Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
EMMA
“On second thought, I don’t think I’m done with you,” Seamus says once we get into his bedroom. He’s sitting on the bed, and I’m standing in front of him, but he pulls me between his legs, and the full body ache this inspires tells me I’m very far from done with him too.
He’s awakened my needs—a whole Pandora’s box of them. Being with him is different . He’d probably make some aggravating comment, saying it’s because I’m used to older men, but that’s not why. It’s because the connection we have is special.
Which is terrifying.
I might have held strong if he hadn’t opened up to me earlier, telling me about his ex and what their relationship did to him. Sharing part of his story finally, the way he wouldn’t that first night outside the restaurant.
His willingness to be vulnerable was the undoing of me—or at least the undoing of my pants—and I used Leap Day as a dumb excuse to take what I wanted.
Pandora probably made excuses for herself too.
“You need to rest,” I insist.
“I will. After you sit on my face.”
“I’m not going to do that,” I protest, even as he leans in to suck my nipple, his hand traveling between my legs, probably finding me soaking. A sound of pure need escapes me as he strokes me. I remind myself that he’s good at this because he’s been with a lot of women. It may not be special for him in the way it is for me. But I don’t totally believe that.
Clearing my throat, I add, “You have a head injury.”
“And the only cure is your pussy.” It’s a ridiculous remark, probably designed to make me laugh, but it doesn’t. Because I’m hit with how much I’ve come to hunger for the sight of his face. The sound of his voice. His touch.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.
“You’ll be nowhere near my rib, and the bruise is on my forehead. It’ll be fine. I want to taste you. I’ve wanted to taste you for months.”
“Lie down,” I say, my voice shaking.
He does, his eyes on me. Challenging me. Begging me for mercy. And what’s a woman to do? I lean down and kiss him softly, and then I climb up onto the bed beside him.
“Fuck yes, Em. On top of me. Give me what I need.”
I position myself next to the headboard and carefully lower down to him, feeling more naked now than when we were out in the living room. He grips both of my hips in his powerful hands and yanks me down to his mouth, shocking me. For someone who’s gone through so much this week, he’s still so strong. So physically present. An instant burst of pleasure jolts through me as he sweeps his tongue between my legs and then sucks in the most sensitive part of me. I’m so worked up, so turned on, that that’s nearly all it takes—a touch of his tongue and suction in exactly the right place. But he puts pressure on my hips, silently urging me to give him more of my weight, more of me. He moves his head slightly so he can speak and says, “Give it all to me, Emma. I want all of you.”
I give myself over to it, my hands clutching the headboard for dear life as he continues, because I feel myself losing control. It happens slowly at first and then in a great tide as he continues to pleasure me, his tongue finding all of the places inside of me no one else has ever bothered to look for, his hands essentially pinning me in place so he can do whatever he likes. And I’m shocked to realize I’m grinding against his face. He sucks on my sensitive spot one more time, and I’m shoved over the edge, my body writhing. Everything inside of me is focused on the present. On Seamus and me and this moment. On feeling so good that pleasure is the only thing I have space for.
It’s a revelation .
I move off of him as soon as I recover myself, worried that I’ve smothered him or jarred his injuries.
“Did I hurt you?” I ask, breathing hard.
“No, baby,” he says as he makes a show of licking his lips. “I think you just saved me.”
“Do you want me to take care of you?” I ask, nodding toward his straining dick.
“Yes, Em,” he says, and I slide my hand over him, wanting to stroke him the way he did himself earlier today. It feels every bit as satisfying as I expected it to, even more so when I see his face as he comes, and know I’m the one who did that to him.
I expect him to fall asleep after that. That’s what men do, in my experience. They get what they want and then they move on. Normally, that’s what I would do. I’d segue to the next thing—thinking about a case, or grabbing a stiff drink to relax in front of the TV. But Seamus keeps his arm around me, and we talk for over an hour. I don’t know which of us falls to sleep first, only that I wake up with his arm around me, so comfortable and at peace that emotion immediately wells up in my throat and threatens to choke me.
Because this wasn’t supposed to happen. It can’t happen, can it?
It’s completely dark in the room, but I stare at the ceiling until my eyes become acclimated, my mind whirring, that ball of emotion in my throat growing as if it’s a snowball traveling downhill. Finally, I let myself look at him.
He’s beautiful asleep—his lashes long against his cheeks, his features at rest, all traces of a smirk gone from his lips.
He’s beautiful awake, too, with the smirk.
He’s beautiful to me always.
That ball of emotion gets bigger, and my chest feels more and more like that pool of melted butter. Panic takes over.
I will not fall for Seamus James or his sweet streak or his charming words, delivered through talented, nicely shaped lips.
I will not fall for the man who keeps condoms in his sock drawer but a photo of his family on his dresser.
I will not fall for the man who buys lunch for strangers because they’re having a bad day and takes care of other people’s pet rabbits.
I will not fall for Anthony’s brother-in-law, who has a past in organized crime that goes who knows how deep.
Those are the thoughts running through my head as I get up as quietly as possible, not wanting to disturb him. But he still stirs, his head moving restlessly against the pillow, and murmurs my name.
Those are the thoughts running through my head as I quickly clean the apartment, mentally taking note of the fact that Chuck does not appear to have come home yet. Hopefully, I won’t walk in on him and my mother enjoying the living room in Smith House, the way we “enjoyed” the living room of this apartment. There are some things a woman can’t get over.
Like Seamus , a voice in my head whispers.
Stupid voice.
I gulp some water and then find a pen and a cube of Post-Its. But I don’t know what to write. Thank you for the sex ? I freaked out and stress-cleaned in the middle of the night, and now I’m leaving ?
I settle for
Talk to you tomorrow, E.
Then linger over it, because it’s obviously awful. Cold and detached, businesslike. I add a heart next to the note, then crinkle the yellow paper in horror and pocket it before penning another.
I left to check on my mother. Or maybe it’s Chuck who needs the wellness check. We’ll talk tomorrow. It was one hell of a leap day, Seamus.
There, that’ll do.
I’ve let him know this was important to me.
Special .
I linger by the door, though, because it still feels wrong to creep out in the middle of the night like an asshole. No one’s ever pulled that trick on me since college—and I woke up before the guy could leave and threw a balled-up dollar bill at his back. It hit him, word spread—because I spread it—and he was known as Buck for the next two years.
I feel a longing to return to that warm bed and curl up beside Seamus, to make him some damn breakfast in a few hours. And it’s that final want that has me pulling my coat on and leaving, using the knob lock to secure the door behind me.
There’s something hot in my throat and behind my eyes as I drive home through the dark night. But I swallow it back and remind myself that I’m in this situation because I let myself fall for Jeffrey’s bullshit.
Seamus isn’t full of bullshit—at least not nearly as much as he’d like people to think—but he has plenty of secrets. Dark ones. He admitted as much to me last night.
We agreed to enjoy each other for one night, and that’s what we did. There’s no need to get emotional about it. I’ll still see him, obviously. It’s not goodbye .
Steeling my spine, I turn the radio on loud and complete the drive home. There’s a very practical car parked outside the gate. Chuck’s. It has him written all over it, from the wooden siding to the airy caboose. I could see him going camping in that car—but he certainly wouldn’t be bringing my mother.
My brain tries to calculate percentages for them, the way I refused to do earlier, but I stop it in its tracks again.
If it’s not going to work out for them, I don’t want to know.
Same for Rosie and Anthony and even Declan and Claire.
I reach for my phone to text Seamus about the car before remembering…then reach for it anyway and text my brother.
I think our mother has taken a lover.
He doesn’t respond, but then again, it’s two in the morning.
I pocket the phone and head for the front door, but I’m stopped in my tracks by a rustling sound at the side of the building. Adrenaline pumps through my veins, and I slowly pull the pepper spray from my bag.
Jeffrey knows where my mother lives. I can think of no earthly reason why he’d come here, unless he knows I was in Ellie’s room…
Fear tries to weave through the adrenaline, but I refuse to be afraid of that man. So I stalk over to the bushes, canister extended, and as soon as a man’s body emerges from the bushes and I see his head of silver hair, I spray.
“Good gravy!” the man calls out, pressing his hands to his face, which probably just makes his hands hurt. I gasp, because it’s Chuck .
“Shit, I thought you were someone else. Let’s get you inside.”
He lets me hustle him in through the same door I used to enter the house on New Year’s Eve. I direct him to lean over the sink and then splash his face with milk from the rarely used and possibly sour carton in the refrigerator. I dip in and out so quickly I barely take notice of all of the covered carafes of crème br?lée. He follows my directions, gasping, and then washes his hands and face and wipes them on a dish towel that is purely decorative.
He staggers over to the kitchen island and sits, his expression miserable and his eyes and the surrounding skin as pink as a teenage girl’s sweet sixteen party. I sit across from him.
“Well, I probably deserved that,” he says with a gusty sigh.
“You deserved to get pepper-sprayed in the face?” I ask, almost smiling. “And I’m pretty sure that milk’s sour.”
“It is,” he says mournfully. “Some of it landed in my mouth. The cream in the fridge might have done the trick, but I don’t suppose you knew where to find it. But a real man doesn’t leave a friend’s house in the middle of the night, so I don’t blame you for thinking the worst. I want you to know that I think very highly of your mother. She’s one fine woman.”
I sit back in the chair. My training tells me to keep my own failures to myself and allow the other person to speak, but I’m exhausted, and this man is neither my client nor the opposing counsel. So I say, “I could hardly judge you for that, given I just did the same thing.”
He cocks his head, his red eyes squinting, but that’s probably just from the pepper spray. “Were you with my boy, by any chance?”
“Seamus?” I ask, nearly laughing. Based on what I know, Seamus and Chuck have only known each other since New Year’s.
He gives a serious nod, and that melted butter feeling slides through me again. It’s sweet that they look after each other—a thought that should make me want to vomit in my own mouth but doesn’t.
Squelching the temptation to give him a vague response, I say, “Yes, but please don’t tell anyone.”
He mimes zipping his lips—an action I have only seen people who are terrible at keeping secrets do.
Fantastic.
“He likes you,” he says, watching me more closely now. Or maybe he’s simply struggling to see. “He’s cagy about that sort of thing, but I see it.”
“I like him too,” I admit. “But neither of us are interested in a relationship.”
He shrugs. “He might have told me something about that, but I get the feeling he made a bad call once, and he’s still blaming himself for it. I told him he doesn’t know what it’s like to love the right woman.”
“Love has nothing to do with it,” I insist, taken aback. “We…like each other, but it would never work. Liking someone is only a small part of a relationship.”
He makes a sound that’s somewhere between a snort and a pained grunt. “Maybe so, but it’s the most important part, don’t you think?”
“That’s not what I’ve seen,” I argue, even though I feel something inside of me resonating with his remark. “The most important thing is for two people to have common goals. Shared interests.” I give him one of my patented Emma Rosings Smith closing argument looks. “And we do not .”
He’s already shaking his head. “My wife loved nothing more than a party, and I’ve spent the last forty years running a party planning business. I wouldn’t say we were compatible in the end. Didn’t have much to talk about either. Surface interests are like oil floating on water. It’s the things that sink deep that matter. Do you share values? Are you willing to accept each other’s baggage?”
“And are you willing to accept my mother’s three marriages’ worth?” I ask, lifting my eyebrows. It’s not that his words haven’t made an impact—they have. But I’m not the kind of person who can be swayed by a summer breeze. I require winter storms. Hurricanes. I’ll need to take what he told me and pore over it. But not now. Now, I want to know why he snuck off in the middle of the night. I’d ask him about his intentions toward my mother if I didn’t worry he’d turn the question around and ask me about mine toward Seamus.
“Goodness. You don’t think that’s why I was leaving, do you?” he asks, worrying at the dishcloth.
“Well, yes… That or your marriage. Seamus said you had some unresolved feelings about that.”
He folds the dishcloth and sets it down before looking at me, his eyes still as red as a toddler with pink eye. It should be impossible to take him seriously, but I’m riveted. “I contacted a few attorneys in the bathroom during dinner,” he finally says.
Laughter spurts from me. “You excused yourself so you could get a divorce?”
His smile is endearing. “Like I said…your mother is a remarkable woman.”
“Who’d you contact?”
“Oh, a few well-known experts.”
He lists off a couple of names, and I burst out laughing. “You got those names off billboards around town, didn’t you?”
He shrugs self-consciously. “I found their names online and thought they sounded familiar.”
Which is exactly why they shell out for the billboards.
“I’ll refer you to someone else,” I say. “Someone who’s not going to give you the runaround. This is a simple case. You don’t need to empty your bank account over it.”
He thanks me and then says, “You know, before I came over, I wasn’t convinced this was really a date. But your mother said enough that I had reason to hope, and hope isn’t something I’ve felt in a long time.”
I think of Seamus propped up in bed, murmuring my name.
I swallow the memory down and ask, “If you weren’t fleeing the scene of the crime, what were you doing?”
He scratches his head. “Well…dessert didn’t exactly go as planned last night. It felt like everything that could go wrong did…”
I find myself thinking of Sophie and the full moon Leap Day, but I shake it off.
“I saw a bunch of carafes in the fridge.”
His face creases into an approximation of a frown. “It felt wasteful to just throw them away.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t think it was a sign,” I comment before I can think it through. Crap. I don’t want to give him ideas. He and my mother clearly like each other, a lot. “Not that I believe in signs,” I add.
“I do,” he says. “But last night, I think it was only a sign of us being too interested in our conversation and in each other to pay much attention to what we were doing. I thought I’d make up for it by fixing her a nice breakfast. Some cinnamon rolls. But I came in here, and there wasn’t much to work with other than the stuff for dessert last night, so I was going to make a quick trip to an all-night-grocery store in Asheville to pick up supplies.”
I take a moment to process this. First, that he got up in the middle of the night to make cinnamon rolls for my mother. Second, that he thought a normal household would have all of the ingredients for cinnamon rolls on hand. Thirdly, that he was so into his plan that he tried to go to the grocery store in the middle of the night.
“Why’d you go around the back?” I ask.
“I didn’t want to risk waking your mother up, of course. We fell asleep on the couch, watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns.”
I bite my bottom lip to keep from laughing. I’d thought they’d had some torrid sexcapade all through the house, and all this time, the only thing he’d walked away from was an episode of Mary Tyler Moore .
God, I’m desperate to tell Seamus about all of this—but that thought instantly dries up my laughter. Because I really did run out on him.
“Of course,” I manage to say. “I’m sorry again for the misunderstanding. But you don’t need to go to such trouble to let her know you’re interested. Why don’t you just tuck a blanket around her and call it a night?”
He raps the counter top with his knuckles. “It was too much wasn’t it? Darn it. I’m going to keep messing up. I’m out of practice.”
Yawning, I say, “Honestly, my mother is exactly the kind of person who would love it if someone wasted five hours of sleep putting together a surprise for her, but you might want to save it for a special occasion. Before you can take care of anyone else, you have to take care of yourself.”
He winks at me. “But there’s the kicker, isn’t it? What if you can take care of yourself and someone else at the same time? It just so happens that I had a hankering for some cinnamon rolls.”
This is another chestnut of wisdom I’ll have to work through my brain a few times. But that’ll happen later.
I’ll be damned if I don’t find myself offering to take the man I just maced to the store for some cinnamon. There’s a feeling in my chest that’s a lot like hope.