Chapter 39
Thirty-Nine
The barndo has an impressive amount of potential. A shed house, who knew?
Separated from the shop by a heavily insulated wall, Gavin leads me through the three large unfinished bedrooms—the primary has a closet that even I could work with—two and a half bathrooms, and a kitchen that opens to a living room with a wall of windows facing the vineyard.
The closest thing to being finished is the half bathroom—it has a working toilet and sink—but I can see the rest as clearly as it was.
Can imagine color on the walls and pieces of glass filling in the blanks.
The sun has long set, and other than the porch light from Nancy’s house, the view through the windows is a pitch-black box lidded by a million stars.
Back in the shop, we lean against one of the stainless-steel tables—a marver, as Sabrina called it—facing one another.
Strands of Edison bulbs hang overhead to dimly light the large space, and a cool breeze blows through the single open garage door.
It feels like fall, but any sounds of nature are lost to the whir of the furnaces and ventilation fans.
“Why didn’t you finish?” I ask him. “Live here?”
“Felt too hard after Greg died,” Gavin admits. “He haunted it.” He shrugs, looking around the shop. “If I couldn’t work here then I sure as hell couldn’t live here. I needed time. Get my head on straight.” His eyes meet mine. “Find the right inspiration.”
I tuck my chin to my shoulder until the urge to smile passes. “A lesser person might gloat about being the hero twice in a person’s story.”
He chuckles.
A shelf of glass flowers and other small objects catch my eye.
I take the few steps to examine them, picking up an elongated teardrop sculpture swirled with color.
A paperweight, I assume. I wrap my fingers around it—it has a satisfying fit in my palm—then, still cupping it, return to the spot next to Gavin. “I bet Amanda loved it in here.”
“She did.”
It’s a comfort and jab. Twenty-some years ago we promised we’d be having porch wine together right now. I wouldn’t have believed I’d be asking a third party what she liked before she died.
Her absence fills the air until Gavin grabs my empty hand and rubs small circles on my knuckle with his thumb. “You want to talk about Sunday?”
“About how you said I had a heart made of ice and was—how did you put it?” I tap my chin with the paperweight. “Ah—trying to create a genetically perfect child to control after I forbid you to love me? That what you want to talk about?”
He laughs through a breath and drops my hand to fold his arms over his chest. “Yeah.”
He’s handsome standing here. The low lights dancing in his eyes and the easy way he’s smiling even though our last conversation wasn’t much different than a gunfight.
“No,” I admit. “But we can.”
He quirks a brow. “And you’ll be honest?”
I pin him with a look and he rubs his nose. Touché.
“Results are black and white in business,” I start, fidgeting with the paperweight. “That’s why it comes so easy to me. I win or I lose. Everything else . . . relationships.” I eye him. “People complicate things, but . . . being back here has lifted the veil on what I’ve been missing.”
I will never tell Rue, but she and Nash have been the most revealing. Their looks and touches. Bennie. Them trying for a baby. Together. It’ll likely take them longer because they’re older and Rue’s diet is atrocious, but they’ll do it together. I want that.
“And yes,” I continue. “I lied and stole medical information—” I grip the piece of glass in my hands a little tighter. “But I want a baby. I want to know what it feels like to be pregnant then see myself in someone else. Love someone and be loved back.”
Gavin takes a step so he’s directly in front of me, palms on the edge of the marver on either side of my hips.
I set the paperweight beside me and trace his jaw with my finger.
“I know you say you don’t care about age, but I might only have a few years left to do this.
That’s a real thing I have to think of. It’s not me being controlling, it’s a deadline.
Just because you want kids someday doesn’t mean I can operate like that. It’s what I’m doing now.”
That reality is as audible as the whoosh of the furnace filled with hot glass.
I’m running out of time and he’s not in a position to do anything about it.
Me having a baby with a stranger is one thing—but with a partner in the mix?
That’s a guaranteed life of compromise. With the right person, I’d do it, but I’ve only known Gavin over a month—people don’t consciously have babies with someone after a month.
Even Rue and Nash made it two months, and that was on accident.
My fingers find the worn shard of glass hanging from his neck, and both of our gazes go to it. The piece I gave him all those years ago.
He hoists me onto the table, lifting the skirt of my dress up to my knees so he can step between them.
“It doesn’t change things for me,” he says. His hands move from my hips to my face, pushing my hair away and rubbing my cheeks with his thumbs. “I have custody of Addie. Legally, she’s mine. Forever. And I’m thirty. You think I want to wait to have kids until I’m old and forty?”
“Hey!” I slap his chest, and he laughs. “I’m being vulnerable, you ass.”
His smile stays. “I am too. I don’t care, Reese. Just no more stakeouts or trying to break my nose.”
I laugh a little but swoon a lot.
He’s fine.
With me.
Despite the fact I punched him and stole medical information and forgot to fill my life with people, he wants me. And the baby I’m going to have.
“How do we do this?” Panic tangles between my ribs like invasive vines of kudzu.
“How do we—” I squeeze my eyes shut. When I open them, he’s right there.
Steady and smiling, meeting me where I am and consuming me in flames as he does.
“So we’re clear, you know I want a baby and I have a job in Chicago, and I know you live here.
I won’t drag you into any more closets, I get that, but I don’t know how to do this or firmly say what comes next without thinking it all through. ”
His hands are back on my face, this time holding me tight. “You care that I’m thirty and cut grass?”
My panic ebbs with my smile. “Not even a little bit.”
He kisses me then, just barely. Just a second and without urgency. The way you kiss someone you know you’ll kiss again and again. Who you want to shut up as much as want to comfort. “Okay,” he says, still close. “Then we do this one day at a time and figure it out together.”
“No plans and teamwork,” I murmur. “My specialties.”
He chuckles between kisses. “I’ll teach you.”
“Really?” His mouth moves to my jaw and turns the cool breeze blowing through the shop to a pure heat that forms in my low belly then works its way up. My arousal takes on a life of its own and sends my hips scooting toward his. In his ear, I whisper, “What else can you teach me?”
His gaze drops to where my dress is bunched around my hips and my bare thighs are hugging his. I rock against him, once, then squeeze my legs into him like a vise. When his eyes meet mine, they’re anything but bright—they’re hot. Hotter than the glass cooking in any box in this shop.
He wets his lips—I imagine him hitching my dress up the rest of the way and bending me over this table—then our mouths collide. Hands roaming, tongues reaching.
I fist his shirt; he grips my hips.
My ankles hook behind his back and my dress rides up high enough my ass meets cool stainless steel.
I rock against him, the buckle of his belt giving me just enough friction to keep rocking.
Then I whimper.
Gavin growls—I must like growling—and pulls back. His lips are wet, and there are about three places I’d like for him to put them.
His gaze drops to my dress. “Can we take this off?”
I nod, breathless, interlacing my fingers behind his neck so I can keep rocking. “Please.”
He fumbles with the first button and mutters a swear. Too bad for me, there are about thirty-five more.
We’re kissing again, aggressive and hungry.
“Shit,” he says into my mouth. “This dress expensive?”
I bite his lip. “Very.”
I’m rocking and rocking and he’s still fumbling with the first button. It would be funny if it wasn’t infuriating.
“How much do you care?”
I let out a wanton laugh. “Nowhere near as much as I care about what you’re about to teach me.”
His fingers still and he looks at me.
“Do it,” I tell him.
And he does.
With both hands at the neckline, he yanks the fabric apart, sending every button popping off and rendering me fully exposed.
And: Holy hell in a whorehouse.
When he sees I’m not wearing a bra and my panties are a thin layer of lace, his eyes flare and his hand cups my breast, thumb circling.
He leans forward to kiss me, but I have become a sex-crazed feral cat because I dodge his mouth to put my mouth on his jaw.
And lick.
While I rock.
With zero shame, I lap his taste of salt and sin right up. His few days’ worth of scruff hits my tongue like a sheet of rusty metal, and I want to feel it everywhere. My face. My chest. Between my thighs until I scream or get tetanus.
He mutters the sexiest “fuck” I’ve ever heard, and I lick him again.
I can’t stop licking him.
Tasting him.
My mouth is on his neck and his hands are groping my skin and we’re moving so much the paperweight next to me topples with a clatter against the stainless steel.
“I need you inside me,” I manage between gasps as I fumble to unhook his belt.
He rounds his spine to take my breast in his mouth. “So impatient.”
Before I can get his pants unbuttoned, he presses two fingers between my thighs and I nearly scream. I’m on a hair trigger and don’t even care.
“Goddamn, Reese.” His voice might have traveled through a ball of hot glass to get to me. “You’re soaked.”
I grip his shirt, his finger moving in the best kind of way.
Touching . . .
Stroking . . .
. . . It’s gone.
Gone?
My eyes fly open, fighting words on my lips until I spot the glass teardrop in his hand and a wicked smile on his fuckable face.
Here. We. Go.
Eyes open and faces close, Gavin rubs the smooth, wide end of the piece against me.
There.
“See,” he says right in my ear, “I knew you liked the glass.”
My whimpering tells him exactly how much.
I respond with a grind.
On a piece of glass.
He pushes the fabric of my underwear to the side to slide and glide.
Circles and strokes and pressure until he’s at my entrance, teasing me with it.
I might regret it later, but right now I’d let him fuck me with anything in this building.
This glass. Broken glass. A hot pipe dripping with molten glass.
My “I’m close” comes out like a whine.
I don’t stop grinding his glass—I can’t—and he responds by pulling my dress down one arm and biting into my shoulder.
With his fingers, mouth, and his glass on my skin, Gavin coaxes pleasure out of me until my broken whines turn to constant pleas with every move harder and faster and deeper and—oh, God!
Like fine china thrown against a brick wall, I shatter with a scream. Obliterate. A million pieces of me fly through the air and into space, never to be whole again.
Just when I think Gavin can’t get any hotter, with his eyes locked on mine, he brings my new favorite piece of art to his mouth, licks the end covered in me—slowly—then sets it on the table.
My pleasure spent body reignites with heat, and he sees, chuckling as he wraps his arms around me then puts his filthy mouth on mine.
“If I would have known you could do that,” I say between kisses and shallow breaths, “I would’ve skipped playing hard to get.”
He makes an amused sound, brushing hair out of my face. Twinkles from the lights dance in his eyes. “I like you playing hard to get.” He kisses my jaw, my throat. “And if I would have known how much glass did it for you, I would have dragged you in here the first day.”
I hum my laugh, my eyes reorienting with the tools and furnaces around us. “It’s the only reason I’m here.”
“Good thing I have a lot.” He slides my dress down my other arm, leaving me completely naked less my underwear and boots, and his hands and mouth wander me. “Means the rest will be easy.”
The rest means figuring out how to manage the difference between our lives—the baby I’m having and the job I may or may not get back to.
Maybe it should worry me, but right now, it doesn’t.
He knows why I’m here; I know who he is.
If we can handle that, maybe we can figure it out, even without a plan.
And it makes me want him even more.
His mouth returns to mine, slow and unhurried but with enough heat it lets me know we’re finishing what we started—I hope it involves his tongue and that glass.
My fingers fumble with the button of his jeans. Through the denim, he’s hard and ready and yes please. I pull back from his mouth just far enough to ask, “You ready to fuck me on this table?”
“I was ready as soon as I saw that dress,” he says with a pinch of my nipple and press of his erection into my pubic bone.
At the look in his eyes, my mouth waters—Gavin’s about to wreck me in the best way—and the tune of an ocarina cuts through the air.
An ocarina?
What?
I push Gavin away and turn to the source.
Banyan stands in the doorway with a stupid smile on his crooked face, and I scream.
“I knew it,” he says, snapping his fingers. “Fire and heat belong together.” He drops the ocarina to his chest. “Didn’t I say this?”
My jaw drops. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Banyan’s gaze drops to my exposed torso as I fumble to cover myself with a piece of my dress.
“Sounded like you were having fun.” His brows raise. “Bet you’ll be in a better mood now.” To the open doorway he shouts, “Feel that, ladies?” His gaze drops to the paperweight next to me then he grins. “It doesn’t surprise me it took a piece of glass to get you there.”
Gavin chuckles and I glare at him.
“What?” He pecks me with a kiss, unbothered as he fastens his belt and adjusts his pants and the good time I won’t be impaled with. Leave it to a hippie to ruin my life. “You saying that wasn’t fun?”
“Horrific, actually.” To Banyan: “You’re fired.”
Banyan bats a hand through the air like that’s nonsense—it mostly is—as Gavin tosses me a T-shirt to put over my ripped dress.
Banyan meets my scowl with an unperturbed smile. “I ever tell you about the time I lived in a single-roomed shared house with twelve women?”