by Lacey Black
“Wow,” she replies, clearing her throat, “I have to admit, I’m a little shocked by that.”
I hold my position and look to the side. The water is gorgeous this evening as the sun starts to drop behind the house. “She seemed different,” I confess. “When I returned from college, I spent a couple of years working for old man Parkinson. He was set to retire soon and took me on as his apprentice. I learned a lot of shit from him in a short time, and I knew owning my own business was where I was headed. Ashley was a year behind us in school and returned after things started to take off for me.” I shrug. “Everything wasn’t always great, but it was good for a while. The best part about it is Max.”
She smiles up from her chair. “He’s pretty awesome. He’s definitely the spitting image of you, but now that I know who his mom is, I can see her in him as well.”
Talking about my son makes my own smile come fast and easy. “He is pretty fucking awesome.”
“So you’ve been divorced for…” she asks, leaving the end open for me to fill in the blank.
“Almost a year. We were separated for about six months before that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but as someone who very recently went through her own divorce, it can be quite freeing to finally let go of something negative or a bitterness that has a hold of you in life.”
I knew she was married. The different last name was a pretty damn good indication of that, but to hear her confirm it? It kinda makes me a little rage-y, which is completely not like me. Yet, it feels a little bit like jealousy bubbling up in my chest and I don’t know how to explain it. She’s not mine and hasn’t been for a long damn time. “I kinda figured, since Dunnington is listed on the contract.”
She nods, but doesn’t immediately elaborate. Just when I think she’s not about to continue, she speaks. “Charles Dunnington III worked for my father. After college, it was expected of me to join the family business. I hated it, and Daddy knew it. But I tried to make the best of it, you know? Charles was Daddy’s right hand and I was told our partnership would do wonders for the business.” She says it so matter-of-factly that it comes more of a shock than the actual words she speaks.
“Partnership for the business?”
Kate shrugs her bare shoulders. “Mother made it very clear our relationship would be important to my father and his company.”
“So she pushed you into marrying someone you didn’t love?” Again, anger sweeps through my chest at the idea.
“Yes and no. I met Charles when I was young and vulnerable. I thought I was in love with him, but I wasn’t, not really. Not the kind of love a woman should have for the man she marries. He was comfortable.”
“But was he really?”
She looks at me with those piercing hazel eyes that look a shade lighter than the bark of a sycamore tree in this light. “No, not really.”
I watch her for several long seconds, both of us coming to terms with the mistakes we’ve made in the past and the repercussions we live with now. Our lives, while ripped away from each other, took similar paths. No, my life was still as blue collar as it could get, but the deep-rooted pain and longing was there for both. Together, we found solace in someone else, someone who wasn’t right for us.
The end results were the same.
“Do you want to stay for dinner?” she whispers, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I shouldn’t.
I should go home and grab some sleep. I have to meet Ashley and Max at the preschool tomorrow for his first day. There’s a small stack of bills on my desk that require my attention. Yet, for some reason, I find myself disregarding all of that, instead replying, “Sure.”
Gathering up my tools, I ignore the feel of her eyes on me and the happy little gallop in my chest. That warning sign that tells me not to get too close? I brush it aside too. Instead, I clean up my mess and head to the back door, where I find Kate gathering up food for dinner.
I’m staying.
I shouldn’t, but right now, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
Chapter Ten
Kathryn
I’m nervous. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I am.
Wait.
Yes, I do.
It’s the fact Jensen Grayson, the man who stole my heart in high school and never gave it back, is now sitting at my new island, watching me cook chicken breasts in my new chef’s kitchen. It was one of the features I insisted on when I decided to update the space. The old kitchen was formal and stiff. Plus, it reminded me of our housekeeper, Ingrid, and the fact I saw her ass bent over the countertop, the man standing behind her making her moan in pleasure definitely not her husband. He was the old landscaper, in one of those totally cliché ways.
Now, this almost complete kitchen is mine. I’m not the best cook, but I’m learning. Okay, so I can barely cook at all, but no one needs to know that. How hard can it be to throw a few chicken breasts on the stove?
“Umm, Kate?” Jensen asks softly, getting up from the stool and meeting me on the opposite side of the island. I can feel the heat from his body as he stands behind me, a mixture of dirt and sweat filling my nostrils.
“Yes?” I ask, my voice all crackly and high-pitched.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asks, a hint of humor in his voice.
I glance over my shoulder and then back at him. “Of course I do,” I defend, ready to argue until I see the smoke starting to billow from the fancy six burner stove in front of me. “Shit!” I holler, turning off the heat and reaching for a towel. I wave it back and forth to try to move the smoke before it hits the detector on the ceiling.
Jensen starts to laugh as he reaches around me and pulls the chicken from the heat source. Clearly, I’m unable to do something as simple as grill a few chicken breasts. Hearing him laugh should upset me, but it doesn’t. Instead, I find myself laughing right along with him, something only he could make me do when faced with one of my failures.
“So, clearly cooking classes weren’t in order while in New York,” he jokes, grabbing the towel and waving it around more.
I run over and open the back door, thankful when the smoke starts to dissipate quickly. “Umm, no. No cooking classes, though clearly, I could have used a few.”
Jensen stands at the counter, his hip leaned casually against the marble top. A smile plays on his lips as he crosses his arms and watches me. He looks so much the same, yet completely different. He’s older for sure, but his mannerisms and his smile is everything I remember from my time in Rockland Falls.
“Come on, Gordon Ramsay. We’ll call this your first lesson,” he says, heading over to the fridge as if he’s done it a thousand times before.
He makes himself at home as he takes a pork loin and some vegetables out, setting them down on the counter. Fortunately, I picked up a few things at the store to keep in the fridge, even if I didn’t know how to fix them. My plan was to pull up YouTube cooking videos, but this is probably better right? I watch as he quickly washes his hands and grabs the cutting board and knife. He works silently as he seasons the loin with salt and pepper, adding crushed red pepper to the top before placing it on a pan. Once the oven is preheated, he places it inside and sets the timer.
With the meat in the oven, now he turns his attention to me. “That’ll take about forty minutes or so. Let’s get these cleaned and cut up. I love this big double oven. It’ll come in handy when cooking the vegetables,” he says, washing his hands a second time before turning to me.
Jensen reaches for me, gently taking my upper arm in his warm, callused hand and moving me until I’m standing directly in front of him. His body produces heat like a furnace and I can feel it all the way down to my bones. My blood starts to zing through my veins as he places the cutting board and knife in front of me.
“Can I trust you not to accidentally chop off one of these pretty little fingers?” he asks, taking my hand in his own and almost rendering me completely speechless. I nod frantically, the words just not able
to slide through my parched mouth. “Let’s cut up these Brussels sprouts. Slice off the end, like this,” he instructs, showing me how, “and then cut them in half, like so.”
Looks easy enough. He leaves me to it, while preheating the bottom oven. Jensen takes a minute to wash four potatoes, trimming off the ugly parts, before setting them next to my board. When I have the sprouts cut, he places them in a bowl and adds coconut oil, salt, and pepper, before stirring it all together and spreading them out on a cookie sheet. Watching Jensen breeze around the kitchen is actually quite the turn-on. I never thought having a man who could cook would get me all hot and bothered, but here I am, practically panting like a dog in heat, and getting lost in his effortless movements in tight jeans as he cooks us dinner.
My word, that ass…
“Cube those, but leave the skins on,” he interrupts the naughty train that was silently barreling down on me.
I do as he instructs, careful to keep my breathing under control, all while watching him out of the corner of my eye. Somehow I manage to not slice off a finger, considering my attention is definitely diverted. He barely says a word as he rinses off the potatoes and gives them the same treatment as the Brussels sprouts. Once they’re seasoned and spread out on a pan, he places it all in the oven below the loin.
Then he turns, his eyes lasered in on my position. My hands are suddenly fidgety, like I don’t know what to do with them, so I hold them tightly at my waist. Jensen doesn’t move, doesn’t give anything away on his handsome face. I have no clue what he’s thinking, something I used to pride myself in being able to figure out, but now, I don’t know if I’m just out of practice or if I just don’t know the man as well as I knew the boy.
The air shifts, warmth spreading through the room and my blood like someone turned up the heat. My breath catches in my throat and before I know it, he’s moving, approaching with the confidence I’ve always admired in him. His eyes bore into mine as he pulls me into his arms and presses his lips to mine, hungry and fierce.
At first, I’m almost in shock. As far as fantasies go, this one’s been at the top of my list for a really, really long time. But as Jensen sweeps his tongue across the seam of my lips, I realize it’s not a fantasy. Not at all. This is real. Jensen has his arms around me, pulling me tightly against his hard body, and he’s kissing me with a decade’s worth of pent-up frustration.
This kiss is everything. It’s alive, breathing and feeding, consuming me in a way only his kisses could ever do. My mouth opens easily as his tongue slides inside, tasting and devouring. Blood swooshes in my ears as he lifts, setting me atop the counter. My legs instantly open and wrap around his trim waist, while his hands are pinned between the globes of my ass and the hard surface I’m sitting on. I can feel his erection pressed firmly in the apex of my legs and it only grows (pun intended) when he pulls me tightly against him.
Lacking any control over my own body, I tilt my hips and grind against him. A low groan crawls from his throat, but he doesn’t break the kiss. His lips are firm and rough as they devour my own, ensuring this kiss is one I won’t be forgetting anytime soon. My pulse is pounding, blood is pumping, and my body is begging for more. More friction. More touching. More Jensen.
But before I can beg him to remove every scrap of clothing between us, he rips his lips from mine with a groan that borders desire and pain. “Shit,” he pants, closing his eyes and resting his forehead against mine.
His heavy breathing mixes with mine as I struggle between reeling back in the desire coursing through my body and continuing to grind against him. I know exactly which way my needy body is leaning, that’s for sure. This ache between my legs is only growing more intense by the second.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he whispers as he opens his eyes. They’re still dilated from desire, but it’s the look of pain that grabs my attention and won’t let go.
He’s right.
We shouldn’t be doing this.
His words ring in my ears like a siren, and suddenly, I feel embarrassed. I’m practically climbing my ex-boyfriend as if he were a tree in the backyard, while imagining the dirty things he could do to me on this very counter. The burn moves up my neck and lands in my cheeks as I drop my hands from gripping the back of his T-shirt.
Jensen pulls away and walks to the opposite side of the kitchen. It’s as if he can’t get far enough away from me, not that I blame him. Confliction is etched all over his handsome face, and that pains me even more. I did that to him.
Then my eyes drop to his pants and the tightness they possess, and I realize, I did that too.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around my stomach, wishing his arms were still around me.
“For what? I’m the one who kissed you.”
My eyes connect with his from across the room. “I’m not talking about the kiss.” My heart tries to pound out of my chest as my words seem to register. We haven’t talked about what happened twelve years ago. I’ve been avoiding it like the plague, but I don’t think I can live without saying it any longer.
He averts his eyes for a second, his mouth moving as if he’s trying to figure out what to say. Needing to get this out, I let the words spill from my lips. “I’m sorry I left in the middle of the night and you never heard from me again. If I could take it back, I would. Something…something happened and I still don’t completely understand it. My dad stopped me when I came home that night from our date and told me we were leaving.” I feel the burn of tears, but forge on.
“Mother was already packing what few belongings she was taking. I was informed I needed to gather my things because we were moving to New York. I tried to call you, but it just went to voicemail. When Mother came in my room and saw me waiting to leave you a message, she took my phone and smashed it.
“I was barely able to gather up a few things before I was ushered to a waiting car. The next thing I knew, we were boarding Daddy’s jet for New York. It all happened so fast, it was like a dream. A nightmare, actually. I couldn’t remember your number since my phone was broken and there was something clearly going on between my parents. The tension was so thick between them you could practically see it.”
I take a deep breath, steeling my back as I forge on. “I decided to give it a day or two to calm down before I asked to go back. Even though they had their heart set on me attending Princeton that fall, I was ready to tell them I had enrolled at North Carolina State with you.”
That day comes back to me as if it had happened yesterday. My parents had no clue I wanted to stay local and study art instead of being carted off to Princeton and major in business management and real estate like my dad. Painting was my passion, my dream. It’s all I wanted to do. Well, that and stay with Jensen.
But that was taken from me in the middle of the night.
“What happened?”
“Mother bought me a new phone and refused to allow me to pull my old contacts. I couldn’t remember your number for the life of me, even though I had called or texted it a dozen times a day for a few years. After a few days, I got online and found the number for your mom’s bed and breakfast. Before I could call, she told me you didn’t want to speak to me anymore.” The words are barely audible as I relive the worst time of my life.
“What? Why would she say that?”
I shrug my shoulders, keeping my eyes on the fancy new tile I just had installed in the kitchen. “She said…” I take a deep breath and force myself to say the words. “She said you were using me, to get our money.”
“The fuck?” he bellows, pulling my gaze back to his. His face is a mixture of horror and disbelief.
“I didn’t believe her at first,” I insist, the tears spilling from my eyes like someone turned on the faucet.
He gazes at me from across the room before asking, “At first?”
“Yeah, at first,” I whisper.
“What changed?” he asks, his voice shallow and unsure.
“The letters.”
&n
bsp; “Letters?” he asks, clearly very confused about what letters I’m referring to.
“The ones between you and your father.”
Perplexity is written all over his gorgeous face as he tries to follow, but I don’t understand why. How could he have forgotten about the letters he wrote back and forth with his dad, talking about how he didn’t love me and was in it for sex?
“Butterfly, I’m trying to understand what you’re saying, but I have to be honest. I don’t know anything about any letters. The only letters I wrote were to you and they were all sent back to me in a bundle with a note you didn’t want to hear from me again.”
Now it’s my turn to look confused. “I never got any letters, and I definitely didn’t tell you to leave me alone.”
“I got them all back about two months after you left. When your cell phone was disconnected, I resorted to writing you letters. Your dad gave me your address,” he says, shocking me all over again.
“What? I never received anything!” I insist, trying to figure out how he would have gotten them back if I didn’t even see them.
And then, like a snake slithering up my spine, cold dread settles in.
“What did the note say that I supposedly wrote?” I ask, my eyes glued to his blue ones.
“That you were happy in New York and had already moved on.” His words cut like a knife, the wound left behind fresh and gaping.
I start to cry harder now, my shoulders shaking with realization. “I never wrote that.”
The warm touch of his hand against my cheek startles me. Jensen wipes away my tears with the pads of his thumbs and tilts my head up to look into my eyes. “And there were never any letters between my dad and me, Kate. I was barely speaking to him at that point in my life, let alone talking to him via mail about something as personal as my feelings for you.”
His words make me cry all over again. Years—more than a decade—I spent wondering what I had ever done wrong, why I never saw Jensen for who he was. He had told me he loved me every day, so why would he tell me that and then tell his dad he didn’t? I had been so confused and hurt.