Chapter 9
Nine
“Are you sure you don’t mind this? I know you have a ton to do to get ready for the grand opening.”
Holt waited until Cayla had fastened her earrings before turning her from the bathroom mirror to face him and boxing her in against the counter, one arm planted on either side of her hips. “I’ve got this. Maddie and I will be fine. And I swear I’ll make sure she eats something that isn’t pure sugar.”
Her chest rose and fell in a heavy sigh as her hands skated up his chest and over his shoulders to toy with the hair at his nape. “I’m not questioning your capability. I just… don’t want to take advantage.”
Wanting to purr at her touch, he lowered his mouth to a hair’s breadth from hers. “You can take advantage of me anytime.”
Cayla groaned. “I’d like the chance to take that kind of advantage of you at all. And I know we could probably squeeze in something fast under current circumstances, but as this past week has shown, the likelihood of getting interrupted is high, and as hard as this is, being interrupted further along in the… uh… process just seems mean.”
A laugh rumbled up in his chest. “You’re not wrong. And I suppose there’s something to be said for anticipation.”
Her smile was wry. “If my anticipation dials up much more, all you’re going to have to do is look at me.”
“There’s something to aspire to.” Easing back, he dragged his gaze from her face down to her chest, imagining the sight of those lovely full breasts without the restriction of bra and dress. Her nipples pebbled as he watched, and he grinned.
“There’s going to be no living with you now, is there?”
“Don’t worry. I understand that with great power comes great responsibility.” To illustrate the point, he gripped her by the hips and sat her on the counter.
“What are you doing?” Cayla’s voice was gratifyingly breathless and her knees automatically parted to accommodate him.
“The way I see it is this: Yeah, we’d both like a big chunk of uninterrupted time to explore each other. But at this point, we’re probably more distracted from the things we’re supposed to be doing by thinking about getting naked together. So it seems prudent to take the edge off.” He skimmed his palms up her torso.
“But Maddie—ooooh.” Her voice trailed off on a moan as he cupped her breasts over the dress, circling those pert nipples with his thumbs.
“She’s currently enraptured by old episodes of Voltron. On the other side of the bedroom door, which is locked, with the chair in front. You don’t have to be out the door for fifteen more minutes, and under the circumstances, I don’t think you’re going to take that long.”
Those brown eyes were glazed with lust as she smiled. “Cocky, aren’t you?”
“It’s not cocky when it’s justified. I need to get my hands on you. Need to taste you. Just a little to get me through. Please?”
“Well, what kind of wife would I be if I said no to such a polite request?”
Oh, hell yeah. He loved the sound of that.
Dipping his hand into the neckline of her dress, he freed one beautiful breast, immediately bending to take that pearled nipple into his mouth. Cayla’s breath exploded out, her fingers threading into his hair. She was so damned sweet, so responsive to each swirl and pull of his tongue. Judging by those little whimpering cries she was trying to muffle, he could probably make her come just from this. But he wanted to give her more. Because she’d given him back a piece of himself he hadn’t even known was missing, and he knew he was a drowning man slipping under for the third time.
Switching over to the other breast, he stroked his free hand up her leg, beneath the skirt of her dress, to the heated juncture between her thighs. She immediately rocked into his touch, and he felt the dampness of her underwear. Shifting them aside, he cupped her, growling as he parted her folds and felt all that hot, slick wetness against his palm. For him.
It took all his control not to lose it right then and there. But he’d made her a promise, and he intended to deliver.
One finger breached that waiting heat, and she cried out. Abandoning her breast, he took her mouth, swallowing her moans of pleasure, as he slid a second finger into that tight channel, imagining it was his dick she was riding with abandon. He wanted her over him, so he could watch those gorgeous breasts bounce as he thrust inside her. He’d gone so hard behind his fly, the zipper was probably leaving a permanent imprint. But it was absolutely worth it for every buck, every sound, every taste of her passion. This was his wife. His. And on that absolutely caveman thought, he dragged his thumb through her wetness and circled her clit.
She exploded, her inner muscles clamping down, her whole body bowing into him. The aftershocks seemed to go on and on, until at last she lay limp and trembling against his shoulder, breath heaving.
“You are… that was… We’re going to need a defibrillator for the bedroom. If you can do that with your hands and mouth, actually having you inside me may give me a heart attack.”
Despite the total lack of blood supply to his brain, Holt kissed her with smug satisfaction. “Four minutes.”
Cayla made an incoherent noise he eventually identified as a laugh. “Your master plan failed, though.”
“You don’t feel better?”
“I feel amazing. But if you think I’m not going to be thinking about getting you naked even more now, you’re sorely mistaken.”
He grinned. “Worth it.”
“Let me up. I need to clean up before I leave.”
“Just one second.” Reaching beneath her dress, he dragged her panties down and off. “I’m keeping these.”
The fire engine blush on her cheeks when he stuffed them in his pocket was something else that was going to stick with him for the rest of the day.
Holt got his raging hard on under control by the time Cayla had made herself presentable again. Maddie was still glued to Voltron.
“I’m gonna be gone all day for work. You be good for Holt. Okay, baby?”
“Uh huh.”
“Madeleine Faith, I’m speaking to you.”
Maddie dragged her gaze from the TV. “Sorry, Mommy. Have a good day!”
“I probably won’t be back until after dinner. Hugs.”
As soon as Maddie was done squeezing her, Holt stepped up for his turn. “I’ll get by the hardware store sometime today.”
“See that you do.” She framed his face and gave him a lingering kiss. “Incentive.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Then she was gone, and he was alone with his pint-sized charge.
“Okay, Bumblebee, time to get dressed. We’re gonna be at the bakery today.”
“Does that mean I get cake?”
“You’ll have to work for it. I need an assistant baker to help me with recipes today. You up for it?”
“Yeah!” Lured by the prospect of chocolate, she abandoned Voltron and raced for her room.
Brax and Jonah were already at Bad Boy Bakers by the time they arrived. Given the bowls, trays, and other baking implements scattered over work surfaces, they had been for a while.
“Good mornin’, Sunshine,” Jonah announced. “Hi to you, too, Holt.”
Maddie giggled. “Hi! Whatcha makin’?”
“Cat head biscuits.”
Her eyes went huge and horrified. “You’re cooking kitty cats?”
“No! No. They’re really big biscuits. The size of a kitty cat’s head. No kitties were harmed in the making of this breakfast. Cross my heart.” Jonah made an X over his chest and lifted her up so she could see the biscuits baking in one of their industrial ovens.
“The cat head biscuits are delicious but I keep telling him the butter dip tray biscuits are more practical for breakfast sandwiches,” Brax argued. “We can prep the whole thing at once. Less effort, equally delicious. We’re a bakery. We don’t want to have to make the fillings fresh for every order.”
“Yeah, but the cat heads can be made in smaller batches. Until we know what kind of traffic we’re looking at, we don’t want to waste ingredients by overcooking.”
These had become familiar debates as they neared their grand opening. Holt stowed his keys and walked over to his workstation. “What do the numbers say?”
As they talked, Maddie wandered the kitchen, little hands clasped behind her back to keep herself from touching anything. Holt kept half an eye out to make sure she didn’t try to touch the ovens or range while he began gathering ingredients from the storeroom and walk-in cooler. He figured he could make up some fondant for her to use like Play-doh.
“What’s back here?”
“That’s the office,” Brax explained.
She tugged open the door and peered into the tiny room. “Looks like a closet to me.”
“That’s because it was totally a closet,” Holt told her. “We didn’t think about needing office space when we did the renovation, so we kinda had to shoe-horn one in where we could.” They’d fashioned a desk out of a pair of file cabinets with some boards laid over the top. A desktop computer—one of his friend Cash’s cast-offs from his cybersecurity business—sat on top. Shelves of the same iron pipe and pallet board they’d used out front filled the wall above it. It wasn’t anything to write home about, but it was a functional workspace for doing inventory or accounting.
“What about this one?”
“That door goes outside. Technically, it’s our delivery entrance. Mostly, it’s where we go to take out the trash. Which needs doing now.” Holt raised a brow at his partners as he grabbed the bag from the communal can and twisted it closed. “Open the door for me, will you, kiddo?”
She twisted the knob, pushing the door open and holding it for him.
“Thanks.” He strode past her, the bag of trash held high.
Something crashed, and one of the garbage cans fell over. Holt turned to see a skinny little dog scarfing down banana peels from the bag it had torn open. What kind of hungry did a dog have to be to eat banana peels?
From behind him, Maddie squeaked and leapt forward. His heart clawed its way into his throat as he lunged for her and missed. She was going to get bitten. Hurt. On his watch. The dog reared up, and he braced to dive between snapping jaws and the child.
She was… giggling.
The dog had its front paws on her shoulders and was bathing her face with its tongue. Maddie had her arms around it, grinning in absolute delight.
Holt’s knees went weak with relief, and he had to reach out and steady himself against the wall of the building. The dog was friendly. Walking over, he gently lifted it off Maddie’s shoulders. It immediately flopped onto its back. Her back, he noted, as she wriggled in obvious demand for belly scratches, the skinny whip of a tail swishing against the ground.
He couldn’t quite stop himself from complying. “What are we gonna do about you?”
“Well, that’s easy, silly. She’s hungry. We should feed her.”
“Feed who?” Jonah stuck his head out the door. “Oh.”
Brax followed him out. “I see we have a guest.”
“Yeah, she could do with something more appropriate to eat than banana peels. But we’ve got to figure out who she belongs to.” Even as Holt said it, he knew this dog didn’t belong to anybody. She wore no collar and was far too skinny—maybe forty pounds when she should’ve been over fifty—with each of her ribs showing against the dirty brown coat. She’d clearly been on her own for a significant amount of time.
The dog rolled back to her feet, whole body vibrating from wags as she leaned against Maddie. Maddie draped one arm over her shoulders, and they both looked up at him with pleading eyes.
Gah. Those eyes! He’d been trained to withstand all manner of torture, but this. This was just fighting dirty.
Needing some kind of backup, Holt looked at his friends.
Brax just grinned. “Brother, you’re screwed.”
It was a good day that started with an orgasm and ended with ecstatic clients and multiple referrals. Cayla decided bookending that day with another orgasm—preferably a mutual one this time—would make it even better. She wondered if Holt had made it to the hardware store, and if he’d had a chance to install the new lock yet. Hope sprang eternal.
He hadn’t contacted her today other than to say he’d have dinner on warm for when she got home. She could only hope that was because all had been calm and quiet, with nothing new from Arthur and no major misbehavior on Maddie’s part. She was a good kid, but this was the first day she’d been with Holt entirely on their own. Undoubtedly, she’d be testing his boundaries as a parental figure. Cayla just hoped it hadn’t been too trying for him.
She stepped into the kitchen to the smell of onions, peppers, and tomatoes, with a heavy hint of garlic. Spaghetti, if her nose didn’t deceive her. Her mouth watered, anticipating a plateful, hopefully with a slice of rich, buttery garlic bread.
Holt appeared in the doorway from the living room. “You’re home.”
“I am.” Feeling buoyant and happy, she skipped across the room, much as her daughter tended to, and bounced up to kiss him soundly on the mouth. “I had the best day.”
“Good! The wedding went well?”
“It went absolutely fantastic. And I ended up with four referrals by the end of the reception.”
“That’s worth drinking to. Let me pour you a glass of wine.”
“I won’t say no.” She wandered over to grab a plate and began filling it from the pots on the stove as she gave him the high points of the day.
It wasn’t until she reached for the wine that she took a close look at his face. He looked… guilty. Not quite meeting her eyes as he handed her the glass.
Her own smile faded. “What is it?”
He fidgeted, a move so uncharacteristic she knew something was definitely wrong.
“Holt? Did something happen? Did Arthur show up?”
His hand shot out to cover hers and squeezed. “No. No, nothing like that.”
She realized she had yet to see or hear any sign of her daughter and felt fresh panic begin to brew. “Where’s Maddie?”
“She’s absolutely fine. Don’t worry. She’s playing out back.”
That was when Cayla heard the barking. On a narrow-eyed glare, she strode to the window and saw Maddie romping around the yard with an unfamiliar dog.
She rounded on him. “Holt! You can’t just get her a dog without discussing it with me. I expressly told you the other day that I couldn’t handle adding another living thing to this household. How could you do this?”
“I know. And I didn’t. I mean, not on purpose. I swear, it’s not my fault! She pulled a Puss In Boots.”
“What are you talking about?”
He scrubbed a hand over his head. “We were at the bakery, and I took the trash out, and Maddie came out with me, and there was this dog digging through the garbage. We couldn’t just leave her there. She was clearly starving. But when I told Maddie we had to find out who she belonged to, she looked at me with these eyes . Like I was the worst person in the world if I didn’t bring her home with us. I’ve survived waterboarding, sensory deprivation, and a whole host of other things I’d never describe to you, and I couldn’t say no to a five-year-old.”
Cayla didn’t want a dog. She didn’t have the bandwidth for a dog. But she knew exactly what face he was talking about, and she recognized she probably should’ve warned him about it.
“Rookie move, Steele. Parenting 101 means you are required to withstand the utilization of The Face. Otherwise, total chaos reigns and you end up raising little tyrants.”
“I know. And I get it. But look at them, Cayla. Are you really going to be the one to take that away from her?”
He turned her toward the window again so she could see Maddie flopping on the grass with her new four-legged companion in the fading light, the world’s biggest smile on her face as the dog cuddled into her. They were close enough Cayla could count the poor animal’s ribs. If she’d had a home, it wasn’t a good one. And the county animal shelter was already under-funded and over-crowded. She was a bleeding heart. The only way she’d been able to say no this long was that no situation like this had presented itself. But she could no more put that dog in a kill shelter or kick her out on the street than she could let go of her own child.
“I kind of hate you a little bit right now.”
“Fair. Would it help if I promised to do all the cleaning up after the dog and teaching Maddie how to be responsible for her?”
“It’s a start.”
She tried to hold herself stiff as he tugged her back against his body, wrapping those strong arms around her as he bent his mouth close to her ear. “How about if I promise to make up for the inconvenience and additional stress with baked goods and orgasms?”
Her lips twitched. “I suppose that depends.”
“On what?”
“Did you actually make it to the hardware store today?”
His silence was answer enough.
Cayla sighed and pulled away.
“I really meant to. But once Banana Bread turned up, we got kinda busy, going down to the co-op to buy dog food and a bed and a crate and supplies, and then getting her home and bathed and settled and… Yeah. By the time I thought of it again, they were already closed.”
“Banana Bread?”
“She was eating banana peels from the trash when we found her, so that’s what Maddie named her. I was thinking we could call her BB for short.”
In that moment he looked so young himself, with a boyish hope shining in those big blue eyes.
“Did you have a dog growing up?”
He blinked, some shutter going down over the hope. “No. We lived in an apartment. It wasn’t practical.”
God. She couldn’t take this away from him either.
“Well, if we’re going to have a dog, you’re going to have to build a fence. I don’t want to be those people who let their dog just wander loose. It’s not safe for the dog, and Lord knows, Maddie would follow one anywhere.”
Holt brightened. “I’ll make sure you won’t regret it.”
“What kind of dog is she, anyway?”
“Some kind of yellow lab/shepherd mix, I think. I’ll get her into the vet ASAP to confirm she’s spayed. She’s not a puppy, and it looks like she’s already had at least one litter. The guys at the co-op are pegging her at about four or five years old.”
“Well, hopefully that will make her easier to house-train.”
The backdoor opened and girl and dog came bounding in.
“Mommy! Meet Banana Bread!”
The dog skidded to a halt inches away from Cayla and slowly lowered to her haunches, as if sensing she was the one who had to be impressed. Cocking her head and peering up with liquid eyes, she lifted one paw. If Cayla hadn’t already been sold, that would’ve toppled her.
Taking the paw, she gently shook it. “Welcome to the family, BB.”