Chapter Eleven
E mma
“Howdy, neighbor.”
Mitch glanced up from where he sat on the pool deck, trilling bare feet through the shallow end. He looked radiant in the moonlight, long, lean, and seeming younger than ever. She’d never wanted him more than at that very moment, which was really saying something since she’d wanted him, deep down inside (and everywhere else in her body, for that matter), since the first time they’d laid eyes upon one another.
“Sup?” he asked casually, belying the way his whole body had jerked upon hearing her voice.
“Not much,” she muttered casually, as if she hadn’t been pacing the entirety of her big, sprawling, lonely ass house since the minute she’d left him, looking ridiculous but sexy while draped over the too-small BMX bike in the street. “You?”
“You’re looking at it,” Mitch insisted, voice low and taut above the sound of ripples spreading from the water that surrounded his big, pale feet.
“No party games tonight?” Emma murmured, admiring the spacious pool deck and finding it conspicuously empty of half-naked revelers sucking rot gut tequila out of each other’s pierced belly buttons between raiding the pool house fridge for beer cans to crumple against their foreheads.
Mitch shook his head, hair still shaggy and rumpled from their beach shower earlier that day. “They all took off for some music festival down in South Florida,” he explained, rising easily until his bare feet dripped on the damp pool tiles.
Emma felt a stirring beneath the casual wrap dress she’d thrown on to drift next door, silken and smooth against the bare, flushed skin underneath. “So what have you been doing all night?” she asked, absently pressing her damp loins against the back of the waist-high door on her side of the fence.
“Waiting for you to show up looking like that,” he teased, tossing a towel casually over one bare shoulder and approaching, panther-like, hips swaying so that his baggies slithered up and down his narrow hip bones.
Emma paused to admire the show, drinking him in like a fine wine as she grew drunk on his unmistakable youth and firm, vibrant flesh. “And if I hadn’t?” she finally croaked.
Mitch glanced over his shoulder at the big, sprawling house behind him, then in the other direction at the slim but stylish pool house across from it. “Find somewhere awkward and uncomfortable in there to sleep,” he sighed, big fingers wrapped around the fence posts on either side of her. “Since Reggie banished me from the big house while he and his pals are away.”
“What? That little shit!”
Mitch chuckled easily, seeming uber casual despite the late hour and sudden homelessness. “My sentiments exactly.”
Emma had been in the pool house before, during some Memorial Day cookout or other, as she recalled. “There’s nowhere for a big, strapping boy like you to sleep in there.”
“Alas,” Mitch sighed, body heat radiating off of his lean, pale chest in waves that crashed upon her own deliciously. “Why do you think I’m up at this ungodly hour?”
Emma merely nodded, mind working through a dozen different saucy scenarios as his long fingers lingered just beside her own. “What’s your excuse?” he asked, eyes penetrating in the deep dark of night.
Emma nodded, as if to herself, no longer able to deny her craven desires or the way her body was responding almost uncontrollably to each and every one of them. “You, silly,” she murmured, easily unlatching her fence door and stepping cautiously aside, an unspoken invitation she hoped he’d notice. “I can’t let you sleep on some random deck chair, Mitch.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, fiddling with the latch on his side to open his door of the neighboring fence. “But you didn’t know that when you came over here tonight.”
Emma blushed and waved an impatient hand. “Do you have to notice every little thing?” she blurted as he inched slowly onto her property line, pale feet crunching on the soft spring grass. “Can’t you just ignore the fact that I came over here in the middle of the night just to gaze at you in the pool?”
“That was you gazing?” Mitch asked as Emma shut the gate behind them and led him toward the back door past her own shimmering pool. “I just thought you were being nosy again?”
“Again?”
“I mean, that’s why you came over last night, right? To see what all the fuss was about?”
“I didn’t hear you complaining,” Emma teased, holding the screen door to her wraparound patio open for him. He paused, glancing slightly down and leaving her just on the verge of breathlessness. “Do you have to notice every little thing?” He winked then, using her own teasing phrase on her this time.
“Besides,” he added, pausing just inside the doorway as she joined him on the patio. “I thought you were waiting until tomorrow to kick off your spring break.”
“Silly boy,” Emma teased, clicking the door shut behind them with an air of finality. “It’s been tomorrow for about three hours already.”
His voice was low, to match the simmering looking in his cool green eyes. “Sounds like you’ve been counting them, Emma.”
She merely nodded, toying with the ends of her ponytail as she nodded toward the open slider that led to her living room. “I should have never ended our day so soon,” she remarked, following him onto the hardwood floor beneath their bare feet.
“If you’d just listened to your spring break tour guide, you wouldn’t have,” Mitch teased, admiring her openly as they stood face to face.
“Well, why wasn’t my tour guide more insistent then?” Emma asked, letting her nervous hands drift down by her sides.
“Is that what you want?” Mitch asked nervously. “I figured you were just joking earlier...”
“I’m not sure what I want,” Emma confessed, hearing the plaintive tone in her own voice. “Why do you think I’m up at this ungodly hour, standing here with you in the middle of the living room...”
Mitch smiled with an air of confidence she was certain he didn’t normally possess. Still, how else could he react hearing this pleading, middle aged woman in the middle of the night, peering quietly up at him with hungry, desperate eyes?
“In the middle of the living room,” he finished for her, nodding toward the Bluetooth speaker she’d been listening to all night, shuffling some random lo-fi chill study tunes playlist the kids at work had turned her on to. “Listening to trance music?”
She blushed, turning to reach for her phone and turn it off. “It helps me relax—” He grabbed her hand gently in mid-sentence, turning her back around to face him.
“Forgive me for saying so,” he murmured, keeping her at arm’s length even as he reached for her other hand. “But you don’t seem particularly ... relaxed at the moment.”
She squeezed his trembling hands back, watching the ripples across his body as he reacted in kind. “Forgive me for saying so,” she breathed, wondering how she was even forming complete sentences the way every murmur, glance and touch kept short-circuiting her brain pan. “But ... neither do you?”
They chuckled then, soft and lazy despite the sexual tension forming between them. Emma wasn’t normally one to flatter herself with such thoughts, but how else to explain the obvious bulge in his powder blue sleep shorts?
“You know what always helps me relax?” Mitch practically purred, squeezing her hands gently all the while. His palms had grown warm and clammy, belying the calm, almost placid expression he wore as he seduced the ever loving shit out of her with every smirk and syllable.
“What’s that?” she croaked, realizing this was the first time another man had touched her since the divorce. Five years it had been since the touch of a man and, if she’d counted the long dry spell she and her husband had had before actually deciding to split, far longer than that. No wonder she was so visibly, achingly, obviously desperate!
“Dancing,” Mitch announced.
Emma snorted, but the sudden burst of nervous laughter only made him draw her closer to him. “Bullshit! You? Dancing to relax?”
“Okay, okay,” Mitch confessed, hoisting her left arm up in one hand while he dragged her other to rest precariously on his smooth, bony hip. His flesh felt hot, almost searing beneath the light touch of her tentative fingers. “Sue me, I lied. But as your official Spring Break Tour Guide, I must remind you that dancing is an integral part of any spring break, so...”
Emma nodded, the thought of dancing with sweet, sexy Mitch too enticing to resist. “I suppose I can’t argue with that logic,” she murmured as he beamed.
“Really?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I ... I didn’t think you’d fall for something this cheesy.”
“Silly boy,” she flirted, hungrily, nakedly, no longer hiding her overriding emotions or, for that matter, the way her desperate loins pressed against the growing bulge in his sheer, cotton sleep shorts. “I fell for you , didn’t I?”