“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Does it matter?”
“He’s buying land from me; I have a meeting with him tomorrow.”
“Here?” Panic raced across Amy’s face.
Victoria shook her head. “Lawyer’s office. I … I don’t like lying to him, Amy.”
“Soon,” she said. “Now, let’s look at our demolition schedule.”
Gavin lifted the sledgehammer, heaving it overhead like some kind of Viking berserker, raping and pillaging his way across the Crooked Creek Ranch.
If Celeste had to guess, she’d say he was probably forty–five years old.
Far too young for her. But she didn’t let that stop her from watching him. Oh no. Nothing short of a natural disaster—and maybe not even that—could get her out of this kitchen.
His long-sleeved red T-shirt molded to the ridge of his spine and exposed the lovely fan of muscles along his back. His hair was hidden beneath a hard hat, which really was a shame—it sort of ruined the image—but Celeste’s fantasy overlooked such mundane realities. Sunlight and dust glittered around him and her fantasy, all-powerful, got rid of the hard hat, the protective goggles, and then, for good measure, the shirt.
Gavin bent his knees and the tool came down with a crunch and thud to eat a huge hole into the southern wall of the living room.
She was transfixed. Compelled. Unable to stop herself from staring. From practically drooling.
Before she had fully recovered, he turned to the western wall and took a huge hole out of that one, too.
He took the plans out of his pocket, checked them, and then, one-handed, swung the sledgehammer from his hip and made a hole in the eastern wall as well.
Oh. My
.
Desire coiled low in her belly. Lust ate its own tail.
He stepped out of sight and Celeste finally let go of the breath she’d been holding. This was getting ridiculous. She was at least fifteen years older than him. And he was probably married. Men like that should be gobbled up and forced to procreate.
But since he and his crew had stepped onto the property yesterday morning, she’d been walking on pins and needles, feeling uncomfortable in her own skin.
Victoria had left to meet Eli at the lawyer’s office. Celeste had no idea where Ruby was—the woman who practically lived in the kitchen was nowhere to be found—so she couldn’t even pick a fight to distract herself from ogling the help.
“Excuse me, Celeste?” She jerked, nearly spilling the mug of tea she’d been stirring sugar into, and turned to face the Viking … ah … Gavin, who stood there, his sledgehammer slung over his shoulder. Dust and bits of drywall speckled his red shirt, the collar pulled aside to reveal the ridge of a collarbone.
Celeste felt herself begin to blush, something she hadn’t done in more than a decade. Something she thought she’d forgotten how to do.
“We’re going to set up some dust barriers, but I just want to warn everyone that the dust is going to be an issue during the demolition and drywalling.”
“Ah … thank you.”
“I understand the boy has allergies—”
Celeste nodded—those dust motes that were so pretty around Gavin’s head could be threatening around Jacob’s.
“Yes, ah, he does. We’ll … handle that.”
His smile was big and warm across his handsome face. It was, in fact, one of the friendliest things she’d ever seen. One of the most open and welcoming gestures that had ever been extended to her, and she found herself panicking in the face of it.
Warmth seeped into his eyes as if he knew the effect of his smile, and a sudden familiarity bloomed between them.
He hadn’t come over here to talk about dust or Jacob. He’d come over to talk to her. The realization filled her with anxiety. He’d probably recognized her.
“I don’t want this to sound weird,” he said, and she braced herself for the worst.
“But I kept a magazine with you on the cover for years.”
And that was the worst.
“The
Sports Illustrated
cover?” she asked, feeling all that heat in her belly turn to ice and then to lead. The weight of her body, of her aging skin, suddenly made her wretched. She’d been forty in that shot, the oldest model to get the cover.
She’d been ogling this man who had ogled the perfection of her much younger body. Probably masturbated to the firmness of her breasts, the sleekness of her thighs, the fullness of her lips.
“Yeah.” He looked sheepish, charming, really. She wanted to reach out and push back that lock of hair over his eye. Like she was his mother. “You probably get that all the time.”
She could feign a certain flattered demeanor, encouraging this man and his flirtation, but instead she shrugged, lifting her tea to take a sip, letting her gaze slide past him, as if there were something more interesting just over his
shoulder. She was uncannily good at pushing men away, at making them feel like fools.
Her cool reply pushed him off his stride, that smile waffling at its corners.
“I suppose you have work to do,” she said, just to crush the smile and the charm and his flirtatious impulses into dust. And it worked. He stiffened, and as if he had a loudspeaker in his brain, she could hear his thoughts, like those of a hundred others before him.
What a bitch
.
It wasn’t the worst thing she’d been called over the years.
“I suppose I do.” His gaze flinty, he turned away, swinging that sledgehammer like it was nothing and settling it over his shoulder.
As a point of pride, she sipped her tea and didn’t watch him go.
“We could have done this at the ranch,” Eli said, all shoulders and knees wedged into one of the stiff chairs in Randy Jenkins’s waiting room. He wore what Victoria realized now was sort of his uniform, blue jeans and one of those snap-front shirts she thought only country music stars wore. This one was light blue and the snaps looked like pearls. He was so handsome, so … beautiful sitting in this stuffy waiting room, that she felt the absurd desire to fling open the doors and tell everyone that this gorgeous creature had had sex with her.
Three times.
“Done what?” She was distracted by his hair, by the remembered sensation of it between her fingers. Her thighs.
This morning, getting ready, she’d thought she would feel awkward seeing him again. But she didn’t. She wanted to unsnap that shirt of his, find the pale skin of
his shoulders and back so she could kiss the constellations of freckles that gathered there.
“Signed these papers.”
No, we couldn’t
, she thought.
Not with your mom there
.
“I’m just trying to keep everything aboveboard,” she said, primly crossing her legs and smoothing the hem of the blue skirt she wore over her knees. Thinking she’d need it, she’d put on her best armor this morning, the last of the Chanel skirts that still fit her and her favorite St. John’s blouse—red, with a high collar and a ruffle around her wrists.
She felt like Queen Elizabeth in this shirt.
Eli cleared his throat and stared at the clock, and she examined every cuticle on her right hand while watching him very carefully out of the corner of her eye.
Oddly, she didn’t take his silence, his reluctance to talk, personally. It was obvious he kept his distance with everyone. Just as it was obvious that he felt far more uncomfortable and awkward than she did. She didn’t know what it was that made him so unsure.
When she and Joel had first gotten married, the sudden change in social circles had been dizzying and she’d spent months quietly sitting in the elegant and constantly redecorated living rooms of the women she was supposed to be friends with.
She’d been paralyzed by nerves, awkward to the extreme. And all those women had looked at her out of the corner of their eyes and whispered behind their palms that they didn’t understand what Joel saw in the little mouse.
But everything had changed when she’d started channeling Celeste. She’d adopted the imperial mannerisms that had made her childhood such torture: the tilt of her head, the arch of her eyebrow.
And over time, she’d been accepted into that cannibalistic
group, had become their leader by virtue of her husband’s money and the cool snobbery she’d perfected.
Clearly, Eli had no such role model. He sat there oozing discomfort.
Thinking about those years, those people, made her melancholy. All too aware of the time she’d wasted cultivating connections and relationships that had been made of smoke and poison.
This man in front of her, the things they’d done, the way he made her feel—she couldn’t pin a name on any of it, couldn’t point at it and say “that’s love” or “that’s friendship,” but it was real. Complicated, sure, but it had been the real her in that truck and in his bed. She hadn’t been pretending to be someone else.
Real in a way she’d forgotten about. Real in a way she never thought she’d have outside of her son and brother.
“You look like a nun in that shirt,” he muttered.
“So?”
“So, you’re not.”
She laughed. “Are you saying I should dress …” The waiting room was empty; Gladys, Randy’s secretary, was sealed back in the copy room, but Victoria still whispered. “Like a slut?”
The idea had some appeal. With these new boobs of hers … she should show them off. Joel was long gone, and his opinions on what she wore no longer mattered.
“You should dress like a woman.” Across the waiting room, those green eyes of his undressed her, pulled away the silk and the skirt, the plain underwear she wore, to find her skin. The tender places only he knew about.
Her body reacted, heating in acquiescence, and she realized what she needed armor against was this. This knowledge he had of her. And the way he could pull her apart with just one look. One word.
She opened her mouth to tell him it was no business of
his, but the door to Randy’s office opened at the same time.
“Randy will see you now,” Gladys said, unsmiling. As if being a legal secretary was grim, life-or-death stuff.
“Great,” she said and practically jumped out of her chair.
Eli walked out of Randy’s office an hour later, his pockets a little emptier, but his life so full he wanted to shout with joy.
He had all the land he needed. Everything was coming together in a way he’d never even considered possible, wedged as he’d been in his role of family savior.
And this woman beside him, searching for the parking stub in her giant suitcase of a purse, had been the unwilling key to it all.
His gratitude was expressionless; he had no way to tell her what she’d done when she’d fired him and freed him from that self-sacrificing role.
“Thank you,” he murmured as they approached the elevator that would take them down to the parking garage. He’d parked his truck next to the old Cadillac her father used to drive.
She laughed, still digging through her purse. “All I did was sell you some land.” She pushed a pair of sunglasses into her hair, revealing the curve of her cheeks, the fullness of her lips, and his gratitude turned into an arousal, a lust so sharp he hurt with it. They stepped into the hush of the elevator. “So, thank—”
The elevator doors shut and he stepped up against her, crowding her in the corner.
“What—oh.” She gasped as he arched slowly against her. The purse fell from her fingers and she braced herself against his arms.
She was as aroused as he was, as susceptible to this
strange fire between them, and that made him hotter, harder.
He didn’t kiss her, difficult as that was, trying to think of something slightly dirty he could do to her in appreciation.
“What are you wearing under that skirt?” he whispered as the elevator hurtled them down down down.
“Underwear.”
Underwear?
Honestly, she needed a better vocabulary. “Give them to me.”
“What?”
“Take them off and give them to me.”
“But—”
“Before those doors open, Tori, and I do something worse.”
Her trembling lips parted, her eyes so dilated it was a wonder she could see past her desire. Carefully, daintily, like the princess she used to be, she reached up under those ugly clothes and slipped down a pair of white cotton panties.
Never in his life had white cotton been such a turn-on.
He tucked them in his pocket just as the door dinged open to reveal two men in business suits. They nodded, smiled at Tori, and a green-eyed monster roared in his chest, hating their eyes on her. He grabbed her bag, holding it over his swollen crotch, and took her gently by the elbow, leading her out of the elevator and across the parking lot to their vehicles.
After fishing her keys out of the bottomless pit she carried, he opened her driver-side door and helped her in. Threw her purse in the passenger seat.
“What … are we doing?”
He kissed her, holding himself in check because he wasn’t going to have sex with her here. Too many people, and even if that was on her list of harmless perversions,
he realized he didn’t like the idea of sharing this side of Tori with anyone else.
But he would give her something else to cross off that list.
“Touch yourself,” he whispered against her lips.
“While I watch.”
She gasped, and he—showing superhuman control if he did say so himself—shut the door. His attention split between her and making sure no one else was around, he watched, dry-mouthed, as she eased her skirt up her legs and slid her hand between them.
This is crazy
, she thought, so turned on by his eyes through the glass. So turned on by what she knew he could see. So turned on by doing this in a public place. She was on fire with all of it, and seconds after her fingers touched the swollen heat between her legs, she exploded, her gasps and cries echoing through the empty car.
Feeling both powerless and powerful at the same time, she glanced through the window at Eli. His eyes glowed, his chest heaved, and she grabbed the door handle to open it, to get out or pull him in, whatever it took to touch him. But he put his hand against the window, keeping the door closed. His eyes shifted over the roof of her car and she heard tires coming. Another car, and she partially froze with horror.