Chapter 15 #2
“They are and they aren’t.” She sat up and pulled her knees in and watched her son sleep for a moment. “They paid for everything, after. School for Toby. The roof. The car. And every time there was a sentence about how fortunate I was that they were able to do so.”
He’d suspected from what she said that there was family money. He hadn’t known it came with obligations.
“I know they love him, and I honestly believe they mean well, but that makes it worse,” she said. “They never ask. They decide, and then they tell me how grateful I ought to be. Right now I’m grateful to be three hundred miles away.”
She leaned against him and didn’t say anything else for a time as they both gazed into the fire. Then he couldn’t say who moved first but one of them reached for the other and all his questions disappeared.
It had gone on a long time. Longer than was wise, with the boy asleep six feet away.
Slow and quiet and careful, her mouth soft under his and gone softer, her hand spread over his heart where she could feel exactly what she was doing to it.
The clothes couldn’t come off but he found the hem of her shirt and slid his hand up the warm skin of her stomach and she shivered against him.
Then he found the soft curve of her breast and she bit her lip even as she arched into the touch.
“Ssh,” he whispered into her ear, and feathered his thumb across a taut peak.
Her gasp was a small, sharp sound that went straight to his cock.
He wanted to spread her out on the sofa, on the rug, on any available surface, and lose himself in her for the rest of the night.
He was a male of granite and control and right then he felt like he could come apart with wanting her.
“Do you want me to stop?” he murmured, and she shook her head.
Thank God. He kept going, exploring her in the firelight, his hands beneath her clothing, quiet and careful.
It was both a frustration and an exquisite pleasure.
He was learning her by touch, the softness of her skin, the curve of her body, and the small, hungry sounds she made when he found a place she liked.
He slid his hand down over her trembling stomach and hesitated at her waist.
“May I?”
She looked over at the sleeping child and nodded.
He slipped a careful hand under the waistband and into the heat between her thighs.
She was slick and hot and more than ready for him.
Her breath hitched as he found the swollen knot of nerves at her core.
He stroked her slowly, lightly, building the tension, until she was panting silently against him.
Her hands clung to his shoulders, her body arching into his touch, chasing a release that was just out of reach. And when he finally gave it to her, pressing down with just the right amount of pressure, she muffled her cry against his shoulder, her whole body shuddering in his arms.
He held her through it, kissing her temple, her cheek, and her pretty mouth, until the tremors subsided and she went boneless against him, breathing hard. He held her like that, the firelight dancing over Toby’s sleeping form and the great, silent room.
He didn’t want the evening to end, but his wings had crept out at some point without his permission, half-mantled behind him.
Combined with the throbbing ache of his cock, he knew he was down to the last thread of his control.
He drew back and pressed his forehead to hers.
“We should stop, little thorn,” he said roughly.
“Yeah,” she’d breathed, not moving. “We should.”
Neither of them had moved for another minute.
Then she’d laughed against his jaw, and it was over, and they’d untangled themselves like two people who knew perfectly well they’d only lost this round on points.
He’d carried Toby home. The boy weighed less than a bag of mortar and he could have carried him to the county line without noticing the load.
Toby didn’t even wake. He just turned his face into Garrick’s shoulder and the trust in that gesture threatened to close his throat.
He’d carried him through the open gate and across the dark nursery to the cottage door.
He’d stood at the threshold with the sleeping child limp and warm against his chest while Maris found her key.
She’d looked up at the two of them in the porch light and gone very quiet.
He’d handed the boy over. He’d kissed her once, at the door, gently.
He’d walked back to the empty enormous house already turning over the next evening in his head—another supper, the fire, the boy on the rug, her mouth—and for the first time in longer than he could remember he’d gone up the stairs of Stonehaven Manor not minding, even a little, how many of its rooms stood dark.
The mistake came, as most of his mistakes did, dressed up as help.
He’d been at the site since first light.
The Asheville job had gone from a rotten joist to three of them, and he’d spent the morning up in the framing with Bellucci working out the repair.
By the time he’d climbed back down and stripped off his gloves, his head was still full of loads and spans and the satisfying logic of a problem he knew how to solve.
That was the state he was in, confident and decisive, a male who’d spent a morning fixing things, when Bellucci frowned at him.
“Calder,” Bellucci said. “Of Hardy Stock. That’s your gardener, isn’t it? The cute little blonde.”
“Yes,” he said, in a voice designed to terminate the discussion.
Bellucci blanched a little but kept going. “I was at the equipment rental about that cherry picker you wanted and I heard her talking to the manager about renting a Bobcat. None of my business, but we’ve got that second one going to waste. Why not—”
“Thank you,” he said, and Bellucci stopped talking.
He stood there for a minute and turned the idea over.
It made perfect sense. Stonehaven Construction owned a spare Bobcat outright and it was sitting in a yard costing him money.
Maris was about to pay a rental company for one, and she wouldn’t get the discount his volume got her either.
He knew enough about small business to know she was probably operating under a very tight margin.
Some part of him knew it wasn’t any of his business, and that he should let her tell him if she needed help. The rest of him thought about how hard she worked for a small, precarious business. And he did what he always did with a fault he could see clearly. He started working out how to fix it.
There was no logic in her paying somebody else for a machine he already owned.
“Send the spare Bobcat to Hardy Stock,” he told Bellucci.
“For how long?”
He thought of Maris hauling a loaded wheelbarrow around the block before he’d opened the gate. He thought of the nursery books he had never seen and the rental counter she shouldn’t have had to stand at.
“Until she doesn’t need it.”
He headed for his truck, satisfied that he had solved the problem.