Chapter Five
A million questions exploded in his thoughts. Where was her kid? Dare he ask?
Glancing up at her in the moonlight, hair in disarray across her pillows, her head tossed back in trust as she gave herself to his touch … Trust, he thought, as he littered kisses across the marks, over her innie—a gift of trust, whatever this was.
Did the reason she wanted to be held like she mattered have anything to do with a kid? With a guy who hadn’t loved her like he should have? Could he fill that empty void with a reason like her? Climbing back up her, he sank again into her welcoming body.
Heaven. Gave her the tender embrace she’d asked him for. Cradled her face as he kissed her, kisses morphing from sensual to emotional, as if bonds were being threaded together, roots were tangling in soil as he undulated. He let her guide him with her mews and increasingly intense touches.
His pace sped, as he noticed an old banjo case in the corner and details about her room. Plain. Stacks of texts against a wall. An old Louisville Slugger propped in the corner. An old photo of a cabin in a frame. Her beloved uncle’s home? It looked a lot like his.
He couldn’t get enough of her nails scoring his neck and hair, his shoulders and back.
He never took girls home. But right now, he wished he’d taken her there, to show her his gram’s lilacs, to share his space with her and see how it felt to have her in it.
He couldn’t slow. Couldn’t take more time to savor this sensation as the need for release tingled in his spine and stones and spurred him onward, wrapped her in an arm, resting his weight on her, kissing, caressing up and down these pretty curves, grippable hips, wondering about those stretch marks, wondering where her kid was, wondering at the awe in her voice as she’d shown him those fossils, worshipping the tattoos of daisies littered over her shoulder…
He swallowed her increasing moans. Followed her cues. Hooked his arm beneath her thigh to hold her open to him as she scored his scalp and took comfort in his body giving to hers and … wanted to say all the wrong things right now. All the needy things a girl having a fling didn’t want to hear.
And so, he kept drinking down her moans like smooth whiskey, kept rolling his body against hers, found his hand laced with hers as he nuzzled into her neck and felt her release wash over him like a baptism while she clung to him, losing himself in the simmering euphoria and following her over the cliff of climax, surging all he had on a gruff groan…
*
He ought to leave. He eyed his clothes and hat on the floor, her tangled in his limbs, bodies clammy and heart rates returning to normal. After the sex, that was when he was supposed to jet. But he had a proposition for her.
Make it special.
He shifted. She scooted out of his arms as he pushed to standing, the bed creaking. Rolled off his spent condom and dropped it in her waste basket. Fished his legs into his jeans. Silence.
She pulled her sheet up to cover up when a moment ago, she’d been bare and so comfortable in her nudity with him, and he itched to lie back down and drag her back into his hold.
She smiled tentatively in his direction but didn’t make eye contact. “Thank you,” she said, and shit, she thought this was goodbye.
“Thank me later, darlin’. I ain’t done here yet.” Her brow furrowed but instead of reaching for his shirt or his boots, he reached for the banjo case in her corner, dust gritty and dry to the touch.
He sat on the floorboards and opened the case. “Been curious about this banjo.”
He lifted it by the neck and tucked it onto his lap.
He strummed. The loose strings flapped? It hadn’t been tuned in a long time. Twisting the tuning knobs, he tightened the strings, testing, again, again, until the instrument was on pitch, and glanced at her.
“Light me up like a moonlit sky…” he sang, leaning back on her bed frame and reaching over his shoulder for her arm, her hand, buried in the sheet, fishing it out.
“C’mere.” He tugged on her until the mattress shifted, and those honest-to-God perfect legs extended beside him to the floor as she knotted up her hair into a haphazard bun.
She found those powder-blue panties. Stretched on her tank top and clicked on the bedside lamp, then sat crisscross, and God, the gorgeous view she made, hair all tousled, soft B cups lush and outlined by her tank ribbing.
“Love me like it’s our last goodbye … this part, here. I wanted to put a real quick hammer-on here—” He demonstrated. “What do you think?” He undraped the strap from his shoulder and shifted the instrument to her.
She furrowed her brow. “You want my opinion?”
She wasn’t used to her opinion mattering? She eyed his other clothes, then him, curiously.
“You’re my muse, Flower Girl.” He grinned, reaching out and brushing aside a wisp.
They sat on the floorboards in hardly any clothes, making soft music, him singing and slapping out the rhythms on his thighs as she strummed and picked and practiced that hammer-on and the following pull-off, twanging the banjo.
The final notes resonated into silence, and she set the banjo across her knees, exhaling and leaning back on her palms.
“Why don’t you play anymore?” he asked, outstretched foot nudging her thigh as he leaned against her bed frame and took her in.
“Who says I don’t play?” she asked.
He swiped a finger through the dust on the old, peeling case, holding it up for her to see as he rubbed it with his thumb to let it flake away. Answer enough.
She shrugged and glanced to the photo of the cabin in the soft glow of her lamp. “It was my uncle’s. He gave it to me when I was chasin’ old dreams.” She glanced back at him, that haunting darkening her eyes again like they had on stage. “Dreams die though.” She shrugged again.
“Don’t sound dead to me. That girl on stage tonight could fill a concert hall if she tried.”
She shook her head, laughing wanly.
“She could,” he argued.
Her eyes lifted to his again. He wanted to ask about those stretch marks. If they had anything to do with this dead dream. “Do you miss it?”
She digested his question. “I don’t trust it,” she finally said.
She didn’t trust easily, that was certain.
“What’s with that cabin?” He hitched his chin toward the picture.
“That was his house.” She, too, glanced at it and hugged her knees up around the instrument. “I spent so many summers there, out in the desert. He always said he’d leave it to me. It would’ve gotten me out of here before it was too late but, well, now…”
Too late? He could tell now the promise hadn’t been fulfilled, and didn’t he know a thing or two about that, by the way she was laughing it off, trailing off.
She blew out the corner of her mouth and smiled.
Checked her phone again. She’d been doing it here and there all night, a crease of concern always marring her brow as she did it.
“Just as well. It always smelled like an oil refinery out there and my life is here now.” Her smile turned into a fond chuckle.
“But man, so many memories. All those jam sessions with my uncle and his buddies, all their kids runnin’ around.
It was the closest I ever came to havin’ cousins even though none of us were related.
Summers playin’ guitar or banjo late into the night, my daddy on the harmonica.
Early sunrises with Uncle Johnny on his porch, him teachin’ me new songs on the guitar or this—” She gestured to the banjo.
“He always said I was the daughter he never had. Anyway, I used to imagine my dream home lookin’ just like it, uh…
” She leaned forward and began fighting a binder out from the stack of books.
“Stone fireplace. Wide window overlooking the plateaus. Nice porch to relax on, on a cool winter night. Quaint.”
She opened the binder on her crisscrossed legs, setting the instrument down.
A scrapbook? T.R. nestled behind her, propping up a knee and resting his hand on her shoulder as he rested his chin atop the other shoulder, his chest warm against her back as he braced his weight on his other hand, because this house…
“At the end of every summer, after I’d get back here to start the school year, my daddy would take the cattle we raised to market, then take off for the next job and I’d beg him not to leave me with my momma.
I’d be so lonely, I’d spend days cutting out magazine pictures, building my dream house as if someday it would be a reality. ”
It certainly hadn’t been this sagging farmhouse, empty and lifeless except for basics. It was where she’d felt roots and acceptance.
Like he had at the farm, growing up. “What was his place like?”
“Warm. Simple. Full of laughter and music.” She turned the pages.
He pressed his lips into her shoulder, seeing what his wallflower had once dreamed about. A … cabin. Like her uncle’s. Wooden beams. Soaring stone fireplaces. Pots of flowers fluffed about wraparound decks. Sunsets through tall windows.
His hand on her shoulder tightened upon her.
“That’s how my grandfolks’ farm was for me.
A place of cousins and freedom and my granddad, quiet as they came and not more educated than middle school, never judged a soul.
Helped me learn to tinker. And Grams had the greenest thumb and a penchant for lilacs.
My sissies and I would help her plant them everywhere, and—” He wanted to tell her about his place, this girl who’d been uprooted every summer and supplanted in this sterile farmhouse with a momma who clearly hadn’t been much of one, to wither and barely cling to life until her next dose of summer sunshine out west when it sounded like she’d bloom again and all those urges to once again rush this, to say the wrong thing too soon and scare her off—
“Why don’t you ask him?”
His brow knitted, his hand on her shoulder toyed with the tank strap, running his finger back and forth beneath it.
“Ask what who?” he bit out.
“The Harvard lawyer cousin. The farm. It means a lot to you. I can see it.”
His finger kept tracing the skin of her shoulder, the strap still running back and forth on the pad of his pointer. “He’d be a fool to give up the reins to a dumbass kid who’d rather play guitar in cheap bars.” He chuckled languidly, but she remained silent.
Then turned to look up at him. “You’re not a kid anymore, though. And something tells me you’ve never been a dumbass.”
His eyes met hers. This brilliant scientist didn’t think he was?
God knew Tyler was always lecturing his ass, even if he meant well. His sisters, as doting as they were and as much as he’d die for them, were always prodding him. His teachers, and parents, and the cops … always a damned lecture. And yet from her…
Those imploring green eyes, challenging him to be ambitious.
He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “Verdict’s still out on that, baby.” He chuckled to play off the strange sentiment of someone seeing more in him.
“You said he was the only one to give you a chance.” He hadn’t actually finished that sentiment in the bar, but she seemed to have filled in the blanks, reading him like a book as he’d been doing with her, finishing each other’s thoughts.
“You seem to trust him. Why wouldn’t he at least listen to you?
What’s the worst he would say? No? I just thought, if you care that much, you’d probably make an amazing owner… ”
Amazing… “Sweetheart, I’ve been called the triple A of accolades—asshole, aggravatin’, argumentative … never amazing.”
His eyes held hers. Amazing. Not his music. Not his dick. Not his smile. Him. A challenge. To not give up fighting by rolling over for others. But to take a no and keep pushing until it was a yes.
“Amazing…” He pressed his lips to hers and whispered, as his palm slid around her nape, “Says the girl who gave up her dream to become a wallflower.”
She froze at his scolding. His eyes bounced back and forth between hers to understand the sudden shift.
She slapped the scrapbook shut as redness warmed her cheeks and she tensed in his touch. “He always said I overstep my place. I’m sorry—”
“Wait, wait, wait…” What? “Who says that?”
He started caressing her strap again to put her at ease.
Her eyes searched his again. “You’re still here.” She chewed on that luscious lip, like she seemed wont to do. “You don’t have to be. I won’t cling or cry if you wanted to take off.”
He pressed his lips to hers. “Naw, baby, I got a proposition for you.”
He wrapped her in his arms and hauled her onto the bed and buried himself between her welcoming arms and legs once more.