Chapter 18 Emma
EIGHTEEN
EMMA
MARCH
A stillness settled between Harlan and me, while his hawkish eyes continued to study me. The corner of his lips ticked up. “Interesting. I thought you weren’t using your hot tub.”
My head lolled back on my shoulders and I sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t let it go.”
“I’m glad. You should use it.” He paused for a moment. “Liam’s a good kid.”
“Thanks,” I said quietly.
“I feel bad that I didn’t know you’re a mom.”
That statement surprised me. Not some shock or horror that I’m a mom, but rather putting it on himself that he didn’t know.
Maybe that he wished he had known? But which way did that go?
That he wished he’d known so he could avoid me?
“That’s alright. I don’t really broadcast it.
Or discuss my personal life at work at all. ”
Harlan chewed the corner of his lip, brow furrowing. “Do other guys know?”
I sucked in a breath and hissed it out with a nod. “I’ve run into Sorrento and Leroy at the rink where their kids skate.”
“Hmm.”
What did “hmm” mean?
“Not everyone responds to it well. Especially with how old Liam is and how old I am.”
Harlan cocked his head back. “What do they do?”
“Leave, usually. Stop getting to know me. If you’re my parents, you never speak to me again.”
I felt stupid for letting that little detail out. It was too vulnerable, too much information for what Harlan was to me. Only the people who knew me best knew that. Certainly no one at work.
But Harlan’s response surprised me. “Assholes.” His eyes darkened, brows lowering. “Aren’t most parents itching to be grandparents?”
“Well, they weren’t,” I chuckled. “And I’m not particularly either.”
“Liam’s just barely an adult.” He whistled. “Eighteen, huh?”
“Eighteen,” I said, bobbing my head and idly dragging my toe in an arc on top of the water.
“You were young,” he suggested. “When you had him.”
“Twenty,” I confirmed. “Barely older than he is now.”
Harlan’s gaze passed over my face. “Where’s his dad?”
“Jeff’s around. He was just here earlier celebrating with us.”
“But you’re separated?”
“Divorced twelve years,” I said, reaching for my own seltzer can and taking a sip. “Jeff remarried, but I’m a free agent.”
“Is it hard to date as a single mom?” He kept peppering me with questions, and I wasn’t sure what was at the heart of it. He was trying to figure me out, I supposed.
I laughed. “Oh, absolutely. Guys are the worst. They’ll act like they’re cool with me being a mom, we fuck, and then they vanish into thin air. It’s like sex with me turns them into ghosts.”
His brows knit. “They’re missing out.”
“Yeah. It’s their loss to not know Liam.”
Harlan watched me more intently with those midnight blue eyes. “They’d be missing out on you too.”
I shivered as a cool breeze blew through the patio, and I sank back down in the water. “Nice of you to say that.”
“No, really,” he said, gesticulating with one hand out of the water.
“We’re all a sum of our experiences, right?
Think about the bus. That shifted how I see everything.
I wouldn’t be right here, right now, if that hadn’t happened.
And the same way, Liam is a major part of your life.
Part of what makes you who you are today. To ignore him is . . . to ignore you.”
I clenched my jaw to stave off the urge to cry. “The bus changed you?”
Harlan had been directly across from me, but scooted over one seat.
Our legs now made an L shape in the middle of the hot tub.
“Yeah. Definitely. I had to really think about what I want from life. What I would have felt like I missed out on if I’d died or if my life as I know it had been taken away. ”
I nodded and waited, because he seemed to have more to add.
“I was on the phone with my ex-girlfriend. I’d been coddling her for a while since I told her I was done.
I was afraid she’d go off the handle, and I don’t want bad things to happen to her.
But it had been months of me placating her feelings.
I broke up with her because she didn’t accept all of me.
It took me almost dying from her distraction to see it more clearly.
It’s not my job to manage her emotions or to change myself for her.
I need to go for what I want out of life. ”
“You want someone who likes you for who you are.”
“Exactly.” Harlan’s foot drifted up my leg and he rolled his lips between his teeth. “And you deserve someone who doesn’t think of Liam as a downside. Being a mom is another cool thing about you.”
“Another? Are you kissing my ass?”
“Maybe.” Royce’s eyes sparkled and that little smirk appeared. “Why do you think I asked you to teach me?”
I smirked. “Because you love to torment me.”
“Mmm, yeah, that is one of my favorite hobbies.” His eyes brightened and he played with that hoochie daddy chain.
He twisted it on his finger and pressed his lip into it, his tongue running over it.
It reminded me of how his tongue stroked my burned fingertips, and how he acted like it was nothing for him to do that for me.
“I love this concept of your widowmaker pussy. Like. You fuck, and these people turn immediately into ghosts?” I dropped my jaw and dug my heel into his shin under the water. “Ow! What was that for?”
“Don’t talk about my pussy like that.”
“You did,” he shrugged. “Can’t I?”
“You can’t talk about my body. Only I can.”
“Shame,” he said, biting his lip. “It’s worth talking about.”
I eyed him and laughed. “Oh no. You’re doing it too.”
“Doing what?” His voice had turned raspy and I hated what it did to me. Harlan Royce was an expert flirt.
“You’re all ‘I gotta return your knife roll,’ and then you come over here, get in my hot tub, and start flattering me so maybe my pussy will turn you into a ghost like all the other ones.”
He tipped his head from side to side. “Well, I have always wanted to haunt people. Could be an easy way to make that happen.”
I raised my foot to the top of the water and sloshed a wave at him. “You are never not the worst.”
“That’s technically a double negative,” he retorted. “What you meant to say—”
“Oh my god!” A dizzying, horny rage overtook me.
I lunged at him, fists flailing, ready to take him out.
He caught my wrists and we started to wrestle.
He was way stronger than I was, but it was fun watching his muscles bulge as he worked for it.
My shins settled on top of his thighs as we fought.
His fingers wrapped around my wrists over my head.
Our eyes met, but our arms stayed braced, not backing down.
He held me there, both of us stilling before preparing for more fighting.
“If I’m the worst, why are you all over me, Chef?”
I let out a little growl, loosening my arms in the hopes that he would do the same. He didn’t relent though, using my surrender to yank me closer. I was almost fully straddling him, mere inches away from having my body locked against his. His thighs felt so fucking firm.
His gaze dropped to my lips and he licked his, eyelids heavy. His hair was mussed and wavier from the hot tub’s steam. In short, he was gorgeous.
My chest heaved, and he touched his tongue to his teeth while taking a languid look at my breasts.
My wrists were still in his hands and his thumbs moved along the tender undersides of them.
His eyes softened as they moved up my throat to my face, cataloging each feature.
I couldn’t take my eyes off his face, off the tender way he was looking at me.
“Don’t,” I breathed.
“Don’t what?” Harlan’s lips were so close that I could feel the soft gust of his breath against mine. “What don’t you want me to do?”
I swallowed hard and tried to ignore the insistent pounding in my chest. “Look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
I was exposed, on the spot. Which of us was going to give in first?
To admit that there was something sexual under all this teasing and arguing?
Admitting that I was even thinking of him that way seemed absurd.
It was even more outrageous that I was afraid to say it when I was straddling his lap, when seconds ago, he’d been eying my body like I was a steak in the lion enclosure. My breath shuddered, my voice meek.
“Like you don’t hate me.”
Harlan’s lips curled into a smirk. “Okay then. I won’t.”
His eyes flitted over my face, second after torturous second going by. Harlan liked to play with his food. Of course he did. “Do you want me, Emma?”
Emma. His voice was silk, the question falling from him so easily.
I let my arms slacken and slowly, he lowered our joined hands.
My palms found his chest, fingertips delicately landing in the grooves of his collarbones.
His hands drifted down my sides, grazing my breasts, over my waist, to dig into my hips and pull me that final inch so our bodies were flush.
The reality check was shocking. I was in Harlan Royce’s lap, a hair’s breadth from his face, wearing nothing but my tiniest bikini. I let out a sad chuckle. “You’re going to use this against me.”
His head cocked back the slightest bit, like he couldn’t believe I said that. “No.” He flattened one palm against my lower back while scooping under my ass with the other, curling my hips toward him until I could feel what he wanted me to feel.
Him. Thick, and long, and hard, and was that . . .?
“You could use this against me too.” He rolled his lips between his teeth, studying my eyes like I was some sort of interesting, exotic animal he’d never seen before.
“But we don’t need to do that to each other.
I think,” he traced his lips down my neck until he pressed a tentative kiss to my collarbone, “this is what we need to do.”