Puppy Love

by Lucy Gilmore

  A gorgeous plant, ivy, but destructive as all hell.

  She did it now with a firm step in his direction, careful of the puppy who lay obediently at their feet. The tugging started in his gut, a churning of desire that worked up to his throat and choked him from the inside. From there, it moved lower, drawing him inexorably forward.

  “No one has ever accused me of exuding sex before,” she said, her voice a low purr. “How am I doing it?”

  “We can start with this ridiculous thing you’re wearing,” he said, since it seemed as good a place to start as any. It also seemed as good a place to touch as any, so he slipped a hand out to grab her about the waist—which, as any man with eyes in his head and blood in his veins would notice, was stark bare. “Where is the rest of your shirt, young lady?”

  She giggled and arched into his touch, allowing his palm to slide down the gently sloping softness of her back. He stopped just above the line of her jeans. “It’s called a crop top, Harrison. All the kids are wearing them these days.”

  He highly doubted it. Whatever seductress of a designer had come up with this shirt obviously had a woman built like Sophie in mind. There wasn’t a whole lot of skin showing between the high waist of her jeans and the tightly fitting black shirt, but what was there was bound by two straps that crossed over her belly button and drew in the narrowest part of her waist.

  He fingered one of those straps now, over and under the fabric, pulling it out just far enough to snap it back into place. Sophie gasped, but she followed this up by tugging his lower lip between her teeth and giving back as good as he gave.

  “If Oscar knew what kinds of things I want to do to you, he’d have me killed,” Harrison muttered.

  “Such a scaredy-cat,” she teased.

  There was no use denying it. He was scared of Oscar. He was scared of Sophie. Hell, he was scared of himself—particularly of how quickly he was casting aside every scruple he’d ever had for a chance at feeling this woman in his arms again.

  “What are some of the things you want to do, by the way?” she asked as she coiled her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. “You should tell me. In explicit detail.”

  He gave up on trying to keep his hands above her waist and tugged the front of her jeans until her pelvis lined up with his. The sweet agony of sensation rocketing through his groin caused him to groan.

  “Nice try,” he said. “The only thing I’m going to do to you is put you in my truck and take you home.”

  She jolted back. “Home?” Her voice was small and her frown intense. “What for? I thought it was going well—the training, the cohabitating.”

  He realized his mistake almost immediately. To him, home meant only one place—the same place it had always been, whether for good or bad or, as was more often the case, terrible. Since Sophie had been staying there, however, he’d found himself seeing it with a more optimistic eye. It was rundown as all hell, yes, and there was no mistaking that it contained memories that should have been exorcised a long time ago, but she could make even a backwoods cave feel like the only place he wanted to be.

  To her, however, home meant Spokane. It meant her mother and sisters. It meant those people who loved her and underestimated her in equal proportions.

  Although how they could go twenty-six years of living with this woman and not see how superior she was to every other goddamn person on the planet, he had no idea.

  “Home,” he repeated more firmly this time. He moved his hands around to her backside, forcing their hips into more perfect alignment. The rounded softness of her ass filled his hands, and he realized that he probably wasn’t going to make it the entire twenty-minute drive home. “But you wanted to show Bubbles around here first, didn’t you?”

  He released her, causing her to blink up at him in some perplexity, but he took her by the hand before she could misunderstand. “I think she should see inside the DNR building, don’t you? Especially my office.”

  “Your office? But—”

  “But isn’t the building empty?” he asked. “Yes, it is. I, however, have a key. We’ll be all alone in there.”

  “Oh,” she said and, with dawning understanding, “oh.”

  “If you don’t like it, you have nothing to blame but that shirt,” he added. “Why can’t you wear sweatpants like a normal person? Have you ever noticed that no matter what you have on, there’s always at least one part of your body on display?”

  She giggled and allowed herself to be pulled across the field, Bubbles trailing happily in their wake. “Do I? How strange.”

  “Not strange,” he grunted. “Torture.”

  The Department of Natural Resources didn’t employ very many full-time employees. It was something he’d often lamented in the past, especially when trying to get any kind of equipment budget passed, but he could only be grateful for it today. Everyone had already gone home for the evening and, given the time of year, weren’t likely to return until morning.

  “I didn’t know you had an office here,” Sophie said as he let them in the front door and flicked on the reception lights. “Poor Oscar only has a tiny room, so I figured space was at a premium.”

  “I should probably warn you that my office is more like a dark hole I’ve claimed as my own,” he said. He still had her hand firmly in his—and had no intention of letting go anytime soon. At her look of surprise, he released a gruff laugh, “I’m the guy they send out to the front lines, Sophie, not some goddamn executive. Between July and October, I’m lucky to sleep in my own bed for more than a week at a time. And the season can last through the end of the year if they loan me out to California, which they almost always do.”

  “I know, but you said—”

  “I lied.”

  “Well, that wasn’t very nice of you. I was hoping for a quickie on your desk. You implied there would be a quickie on your desk.”

  He’d just lied. He’d just admitted that for six months out of the year, he was practically nonexistent. And Sophie’s only disappointment was that she wasn’t going to get tossed over his desk?

  “Oh, there’s not going to be anything quick about what’s about to happen to you,” he promised, and hoisted her over his shoulder.

  Bubbles took instant exception to this action with a bark of protest, but Harrison wasn’t about to unload such a delightful burden. Sophie’s upper half hung over his back, her ass in the air and right on level with his head. She kicked ineffectively at him, laughing and protesting to be put down, but Harrison only tightened his hold.

  “I’m getting really tired of the two of you telling me what to do,” he said. He tried to keep his voice authoritative and stern, but it was impossible. He’d never felt less authoritative or stern in his life. He lowered himself—and Sophie—just enough to scoop Bubbles into his arms and carried the pair of them to the far end of the hall. “For the next hour, you’re both going to do exactly as I say.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said with a laugh that made it impossible for him to buy her obedience. She proved it two seconds later when he set her down and tugged at a cord dangling from the ceiling. A pair of seldom-used stairs floated down, beckoning the pair of them into an open panel above their heads. “Wait—are you about to lure me into an unused attic where no one can hear me scream? I should probably warn you…I’ve read that horror story. I know how it ends.”

  “It is pretty dark up there,” he admitted, suddenly feeling unsure. “And dusty. And not…glamorous.”

  “Hey.” Her hand touched his arm. “You don’t have to do that. What is it? Some kind of storage?”

  He nodded, more grateful than he could say that she was making this easy on him. She always did that—pushed when he needed it, stopped pushing when he needed it more. “It’s where they keep a lot of the out-of-date equipment that the state refuses to get rid of.”

  She smiled. “That sounds promising. Hefty hoses and fire poles and all that.”

  “It’s not that kind of equipment. It’s mostly fil
ing cabinets.”

  The mention of filing cabinets and dust should have had Sophie running for the hills—and taking Bubbles with her—but she seemed to sense that there was more to that upstairs hole than he was letting on. “I’d like to see it. May I?”

  He nodded and watched as she swung a leg onto the bottom step and fearlessly made her way up the rickety contraption. It creaked and groaned a protest, but that didn’t seem to stop her. Harrison had a nice view of her ass as she neared the top, and then a quick glimpse of her ankles before she disappeared altogether.

  She didn’t appear to be making any sounds of disgust, so he grabbed Bubbles and followed her up the steps. They creaked in even greater protest to his weight, but he’d been coming here for close on sixteen years now. They’d always held him before.

  He paused on the landing to allow his eyes a moment to adjust. A skylight provided a beam of sunshine in one corner, highlighting dusty motes that danced in the air, but other than that, there was no lighting up here. No electricity, no running water, no real walls, even. Bare studs and rough floorboards were all that had been done to make this space usable.

  “You have a bed up here,” Sophie said without looking over at him.

  He grunted. It wasn’t a bed so much as an old mattress laid in one corner and heaped with blankets, but he’d slept in it enough for it to count.

  She drew closer to the sunlit corner, her head tilted at a curious angle as she took in the rest. “You have books. And a flashlight. And snacks.”

  He grunted again, but it was more of a chuckle this time. Sophie didn’t sound the least appalled at how pathetic that list sounded for a grown-ass man of thirty. She cast a look back at him over her shoulder. “Why, Harrison Parks. Is this your secret clubhouse?”

  He set Bubbles on the ground and gave her permission to sniff out the area. “I know. It’s pretty sad, right?”

  Her eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? I always wanted a secret clubhouse. My dad built a playhouse one year and put it up in the backyard, but there was nothing secret about it. Either Lila or Dawn or, most of the time, one of Dawn’s boyfriends, was holed up inside. God, they used to smoke so much pot in there.”

  Harrison’s chuckle was impossible to subdue that time. “Sounds a lot more exciting than this place.”

  She returned her attention to the small bookcase that contained most of his reading materials. “What is it, exactly?”

  Even though she couldn’t see him, he shrugged. There was something comforting in making that gesture, as if he was robbing this place of its significance. “At first? A place to crash. I started working here when I was really young, just fourteen, so having a bed that wasn’t under my dad’s roof was everything to me. I’d sleep here whenever we had a fight. Which, to be honest, was pretty much every day.”

  As usual, Sophie cut straight to the heart of the matter. “Do you still use it?”

  He shrugged again, but it was less comforting this time. “Yeah. It’s stupid, but I like it. There aren’t…” He paused. As usual, finding the right words to express himself was a challenge. This is where he’d usually give up and close off, finding it easier to retreat than to keep struggling. It still would be easier, but he wanted to try. Sophie deserved nothing less. “I don’t have many places that are just mine.”

  She nodded her understanding. Now that she’d lived inside his house, she knew. For decades, it had been a cold place, a dead place, a place no rational person would choose to be.

  Until you walked through the door.

  “Oscar gave me this place as a kind of present,” Harrison said, his voice thick. “He knew I needed to get away and clear my head sometimes, so he gave me a key to the building and made sure everyone knows this place is off-limits.”

  She whirled, her lips parted in surprise. “You mean to tell me that no one else has been up here in sixteen years?”

  He nodded.

  “Yet you brought me?”

  He nodded again.

  “But…” Her eyes remained wide, a question burning inside them. It would have been easy to wave that question away—to pull her into his arms and distract her with how comfortable and warm that mattress could be—but she needed to hear this. She needed to know.

  “You’ve been trying to push past my walls since the day you met me,” he said and extended his arms wide. “Well, this is what I’ve been hiding. It’s a little stark and a lot underwhelming, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  Sophie didn’t say a word. Disappointment began to take shape in the back of his throat, but she took a step forward and placed a hand on his cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  And that was all.

  It was exactly what he needed to hear. Not pity and not enthusiasm—not even an awkward change of subject. Just gratitude.

  His own gratitude took the form of a kiss. Given the imposed chastity of the past week, it would have been so easy for that kiss to become frantic and desperate, for his need to have this woman in his arms pushing aside all other considerations.

  But he didn’t feel frantic. He didn’t feel desperate. He just felt whole.

  She responded to the kiss by melting into him. Her body was pliable and warm, her mouth a soft place for him to land. He didn’t know what to do with such a gift—with the offering she gave him every time she opened up and let him in—but she did.

  “And here I thought you were just bringing me up here to ravish me,” she said, smiling up at him. The upturn of her lips filled his heart, the happiness in her eyes impossible to ignore.

  Laughter. That was the one thing this place needed, what it had been missing all those years.

  It was what had been missing from his heart too.

  “I guess that’s what I get for jumping to conclusions,” she added. “Your way is a lot better.”

  He answered her laugh with one of his own. Almost immediately, the attic began to feel airier, lighter. More like home. “Ravishing you can still be on the menu, if you want,” he said. “In fact, there’s nothing I’d like to do more.”

  “Yes, please.”

  It was all the invitation he needed. The moment was right to put the mattress to good use, but Bubbles had taken up a patient perch right in the middle. Harrison didn’t have the heart to move her, nor did it seem all that important—not when Sophie was standing right in front of him.

  He sank to his knees and grabbed her by the hips. Sophie’s surprised gasp lasted only a second before it transformed into an enthusiastic murmur of appreciation.

  “I’m going to need you to remove these jeans,” he said, his voice rough with desire. “Ravishing requires nothing less.”

  She eyed him with a kind of laughing disbelief, but she obeyed him all the same. “I thought it was the shirt you took exception to,” she said as she unbuttoned her jeans and began sliding them down over her hips. Her underwear had taken a drastic turn for the scandalous since their camping trip, today’s offering some kind of red lace contraption it looked like he could tear with his teeth.

  He decided, right then and there, to do just that—especially once Sophie took her time unzipping her little black ankle boots and tossing them to the floor.

  “I hope you aren’t too attached to these panties,” he warned.

  “Well, actually, I—”

  The rest of her sentence was lost in her squeal of delight as he pulled her forward using both his hands and his teeth—his hands cupping the sweet curves of her ass, his teeth caught on the upper band of the lace panties.

  Then he tugged. Hard.

  The sound of his teeth ripping through delicate fabric was oddly satisfying, especially when it was followed by Sophie’s low moan. Her hands dropped to his head, those perfect fingernails scraping against his scalp as she threaded her fingers through the strands. A tingling sensation worked down his spine, not stopping until the rest of his body quivered alongside it.

  “This is Chantilly lace, I’ll have you know,” she said as he managed a particularly
good tear. One more tug, and he’d have reached the gusset—not to mention the hot apex of her thighs. “From La Perla.”

  “I don’t know what any of those words mean, and I sure as hell don’t care right now.”

  Sophie laughed and tightened her hold on his hair. “You silver-tongued devil, you.”

  He tugged one last time. “You have no idea.”

  He made quick work of the tattered remnants of her panties, sliding them down her naked thighs and tossing them to the ground below. Sophie was a glory to behold from any angle, but there was something about this one that set him over the edge. Her legs were long and impossibly smooth. They met in a perfect V of dark curls, already damp with desire, which was where he focused his attention now.

  His tongue might not be silver tipped when it came to talking about his feelings, but he didn’t need it to be. Not when he was about to taste her.

  Running his hands up either side of her right leg, he began his siege there. A soft kiss on the skin above her knee elicited a gasp—a sound that intensified as he worked his way up, pressing tongue and teeth against the suppleness of her upper thigh. She showed a tendency to wriggle, a thing he had to combat by holding her more firmly in place and parting her legs to give himself better access.

  “Cold,” she said with a gasp as he opened her legs and held her there, blowing a long, slow breath against her damp heat. “I can feel everything when you do that.”

  Yes. She needed to feel everything—not just in a physical sense, but in every other possible meaning of the word. Feel me on my knees before you. Feel me tasting every part of you. Feel me begging you to extend this moment into infinity.

  “Good,” he said and lifted her leg even more. With one swift movement, he had her thigh hitched over his shoulder. Most of her weight shifted over to him, a feeling he gloried in much more than he probably should have. “Now hold still, will you? I want to do this right.”

  “You can’t possibly hold me—” she began, but he could and he did.

  With one hand pressed flat against her bare belly, he anchored her in place. He also anchored himself to her with a kiss pressed at the juncture of her thighs. One taste, one lick, one swirl of his tongue against her clit, and all arguments came to an end.