her back a step, two, and her legs hit the footboard of the bed we just made.
We both stop.
Her breathing’s gone ragged. So has mine. She looks at the bed. Looks at me.
“Not this bed,” she says.
“No.” My voice comes out gravel. “Not this bed. This bed’s for strangers. It’s got a job.” I bend, get one arm under her knees and the other at her back before she can argue, and lift her clean off the floor. She yelps and grabs my neck.
“Ben.”
“This cabin’s reclaimed.” I carry her out the door, and she’s laughing now, kicking one boot. “It can keep its bed. Mine’s got no history in it but me being alone, and I’m done with that.”
“It’s too far to be carried.”
“Then quit wiggling.”
I carry her down the track past the Main House with the morning wide open, past the lilac, past the beds she made bloom.
Dolly falls in beside us at the equipment barn like an honor guard who’s seen worse.
Ella gives up fighting it and settles into my chest with her arms around my neck, and that’s how we arrive at my door. Her hair everywhere. My arms burning.
I get the door with my elbow.
“Welcome,” I say, “to our cabin.”
She goes still against me. “Ours.”
“Been yours since the flannel, near enough. Making it official.” I carry her over the threshold and kick the door shut on the world.
We take our time.
This is Monday morning with nowhere to be and nothing left hidden, and I intend to make the most of it. I set her on her feet by the bed and start on her buttons, one at a time, slow enough that she huffs at me.
“I want you so badly, and this is the speed you pick?”
“I’ve waited all summer for this exact morning.” Another button. “I’m not rushing it because you’re impatient.”
“I’m not impatient.”
I get the shirt off her shoulders and put my mouth on the side of her neck, right where it meets her shoulder, and feel her body arch into me. “Liar,” I say against her skin.
She retaliates. Her hands go under my shirt and drag it over my head, then find my belt.
She’s not slow about any of it. She never is.
By the time she’s done, we’re chest to chest in the middle of my floor with the sun laying a stripe across both of us.
I unhook her bra and peel her jeans down her legs, crouching to take off her boots, then pull the jeans off her ankles.
On the way back up, I take the long route.
She’s got her arms halfway crossed when I stand, that old reflex.
I take her wrists and put them down at her sides.
“No hiding,” I say. “Remember. I got the whole spec.”
“Ben.”
“Look at you.” I mean it, and she can hear that I mean it. All of her in the morning light, curves and freckles and the flush spreading down her chest. Her chin comes up. Her arms stay down. That right there is the bravest thing I’ve seen her do all summer.
I lay her down on my bed, start at her mouth and work south.
Her throat. Her collarbone. Her breasts, slow, one and then the other, until her fingers are in my hair and her hips are moving with nothing to move against. I kiss down her stomach, and she laughs once, breathless, because she knows where I’m going.
I’ve made no secret of it since a tailgate in July.
“Eyes open,” I tell her, settle between her thighs, and put my mouth on her.
She’s already soaked. I take my time anyway.
Long, unhurried, thorough, until her laugh turns into a gasp.
When I finally close my mouth over her clit, her hips come off the bed.
I pin them down with my forearm and keep her there.
She says my name. Then she says it less politely.
Her thighs go tight against my ears, and I work her through it steady while she comes apart, fingers wrecked in my hair, the morning sun all over her. I don’t stop until she pulls me up.
“Come here,” she manages. “Come here.”
I go. She kisses me deep, tasting herself, no shyness left anywhere in her, and then she plants a hand on my chest and pushes.
“Eyes open,” she says, when I land on my back. “Your turn.”
She climbs over me, settles astride with her hands flat on my chest. The light’s behind her turning all that hair into a halo, which is false advertising, and I tell her so.
She laughs. Then she takes me in hand and sinks down onto my cock one slow inch at a time, watching my face the whole way.
By the time she’s seated, I’ve forgotten every word I own except her name.
“There he is,” she says, breathless, smug as anything.
“Ella.” I get my hands on her hips. “You’re going to be the death of me.”
“The slow death.” She rolls her hips, easy, no hurry in it, and my grip tightens. “We’ve got all morning. I choose you, remember.” Another roll, deeper, and we both stop being clever for a while.
She rides me slow in the morning light and I watch it all.
The roll of her hips finding a rhythm that suits her, the sun moving on her skin, her head dropping back when I plant my feet and give her something to work against. I run my hands up from her hips, over her waist, and fill them with her breasts.
She covers my hands with hers and presses down harder, grinding now, using me exactly the way she wants, and there’s no better thing a man can watch on this earth.
“Good?” she asks, which is a formality.
“Ella Lockhart.” My thumbs drag over her nipples, and she shivers full-length. “I’d sign anything you put in front of me right now.”
“Noted.” She rocks deeper, breath going short. “Touch me.”
I slide one hand down between us to where we’re joined and circle her clit with my thumb, slow, matching her pace, and the sound she makes is one I plan to spend fifty years collecting.
She grinds down against my hand and my cock both, chasing it.
I keep the circles steady, and it builds in her, the flush climbing, the rhythm going ragged.
“Ben, I’m close.”
“I know. Go on. I’ve got you.”
She comes with her nails biting into my shoulders, back arched, clenching around me hard enough to nearly take me with her.
I hold my thumb still against her, keep my hips deep, and let her ride it all the way down.
When her eyes open again, they’re glazed and gorgeous and looking straight into mine.
“Still with me?” I ask.
“Barely.” She laces her fingers through mine and pins my hands to the pillow on either side of my head, leaning over me, hair curtaining us both. “Don’t you dare stop.”
I let her set it again, deeper, aftershocks still running through her, and it’s a different thing this round, less chase in it and more vow. Her forehead comes down to mine. Our breath goes back and forth in the little space between us.
“I love you,” she says, right there, mid-motion, like it’s part of the rhythm now. First time she’s said it in a bed. It goes through me harder than anything her body’s doing, and that’s a high bar.
“I love you.” I give it straight back, and something in me lets go of the last of the reins. “Now hold on.”
When the slow stops being enough, she says “now” against my mouth.
I take over, driving up into her until her breath goes to pieces, and she comes a third time.
That’s the end of my rope too. I follow her over with her face an inch from mine and her eyes open on me the whole way through, emptying everything I have into her.
After, she lies on my chest, tracing the scar on my forearm. Dolly sighs at the foot of the bed like the last chaperone in Tennessee, defeated.
“Worth the wait?” she asks the ceiling.
“Every day of it.”
She props her chin on my sternum. “You had a plan this morning, Callahan. Curtains, paint, the bed. Anything else I should know about?”
Caught. I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and give her the rest.
“I’m not going back to Wild Briar Creek.
Not to live.” Her whole body goes alert.
“I called Ethan. The ranch office runs fine without me most of the time, and if they’re ever in a jam, I can head back for a few days to lend a hand.
The band will forgive me if I show for the festival, and Caleb’s already planning visits.
” I hold her eyes. “My family’s two hours up the road, and that’s the right distance for family.
But my mornings are here. If you’ll have them. ”
“Ben.”
“I’m not done. That’s the living part. Here’s the working part.
” I sit up against the headboard, bringing her with me.
“Something Blue needs a builder, a books man, and somebody to argue with about load ratings. I’ve been doing all three since June, and my rates are terrible, I basically work for coffee and the view.
So I’m asking straight out. Is there room at Something Blue for me?
Full partner. My name next to yours on the ugly jobs.
Not because you need saving. Because it’s the best thing I’ve ever helped build, and I want to keep building it with you for about the next fifty years. ”
She’s crying and grinning at the same time, which I’m learning is just how Lockhart women do business.
“And before you ask,” I add, “there’s one more question after this one. It’s not ready. It’s still in the annex getting sanded. This one first.”
“Yes.” She takes my face in both hands, the way she did on the mountain. “Yes, there’s room. There’s been room since the day you carried the boxes. Yes to the mornings, yes to the partnership, yes to the ugly jobs.” She kisses me once, hard, sealing it. “Yes.”
Outside the window her grandmother’s valley is getting on with its day, and somewhere down the track a cabin is standing with its curtains open, airing out, ready for whoever comes next.
Yes.