It Began with a Crush (The Cherry Sisters)

by Darcy, Lilian

  Why couldn’t she think of something to talk about? They’d covered so much ground today. She already felt as if she knew him so much better.

  Maybe that was why. The things he’d shared weren’t exactly the basis for casual conversation. The silence between them was thick with their shared awareness of how much she knew. Silence was much harder than words.

  Think of something, Mary Jane! Don’t make this worse by having him think he’s done the wrong thing in talking. Find a way.

  Picking up the milk-filled mugs to put them in the microwave to heat, she looked up at him, and that was a mistake. A big one. All the helplessness showed in her eyes, she knew it, and there was something in his eyes, too. Maybe exactly the same thing.

  Helplessness.

  Need.

  Connection.

  It just happened. One moment everything was fine, she was about to put the mugs of milk into the microwave, and the next moment the mugs were back on the countertop and she and Joe had simply come together, folded into each other, softened and melted and fused, the fabric of their clothing the only thing keeping them from losing all boundaries between their two bodies.

  It went from zero to sixty so fast. One light, questing touch from his lips, and then full-on—arms wrapped around each other, her hair streaked against his face, her mouth as eager and giving as his, her breath rapidly quickening.

  He kissed the way she knew he would. Like a dream. Slow and soft and intent, as if her mouth was the only thing he knew in the world. Hungry, as if he hadn’t kissed a woman in years. Expert, as if once upon a time he’d trained for this and aced the test.

  She knew all about that—the girls in high school and since, the practiced lines—and right now she didn’t care. Didn’t think she could ever care. That was all in the past, and if he was still that guy, then she was still the foolish woman who’d waited years for Alex to finally answer her blunt challenge and turn her down.

  And she knew she wasn’t that woman anymore.

  Right now, she was a woman who wanted this and nothing more. Just a steaming, sizzling, fabulous kiss with a gorgeous man, and she would think about all the rest later.

  Or not.

  Maybe she’d never think about it. Maybe she wouldn’t have to. Who cared?

  Kissing Joe Capelli, nothing else seemed to matter. It was a moment out of time, frozen, endless, wondrous. It wasn’t about her high school mix of crush and loathing, although that had been powerful enough. It wasn’t about what he’d told her about the girls and his battle for their safety, although her heart still ached for him over all of that.

  The only thing that mattered was that she wanted it, and he did, too, and it felt good.

  She tightened her arms around him and felt the hot, hard weight of his groin against her body. He tried to ease it away, embarrassed maybe, but she wouldn’t let him, and cupped her hands against his butt to keep him in place. He groaned. She muffled the groan with her mouth and felt the vibration of it in his chest, that dark baritone voice of his like the rumble of a warm engine on a dark summer night.

  He touched her, sliding his hands down to her hips and holding them lightly, then moving them up until he reached the weight of the undersides of her breasts, where he seemed to want to stop, nudging a little, caressing, feeling the heaviness and liking it, she thought.

  And then, when she wasn’t remotely prepared for it and didn’t know what had triggered it or what had changed, he stopped kissing her and tore his beautiful mouth away, to whisper, “I’m so sorry.” He tried to let her go.

  “Don’t be. Why?”

  “I didn’t want to do this. I told myself I wouldn’t.”

  “Told yourself. So you were thinking about it?”

  “Yes.” The admission seemed to drag itself out of him with incredible weight.

  “That’s okay. So was I. I want it.” She couldn’t find fancy words, just the truth.

  “You’re too nice.” Again, he tried to pull away.

  She wasn’t having that. “What if I don’t want to be nice?” She levered him against her body again, using her hands to pull that tight butt toward her and squash herself into his hardness.

  He said, shaky and distracted—Good, she wanted him distracted!—“You don’t have much choice about being nice. You just are.”

  She traced a fingertip over the fine line where his full top lip met his slightly beard-roughened face, wondering where this was coming from in her. He chased the fingertip with his mouth and she dropped her hand to cup his jaw instead. Mmm, it felt good. She’d gone crazy, and it seemed as if she’d been waiting her whole life to do that. He’d started it, but she’d more than caught up, and she wasn’t going to let him tell her this wasn’t good for her.

  It was.

  “Is that why you’re doing this?” she murmured, inches from his mouth, letting her breath whisper against his skin. “Because I’m nice.”

  “No,” he said bluntly. “I’m doing it because you’re hot. Right now, you seem like the hottest woman I’ve ever seen. Not sure where you put all the heat, because normally it doesn’t show, but right now…”

  “Right now, stop talking. Please?”

  He muttered something under his breath and mashed his mouth gloriously against hers once more. She laughed, and he wanted to know why, whispering the question into her mouth.

  She couldn’t tell him.

  Didn’t really know.

  Just because this felt good, and delicious, and because for once she wasn’t thinking of complications and problems, second-guessing her own reactions or his. It just felt so, so good, and wasn’t that rare, and a miracle, and something to laugh about in a state of beautiful glee?

  “I’m laughing because I’m happy about this,” she finally decided out loud.

  “About me kissing you.”

  “Yes. Simple, really.”

  “Simple is nice. Strange…”

  “Because we haven’t had it in so long, either of us. That’s why it’s strange.”

  “You’re right.” This time, he was the one laughing. “You’re so right!”

  In that joyous spirit, he kissed her some more.

  Until he thought of something, minutes later. “Those girls have been gone too long. They should have been dressed ages ago.” This time, there was nothing halfhearted in the way he pulled back. “I need to find out what they’re up to. Shoot!” He looked Mary Jane up and down, a smoking hot, intimate look that said he was surprised and pleased and seeing her in a whole new light.

  She blushed at that thought. She was seeing herself in a whole new light, too.

  But then he disappeared from the kitchen and reality began to kick in. She followed him in the direction of the bathroom, and he was a few strides away from turning in through the open doorway when they both heard a crash and the frightened exclamations and frantic recriminations of two seven-year-old girls.

  “You let it go!”

  “You were holding it!”

  “No, I wasn’t! I was giving it to you!”

  There was quite a scene awaiting Joe and Mary Jane. Once dressed, Holly and Maddie had apparently decided to explore the bathroom cabinets and play with Mary Jane’s makeup and skin-care creams, which were sitting in piles and rows all over the floor. She was quite fond of her skin-care creams. That crash had been the very most expensive one she had, housed in a gorgeous frosted glass container with an ornate embossed lid, falling onto the tiles with predictable results.

  The girls stood frozen and horrified in the middle of the mess, their faces daubed with little experiments in color and texture and scent.

  Joe was—

  Joe was more horrified than he needed to be. Almost at once, Mary Jane stopped minding about the mess and breakage and started minding about his reaction far more.

  “Girls… Ah hell, girls… Shoot! Jeesh. What have you been doing? Could you not hold it together just a few minutes longer?” He pressed the heels of his hands against the sides of his hea
d, and his voice was anguished. “Mary Jane, I can’t even start with the apologies.”

  “I crashed your car yesterday,” she reminded him, for the second time that day.

  “Yeah, but… No. Hell. We talked before, remember? This scares me. Girls, we’re going to clean this up right now. And your faces. We’re going to stay here until it’s perfect. And you’re going to pay for the broken jar and any mess in the makeup by doing chores, and your wages are going to be pretty low, I’m telling you! What were you doing?”

  “We didn’t mean to drop it.”

  “Yeah, but you shouldn’t have been touching it in the first place. You shouldn’t have been touching any of this. Opening the jars. Putting lipstick on. You shouldn’t even have opened the cabinet. What have we said? Lots of times? About touching other people’s stuff? You were so good today at Penelope’s. Do we have to cancel pony camp? Are you going to do this kind of thing there?”

  “No!”

  “No, Daddy!”

  Their voices came in a tangle of shared sentences and alternating pleas.

  “Don’t cancel pony camp!”

  “Please don’t cancel pony camp!”

  “We just wanted to look.”

  “We were appreciating it.”

  “We weren’t trying to mess with it.”

  “And then we thought Mary Jane wouldn’t mind if we had a little try.”

  “Of the lipstick and the cream.”

  “She has such pretty bottles and jars and stuff.”

  “Because we don’t have a mom to let us play with hers.”

  “Amber said she plays with her mom’s, and it sounds so fun.”

  “And then we…”

  “…kind of forgot…”

  “…that they weren’t ours.”

  “And that Mary Jane hadn’t said that we could touch.”

  He turned to Mary Jane, his face a mask of anguish that seemed too much. “Can you go, while we clean up? Can you trust me to supervise this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go relax, or whatever you need to do. I’m not taking your time over this. I shouldn’t have—” He cut himself off, and she knew what he was thinking about.

  He shouldn’t have kissed her.

  She didn’t agree. She most definitely thought that he should have kissed her. Kissed her longer. Made a plan for kissing her again.

  “I should have kept better track of how long they’d been gone,” he finished.

  “If you’re going to play that game,” she told him, “so should I.”

  “You don’t know them like I do.”

  “They’re just ki—”

  “No. Don’t let them off the hook. Go. The mugs are still sitting there on the bench. Pour the milk back into the container. They’re not getting those hot chocolates now!”

  “Really, they can—”

  “No. There have to be consequences.”

  He was their dad, and he was going to stay firm, Mary Jane could see. She went away, reluctantly—but what else could she do? She had an insight into his fears, now, after everything he’d told her today about their mother’s poor impulse control and compulsively self-destructive behavior. Those words about not having a mom must have torn his heart in pieces.

  There was a long way to travel between dropping a jar of “borrowed” skin cream at the age of seven and stealing money for drugs at the age of thirty-one, but she could understand why Joe feared his girls making that journey, and why he was tough on them sometimes because of it. Was he right to think that firm parenting now would help keep them on the right course?

  Beyond the brief episode of naughtiness, they were such gorgeous girls, she’d lost her heart to them already…and to their father. She didn’t want to see them punished, but she knew that was probably too soft, too sentimental. It seemed so much easier to let them off the hook, and Joe wasn’t about the easy road in the parenting department, he’d been doing it tough for a while, and he wasn’t dropping that ball.

  She understood.

  And she wanted to make it better for all three of them anyhow.

  Twenty minutes passed before Joe and the girls appeared again. Mary Jane had put the milk and chocolate powder and marshmallows away, and was pretending to sit on the couch reading a book, because he’d told her to “relax” so she felt that she should.

  “All done,” he announced. “The girls have something to say.”

  They don’t have to.

  But she didn’t say it, just nodded as she stood up and faced them formally, because once again she understood what Joe was trying to do.

  They were formal about it, also. “We’re very sorry we messed with your stuff,” they said together. “We won’t ever do it again, and we’ll pay for the cream.”

  “Thank you for such a nice apology,” she told them.

  “Go wait for me in the car, okay?” Joe said, and they picked up their damp-looking backpacks and went out of the living room and down the stairs. After they were out of earshot, he asked, “How much for the skin cream?”

  She didn’t dare tell him. It was a top-of-the-range product, an indulgence on her part, and was priced to match. “Just make it twenty dollars.”

  “Come on!”

  “The jar wasn’t full.”

  “Even I, as a mere male, know it would have cost more than that, if it had been three-quarters empty. Which it wasn’t. And there was the lipstick and other stuff they used.”

  “Joe, I don’t want them slaving away to replace it. I know it’s right that they should compensate in some way for the breakage, but they shouldn’t have to pay for my frivolity in treating myself to that brand.”

  “Twenty dollars each. And I’ll pay them a dollar each every time they wash dishes or vacuum.”

  She nodded, because if they kept arguing about it, she’d end up telling him what it really cost and he’d probably collapse on the floor.

  He did one of those mutters under his breath that said he was close to the end of his rope, and she realized his life must have been like this for years, a continuous procession from minor incident to major disaster and back again, none of it his fault, despite what he thought, despite that damning description he’d given her, filled with self-disgust—“two beautiful people trying to get famous.”

  He shifted his weight, as if trying to make up his mind about something, or find the words for something, without having much success. He seemed to do the weight-shifting thing a lot, as if he was restless every time he wasn’t doing productive work, and the impatient movement seemed like a testament to his crammed and disciplined schedule.

  “Do you need to go?” she asked him, wanting to smooth the way for him. Again. It was starting to become a habit. “The girls are in the car…”

  “Probably should. And they’d just better be in the car!”

  “They will be.”

  “They will, yes. This time. Because they’ve just been yelled at. They wouldn’t dare go off exploring. Still, yes, I need to get going.”

  But he didn’t move. And they were both thinking about that kiss, she knew. The memory of it hung thick in the air between them, making her pulses beat faster and her breathing grow shallower. When she looked at him, all she could focus on was his mouth, but that was bad…foolish…so she kept dragging her gaze away and didn’t know where to look instead.

  He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move to leave, either, and the seconds stretched. “Uh, Mary Jane… Yeah.” He lifted his hand to the back of his head, a gesture that told her he was still lost for words.

  So apparently it was up to her to raise the subject. “What was that all about just now, Joe?” she said very carefully. “I’m sorry. I have to ask. I mean, I assume that’s why you’re still here. We…didn’t really finish.”

  He gave her a fleeting look, too powerful considering the fraction of a second it lasted. It felt as if he could see right into her, and as if he wanted to. “I don’t know what it was about. The wrong things, prob
ably.”

  “Why?”

  “Just happened, didn’t it?”

  “I mean, why were they the wrong things?”

  “Two people wondering where their lives went, grabbing onto something because it felt good.”

  What?

  Her rebellion was instant. “No! I’m not taking that lying down, Joe! I don’t believe it for a second! Is that us? Is that all we are? All it was?” He’d shocked her with the bluntness of the words, and she knew he’d done it on purpose.

  To distance them both from something that left him uncomfortable, something he didn’t want. Or didn’t want to want? Which?

  “No, it’s not all. Of course it’s not.” The words were filled with meaning. “There is a heck of a lot more.”

  “Good!”

  He gave her one last suffering look. “But I don’t think I can let it be any of those other things.”

  Chapter Eight

  He left.

  She wanted so much to hold him in place with the right words or the right action, but nothing came, and in the end she just watched him turn around and walk out of the room with that suffering look still on his face.

  She listened to his footsteps all the way down the stairs, heard the office door close behind him, then the car door, then the car engine, and finally its fade into silence.

  It hadn’t been much more than twenty-four hours since she’d taken her car into Capelli Auto and seen that pair of male legs sticking out from under a vehicle, yet she felt as if her heart had covered about a thousand miles.

  A thousand miles of emotional journey.

  A thousand miles of life.

  She hadn’t really loathed him in high school. She’d had a massive crush that she hadn’t admitted even to herself. Like every other girl, she’d thought he was gorgeous and cool, and her teenage hormones had been held hostage to his raw male appeal despite everything her good sense had insisted on.

  But she wasn’t in high school anymore. She was a grown woman.

  No, worse, she was a woman staring down the onset of middle age, without any of the satisfactions in her life that she’d once thought middle age would bring. What had Joe said just now?