by Amelia Wilde
The pan hits the floor with a clang and sauce flies everywhere, coating my clothes along with Dash’s shorts and most of my torso and the top of my head. A wail rises from one of the side rooms—oh, shit, his daughter.
“What the fuck,” Dash hisses, grabbing for the shorts. He steps over me, his footsteps heavy on the way to the bedroom. A moment later he reappears, his daughter nestled into his arms. She’s wearing a pair of cotton pajamas. Footie pajamas. His arms are flexed to carry her and his jaw is set. “I’ll take care of this,” he says to me while I wipe helplessly at my clothes with my bare hands.
This is not going to look good if someone comes into the house. But that’s not going to happen. I can tell by the look on Dash’s face.
I scoot sideways, out of sight of the doorway, just in time.
“Hello?” he says, and the sheer power, sheer manliness in his voice makes me wet all over again. This is a man. He can handle things. He’s the opposite of Sol in every way. That’s what makes him a formidable business enemy. It’s also what makes me so hot for him, damn it. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s not right, what you’re doing, young man,” says the other voice. I cover my face with my hands. What the hell is Morris doing here? “We came to tell you that.”
“At this hour?” says Dash, his rage not disguised even a little. “You woke my daughter. You ruined my dinner.”
“We don’t want another coffee shop in town. The city council never should have approved your business license,” pipes up another voice. “We wanted to tell you in person that we’ll be protesting your shop at this Thursday’s meeting.”
“That’s foolish,” spits Dash. “The license is already granted. I’m opening on Friday. Come to my shop. Don’t come to my shop. I don’t care.” His voice is measured, but I can tell he’s on the verge of losing control. “Was there anything else you wanted to say to me?”
There’s an awkward pause, and then Morris speaks up. “You might not know Ellie very well, but you shouldn’t do this to her, Mr. Huxley.” Wow. They’ve been working. They must have found the public record for the business and found the renters, and— “Her aunt and uncle are some of the best people in town. Don’t do this.”
Awwwww.
A fierce defensiveness flares up in my chest for all these idiot people who have just interrupted the sexiest thing I’ve done in years. I won’t close the shop, no matter what. I can’t disappoint them...or Aunt Lisa and Fred.
I’ll work harder. I’ll figure it out.
“Take it up with the city,” Dash says, and closes the door.
A silence reigns.
There are no more knocks, and a minute later he breezes through the kitchen, going back to the bedroom. I sit in the puddle of sauce. What’s going to happen now? Is our dinner date done with? Is it actually going to become a true sex date now, or has the mood been shattered?
His footsteps are quiet when he returns. One hand comes into view. He helps me up, a disbelieving grin on his face.
“How about a shower?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Dash
The shower turns into a twenty-minute-long affair complete with getting pieces of beef out of Ellie’s hair. She had it pulled back and still it worked its way in there.
“What a waste of sauce,” she says as she steps out and wraps a towel around her, but she has a little half-smile on her face.
“What else is on your mind?”
She flicks her glance down toward the front of me. “You. For starters.” Her smile gets sultrier. “But I bet you’re more concerned with finishing.”
I laugh out loud. “I don’t know. Shouldn’t we give it a few minutes? Make sure the angry mob doesn’t come back?”
It was a shocker, opening the door to find a few old men on my doorstep spoiling for a fight. I probably should have done something else—offered to sit down with them, something—but they’d woken Rosie from a sound sleep. That’s what I’m most angry about. Of course it is. The blowjob I’d only begun to get is a distant second.
“I don’t think they’ll be back,” says Ellie. “They’ve got to be up bright and early tomorrow.”
“To plan how they’re going to bring down my business?”
“To be at mine,” she says, needling me. She lets the towel slip down an inch and my breath catches in my throat. “You know...” She looks down at her feet, then back up at me. “We could get in some real trouble.”
I laugh out loud. “How?”
“By consorting with each other.”
“Consorting—” I can’t stop. “Ellie, that is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would they care if we’re sleeping together?”
“We’re not,” she says. “Not yet.”
She insists on cleaning up the kitchen first, wearing a pair of my boxers and one of my t-shirts. “We can’t leave it,” she says, going past the kitchen to the laundry nook off the entryway. “That’s going from great to terrible.”
“What?”
“You and me together?” She puts in detergent, tips the clothes in after it, and lets the top down gently. “That would be great. And then to come out and clean up spilled sauce? Terrible. Terrible. We can’t.”
I open my mouth to argue, but she has a point. So instead I get the mop.
Her stomach growls loudly mid-scrub. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?”
“No.” She wipes down the front of the cabinets.
“You have to be starving.”
“Look, I don’t like to complain,” Ellie laughs. “But yeah, I am.”
“I have enough to start over.”
She dismisses me out of hand. “You don’t have to do that. That would be insane. You already spent enough time cooking this, and look what happened.”
I lean the mop against the countertop and cross the distance between us.
It’s one step.
Then I wrap an arm around her waist and pull her in close. “Listen carefully,” I say, and her body relaxes in my arms. “I have enough to start over. It’s not a long process. In half an hour I can have a delicious sauce. The noodles only take half that long.” I let my fingers play over the curve of her hip. “I won’t spill the sauce this time. I promise.”
“Challenge accepted,” Ellie whispers.
We both dissolve into laughter.
I start with the half green pepper and half onion from before, dicing them as fast as I can and getting them to sizzle in the pan. Ellie scrubs the counters, straightening up the already straight stacks of mail I have left to deal with. When she’s exhausted herself, she leans against the counter and watches me.
“You have good cooking hands,” she says, after a minute.
I flex and lift the spatula I’m using to break up the rest of the meat in the pan. “What about my arms?”
“Those are multi-talented.”
“Oh, and my hands aren’t?”
“I would never say that.”
It’s so easy standing here with her. It reminds me of working behind the counter at Medium Roast. We danced around each other then. I never had a moment’s worry that she’d spill hot coffee on me, even though we were in tight quarters.
It never felt this easy with Serena.
Then again, I never really knew Serena.
You don’t really know Ellie, either.
There is no way I’m going to entertain that thought right now. Not when I’m cooking her my second batch of spaghetti today and she’s standing there in my clothes.
Say something. I’ve got to say something.
“Did you grow up in Lakewood?”
“In a way.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “We lived in the city when I was a kid, but we moved here after I finished middle school.” Ellie scoffs a little. “My mom wanted me to live in a safer environment.”
There’s something different in her tone. “It isn’t safer here?”
“Oh, it is,” Ellie says, and she sounds almost wi
stful. “It’s a hell of a lot safer here than most places. You don’t have to worry about...” she trails off for a moment. “People care about each other here. Not so much in the city.”
“I didn’t mind it.” I put the spatula down and switch it out for a heavy-duty plastic spoon.
“I didn’t mind it either. At least not when I was in college.”
I steal a glance over at Ellie. She’s looking out the window to the dark of the backyard. The moon shines over the lake, its reflection scattered in the ripples on the surface. “What happened?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Ellie shakes her head slowly. She doesn’t speak until I’m looking into her eyes. “Are you sure you want to go this far?”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I don’t hesitate for a single moment. “Yes.” I put the spoon down on the spoon rest, freshly cleaned, and turn to face her.
“You have to promise me something.” She crosses her arms over her chest.
“I promise.”
That makes her crack a smile. “You haven’t heard what it is yet.”
“I still do.”
Ellie takes a deep breath, gathering her damp hair in both hands. “Promise you won’t think I’m fucking pathetic afterward.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ellery
I want to tell him.
I don’t know why.
I do know why. It’s because whenever I’m in his arms, I feel like nothing could ever happen to me again. I feel like I could pick up a camera and go about my life and it wouldn’t be attracting a disaster.
Never mind that he is a disaster—for Medium Roast, anyway. But his face is open and kind, and for God’s sake, he’s gone back to stirring the pan of spaghetti sauce right now. All because I said I was hungry.
I’m fucking starving. For the spaghetti...and for him.
“I went to school for photography.” I start there because I don’t know where else to start. It’s all so hazy. If I go too far back, it’ll take all night, so I can’t start with the time I picked up my dad’s old film camera from his office and loved the weight of it in my hands. Or the four years I spent in photography club. The award I won for the portrait of Honey. Honey, the wild adventuress who’s off in Europe somewhere at this very moment.
Dash nods. “You said something about that at the sandwich place.”
“I didn’t say much.”
“No.” He frowns at the spaghetti sauce.
“This is why.” I take another deep breath in. “My last semester at college I got an internship for one of the smaller papers. The pay was for shit, but I thought, I’ll get a few credits, I’ll get some experience. Work my way up.”
“That’s a good plan,” says Dash.
“It was a great plan.” I loved working for that little paper. I got a summer at that paper before things fell apart. I don’t want to go back to that day, but it’s already happening in my mind. “Then I got this one assignment.”
My editor had called me into his office, which was a larger version of a regular corporate cube, and told me that he wanted an event covered. It was a local event, but anything with more than one person was a step up from what I’d been doing. I was so fucking excited. I didn’t care that he had coffee breath.
“What kind of assignment?”
“A festival they were holding in one of the neighborhoods. It had the dumbest name: Summer Slam Jam Fest. They had all kinds of local bands. They sucked.” Dash laughs. I can still feel the sun on my shoulders. I can still see the frozen daiquiri Sol had in a plastic cup, the ice melting away in the heat while I stood at the corner of the stage and tried to get the perfect shot of every band. I had frame after frame of the people in the crowd. “I was in the zone that day. I had so many good photos. One of them was going to end up on the front page. I knew it.”
Dash puts the spoon down again and turns the heat down to a simmer. “This doesn’t sound like—”
“It wasn’t until afterward,” I tell him. I can’t linger in this memory for much longer. It makes my heart beat fast. It makes my palms sweat. I hate it. I hate it. “We were walking back from the festival. The neighborhood was a little rough, but I was taking some last shots. The light…” The light had been incredible, that strange time between afternoon and evening, and everything looked like magic on the screen of my digital camera. “My boyfriend was walking next to me on the sidewalk. I had the camera up to my face to take a photo.” I mimic the motion with my hands. “That’s when the woman came out onto the street.” My breath comes out shallow like there’s not enough air in the room. It is not pleasant. “She was screaming for help.”
“Jesus,” Dash says under his breath.
“It all happened fast. Too fast. My body went on autopilot. I took another photo. That’s what we were supposed to do, you know? I wanted to do this as a career. I saw what happened on the viewfinder. Her boyfriend—it must have been her boyfriend, or her husband—ran out behind her.” I swallow the panic rising in my throat. “He shot her in the back.”
Dash steps up to me and puts his hands on the side of my face. “Tell me he didn’t hurt you,” he says, and his voice is rough, tense.
“I don’t know if he ever saw me.” I feel myself sink into his touch. “He ran away and left her on the sidewalk. My boyfriend ran in the opposite direction. I stayed. I called 9-1-1. I think someone else did too because it didn’t take very long for the ambulance to get there.”
“What a fucking coward,” Dash spits.
“Maybe he’s not,” I say, a knot in the pit of my gut releasing. “At least, he’s not more of a coward than me. I quit my job after that. I was going to be a big-time photojournalist and go where the real stories were. I thought I could handle it.”
“Ellie.” Dash moves his thumb over my cheek, and when he pulls it back, it’s wet with tears. My tears.
“I couldn’t handle it,” I say. “I finished up my degree, but I hated being in the city after that. Aunt Lisa and Uncle Fred asked me to come run the shop in the spring. I took the easy way out.”
“That’s not the easy way out. Jesus, Ellie, anybody would be shaken by that—”
“I threw all of it away.” I force the words out. “They paid for me to go to college, Dash. They bailed me out. My dad—god, this is so stupid. He quit his job to buy a farm and work on that, and it blew my college fund. I owe them so much. I only got to go because they wanted me to follow my stupid dream.” I wipe furiously at the tears on my cheeks. I don’t want to be crying over this. Not now. Not here. “I want to forget about all of it and go back. I miss taking photos. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”
“False,” Dash says, his face inches from mine. Hot damn, he is intoxicating, even in the midst of this emotional outburst. “There’s another thing.”
“What?”
“This.”
He leans in and kisses me. It’s long. It’s deep.
It doesn’t end there.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dash
I’m so horrified by the image of Ellie standing there, a witness to something so soul-shattering, that I’m at a loss for what to do.
All I know is that I need to be touching her. I need to be kissing her.
She melts under my touch, her body relaxing into mine. It’s a kiss that starts out so sweet that the feeling is a pure sugar rush from my chest to my fingertips. Then Ellie arches, my clothes loose around her curves, her breasts pressing against my chest, and it becomes something else entirely.
Her fists curl around my shirt and she yanks it forward, pulling me in as close as she can get. Ellie breaks the kiss, pulling back. Her eyes are reddened from the tears, making the gray look that much more vivid, and her face is a picture of pain and lust and need. “I want to forget, Dash. I want to forget that shit. Make me forget.”
I’m already thrumming with the ache to protect her, to go i
nto the past and throw myself between that man and Ellie Collins, even if the asshole was running away. I put a hand on the back of her head, strong and fierce, and push my face into hers. I can match her intensity. I can do anything.
The grin that spreads across my face is all heat. “Make you forget?” She takes in a short, sharp breath. “Now you’ve begged me twice.”
I forget about the spaghetti sauce.
For all I care, the spaghetti sauce can cook down into burnt embers. It makes no difference to me, as long as the house doesn’t catch on fire. Because Ellie? She’s blazing.
She wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and kisses me so hard I’m sure she’s drawn blood.
There is no time to get to the bedroom. This is the Ellie who dropped it low in the coffee shop, totally uninhibited, totally herself. She’s a fucking tigress, clawing at my clothes, my skin.
I strip my shirt off first, then hers. She has nothing on underneath and her breasts are full and gorgeous. The air against her nipples makes them hard. My thumbs against them makes them harder. She wriggles out of her shorts when I drop mine and then she’s completely naked and folding herself back into my arms.
I lift her in one motion, perching her ass on the immaculate countertop. Ellie throws her head back, her wet hair hanging behind her, an invitation that I fully accept. I swirl my tongue around one of her nipples, then the other, and spread her knees open with one of mine.
She’s wet and waiting and sheer perfection. No hesitation this time. She’s as consumed by this moment as I am, and part of me wishes it would last forever.
I think you can guess which part.
“Yes. Yes,” Ellie hisses when I stroke between her legs, two fingers sliding through the juices already collected there. She spreads a little wider, her hips rising off the countertop, and I plunge two fingers into her. She tenses around them and that tightening shatters the rest of my restraint.