Chapter 26 #3
she rocked against his hand, she felt her orgasm gathering. She was finally ready to look over her shoulder.
What she saw in the mirror was shocking at first. It was her ass, round and exposed.
She arched her back to get a view of what she knew Lee wanted her to see. His cock buried deep in her. From this angle, sex
was so raw, and fucking hot. She lifted nearly all the way off him, the head notched at her entrance. She sank onto him again
slowly, watching in fascination as he stretched her open. After a few more times, mesmerized, she realized Lee had propped
himself up on his elbows and was watching her, too. Nakeder than naked, she showed him how much she loved this, how she’d
never been happier. She swung around to look at him again and rocked harder, faster. He reached up to touch her face as she
came. She wanted more of him, all of him inside her, so she pulled his finger into her mouth and sucked on it. It carried
the taste of her own pussy like his mouth did. She loved this; she wanted her taste to haunt him. The memory of her on his
tongue should make him think Thora Williamson is always fucking there. And she would always be there for him, she vowed as the waves of bliss crashed over her.
His orgasm chased hers. He held her by the hips to still her movements as he came, and he looked at her with utter reverence.
She loved being worshipped like this. She could get used to it.
Releasing his finger from her mouth, she kissed him deeply. She tried to express volumes with that kiss. Gratitude and love
and devotion and wonder. She’d have to tell him those things in words, too.
After a quick cleanup, they crawled under the covers of Lee’s bed. Still nude, Thora’s head lay on his chest, his arm wrapped
around her.
“Where do we go from here?” Lee asked.
“That’s a great question. I want to prioritize you, but I also want to prioritize my writing.”
“We don’t have to put a lot of pressure on anything,” Lee said. “I’ll be coming up to Woodhill to check on how the house is
coming along. I could come a little more often if you’d like. If you’re planning on being there.”
Thora had never been so untethered. She could easily fit all her belongings in her Jeep. Between insurance covering her living
expenses after the fire and her inheritance from Bryony, she didn’t need to get a job in the near future. She hadn’t made
any big decisions. She could sell Juniper as a property for someone else to develop. Hell, she could move anywhere she wanted.
But she still regretted that night with the snake, when she thought she was giving up on Juniper. The freedom to go anywhere
she chose was beautiful, but losing the place she held most dear was a cost she’d never wanted to pay.
At the same time, she’d learned an important lesson. She didn’t want her full-time residence to be inaccessible. She wanted cell phone coverage and a fire hydrant somewhere nearby.
“I’m not going to stay at Woodhill House for long. I’m in the way of the renovations and Mack loves me too much to tell me
to scram. But I want to stay in town. It’ll be helpful while I’m writing to have the right atmosphere, you know.”
“You’re welcome to stay here anytime you like, you know.”
“I appreciate that. But I want to take things slow. Going too fast eventually leads to divorce, you know.”
“Hmmm, I think marrying the wrong person leads to divorce.”
She couldn’t argue with that. They continued talking, their first day together when nothing strange happened to either of
them. Thora didn’t feel like a different person in this relaxed atmosphere, but she did feel like the best version of herself.
Lee picked up her scarred hand and traced the outlines.
“Even though the house is gone, I love that it’s still a part of us both.”
Thora did, too. “You’d add that doorknob to your little treasure bowl, wouldn’t you?”
“I might. And if I were designing the rebuilt Juniper, I’d try to source the doorknob again.”
“You don’t think that’s inviting trouble?”
“You always loved that the house presented a little trouble.”
If giving people what they wanted, even if it wasn’t always in their best interest, was Lee’s flaw, she could accept it. “Who
said anything about rebuilding Juniper?”
Lee looked around the room. “Unless there’s someone else in the bed with us, pretty sure that was me.”
“I don’t know if I should rebuild it.”
He sat up on his elbows. “What’s holding you back?”
“I’m only one person. I don’t need a great camp.”
“It wouldn’t have to be a great camp. You could have a small cabin that is an homage to the architecture of the great camps.”
This idea had occurred to her, too. “It seems foolish to build someplace where there isn’t any cell phone reception.”
Lee was undaunted. “There may be some options there. A signal booster, or routing calls through broadband internet.”
“Seems like you’ve been thinking about this.”
He had his notebook on the table on his side of the bed. He reached over to grab it and then handed it to Thora.
Past the cartoons her drew for her and the portrait of her were sketches of a little cabin.
“Twoniper,” he’d titled it.
Thora laughed at that. “It absolutely cannot be called Twoniper.”
“What would you call it?”
The name came to Thora as if the ghost of Bryony whispered it in her ear. “Is Moonrise Manor too ostentatious?”
“Or the right amount of ostentatious,” he offered.
His sketch did remind her of a shrunk-down version of Juniper. It had a living room with a fireplace, an eat-in kitchen with
a half bath, a single bedroom with an en suite bath, and an office.
She could see the vision perfectly. She knew that if she wanted to be serious about writing, she needed to be able to write
wherever, whenever. She couldn’t be precious about it, spending more time thinking about where she wanted to write than what
she wanted to write. At the same time, this looked like the perfect place to hole up and work.
Of course Lee had the vision for it. He was the architect. He knew the best parts of Juniper, and he wanted to make it for
the best parts of her.
“Is there a basement?”
“It doesn’t need a basement. See?” he asked, flipping the page. “It has a carport at the ground level to elevate the cabin,
so you can get a view out over the treetops from the porch.”
“Can we make the outside posts look like chicken legs? So I can have my Baba Yaga hut in the woods?”
“Whatever you want.”
“And I walk up these stairs to enter the house through the living room?”
“Or you go around the back to the kitchen door.”
The more she looked at it, the more her mind filled in the details. How the office would be an homage to the Wood Room. Lee
knew this, too, because he sketched in a little desk with lots of pigeonholes.
He made the bedroom a mix of Juniper’s rooms. He sketched a coverlet on the bed that was surely blue, like the one they were
under at the moment. He even drew in the quail lamp onto the bedside table. Next to it, of course, was a bell.
“Not a fucking bell,” she said.
“I couldn’t help myself.”
“There will be no bells at Moonrise Manor,” she reiterated.
“You like it?”
“You were the one who said we would build something beautiful together.” She tapped the paper. “This is what we are going
to build.”