A Time to Fall (Love by the Seasons Book 1)

by Jess Vonn

  Eventually he pulled his thumb away, but before she could process the loss, his lips replaced it, opening her, tasting her, hungry for the warmth and lingering sweetness her mouth could offer.

  “More,” was all she could say. More of his body. His heat. More of his mouth. More of the sinful chocolate confection the two of them had whipped up with their own hands.

  He leaned back, grinning, as if there were no other word he’d rather hear fall from her lips. He reached again for the cake stand, pulling it closer to them. Smiling at the sticky, wicked game he started, she stretched out a finger, shaking slightly from the pleasure flooding her veins, and scooped it through the velvety cream. She began reaching it up to his perfect lips, but he surprised her by shaking his head no.

  Her eyes narrowed in confusion, but she watched, transfixed, as he grabbed her hand and guided the finger to her own bare breast, swiping a sweet, chocolate peak onto her tightened nipple.

  And then his mouth lowered, a groan escaping his lips as he tasted her cream-covered bud, as his tongue pressed firm and hot up the inner slope of her breast, and the sensations bombarded her—skin and heat and pressure and sweat and chocolate and all that was right in the world. She lost track of time, of place and of any lingering doubts that she wasn’t exactly where she was supposed to be.

  She returned the favor, feeding him cream from her fingers, sucking it from the hard plain of his stomach. She’d never look at frosting the same way. Or chocolate. Or kitchen tables. Or sex. Or anything. She never thought she’d be led so consensually to her demise. This man would obliterate her, but she’d volunteered for it and would do it again in a heartbeat.

  The center of her sex throbbed harder, making her feel like she would burst.

  Cal leaned back, and she shivered from the sudden lack of connection to his strong warmth.

  “Are you wet for me, Briggs?” he asked, his green eyes ablaze with intensity.

  “God, yes.”

  “Are you thinking of what you wish I’d do about it?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she purred in agreement, her hands grasping around him to cup his impossibly muscular ass. That ass would be her downfall.

  He rubbed his hands along her neck and breasts.

  “Are you thinking of what you want to do to me?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Then I’m going to send you home.”

  “What?” She cried desperately as her stomach sank. She had too much hard evidence between her legs to suggest that he wasn’t just as ready to keep going as she was. “Why are you such a mean person?”

  Once more, he met her pout with a grin. He reached down and grabbed her lacy bra from where it sat on the floor and handed it to her. She laced her arms through and after a bit of anatomical jostling that appeared to captivate Cal, she managed to attach the hook in the back and get everything back in place.

  “I do have a homework assignment for you, though,” he said.

  Now that peaked her curiosity. He placed her shirt back over her head. His hands brushed across her shoulders, along her breasts, smoothing everything back into place.

  Well, everything but her tortured libido, the bastard.

  “Homework?”

  He walked to the other side of the kitchen and Winnie couldn’t help but admire the sheer sex appeal of the man, walking around his gorgeous kitchen in a perfectly fitted pair of jeans and nothing else. Muscles all through his arms and back flexed as he reached up to grab a Pyrex dish and lid from a high shelf and a cake cutter from the drawer below.

  He walked back to Winnie, who’d scooted herself off the table and was slowly regaining her land legs. He rotated the cake plate to the side of the confection that hadn’t been destroyed in their seduction and he cut off a massive slab, sliding it into the glass container and sealing it up with the round red rubber lid. He grabbed the handwritten recipe card, and placed it on top of the container for her to keep, pushing it toward her.

  “For you.”

  “My homework is eating cake? You may be my favorite teacher ever.” And wasn’t that more of a truth than she wanted to consider… One night of fairly chaste foreplay with Cal Spencer had already rocked her sexual world.

  “That’s part of it. The other part though…” he started, cupping her face with his hands and pulling her in for one last deep kiss—one final sweep of warmth and sweetness that plucked her deepest sensual strings. Her free hand clutched at the strong heat of his back while it was still in reach. His voice grew low and raspy. “I want you to go home, crawl into bed, and touch yourself thinking of me. I want my name on your lips when you come. Can you do that for me?”

  Winnie’s heart thumped in her chest and her swollen sex ached with need but she nodded with a small smile. She’d never been the best student, but something told her she could ace the hell out of this assignment. She might even secure the title of teacher’s pet.

  Chapter 15

  On Sunday afternoon, Cal found himself exactly where he had been two weeks earlier: trying to run Winnie Briggs out of his system.

  His feet pounded the pavement in an especially strenuous pace, crushing the crisp leaves that the afternoon winds had blown from the trees. But he wasn’t heading toward his mom’s house like usual, because that would mean running toward Winnie, too.

  After last night, he needed some space. Not because she presented a problem. Hell, to be honest, it was because she didn’t. Instead, she presented the kind of temptation that filled Cal with anxiety. He felt the urge to physically escape whatever powerful hold the woman seemed to have over him.

  Geographic distance didn’t seem to be helping much, though. Despite his labored breathing and screaming muscles, his double-crossing mind happily floated back to the night before, to memories of cake and cream and the soft heat of Winnie’s divine breasts under his tongue. Memories of the warm suction of her mouth that foreshadowed the deep pleasures her body could offer.

  Jesus, he hadn’t restricted himself to such heavy petting since high school, yet somehow, with that woman, it had turned him on beyond measure. He wasn’t accustomed to waiting for what he wanted, and doing so heightened the hell out of every minute.

  After Winnie left last night, Cal had done a little homework of his own, needing to take his pleasure from his own hand. As he’d stroked himself, it was only Winnie his mind could imagine. Her plush lips moaning. The feel of her tongue on his fingers. Her eyes flashing with pleasure. Her hungry hands. The taste of chocolate on her skin.

  The orgasm that ripped violently through him had left him shaking with its intensity. Frankly the power of what they were conjuring scared the hell out of him.

  He needed space from her energy—from that damned pull she seemed to have on him, and punishing his body for its fixation on her on this run seemed like the best solution. So cloudy was his own mind, however, that he didn’t notice the actual clouds gathering above him. A few fat sprinkles of rain on his face and arms shook him from his daydreams and he realized a downpour was imminent.

  Shit.

  He’d run at least four miles from home by now, so he braced himself for complete saturation. Except that he suddenly realized where he actually was—less than two blocks from Carter’s place.

  He sprinted the remaining distance in the quickening rain, taking shelteron Carter’s porch before the worst of the downpour began. Carter must have heard him sprint up the steps, because the front door swung wide open.

  “Well, look what the storm washed up,” Carter said with a laugh, opening the door to let his soggy friend step in and get relief from the downpour.

  “Happen to have a spare towel?” Cal asked as rain dripped off his hair and lashes onto his cheeks. Carter dashed to the hallway closet and grabbed a hand towel to toss to his friend.

  “Looks like it should blow over soon enough, anyway,” Carter offered while Cal dried off, glancing out the front door before closing it behind them. Having grown up in the Midwest, both men were accustomed to the sweep
ing thunderstorms that could start and stop in less time than it took to pop up a bowl of popcorn. “Come in. I’ll get you something to drink.”

  “Thanks, man,” Cal said, scanning the home that his friend had lived in since moving back to town and joining the Bloomsburo police force seven years earlier. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  Cal noticed the model car kit in progress on the kitchen table, and he had to smile. Carter had been tinkering with those kits for as long as Cal could remember, though he could attest that Carter’s skills had improved greatly from those early attempts back in elementary school. Today he was damn near professional at it. Cal had always lacked the patience, not to mention the fine motor skills, to join in his friend’s hobby.

  He glanced around Carter’s house, taking in the familiar-yet-unfamiliar space. There had been a time when Cal wiled away hours here, but that was before. Before Carter had lost everything. Before fucking Wyatt had twisted all of their worlds into something ugly and broken.

  He tried not to notice the feminine touches that still lingered in every room of the house. He tried not to think of the room upstairs that was supposed to be the nursery.

  Cal wasn’t proud, and he knew it didn’t make him a great friend, but only a freak rainstorm four miles into a run could get him back inside Carter’s house. There were too many ghosts here, even if those ghosts were probably why Carter himself chose to stay.

  But here he was. And for better or for worse, the shit-eating look on his friend’s face shook Cal from his depressing train of thought.

  “So,” Carter started vaguely, and Cal’s brain caught up. The last time he’d seen Carter had been at the Guiding Star meeting, sitting next to Winnie and flirting openly with her just to piss him off.

  “So,” Cal countered, refusing to give an inch.

  “How’s Winnie?”

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” Cal asked, his temper flaring much faster than usual. Other than his mother, there was no one who could see through Cal’s bullshit quite as quickly or as thoroughly as his oldest friend. It never failed to piss Cal off, given his preference for opacity.

  “It’s an honest question. I saw the glares you were shooting me at the meeting on Thursday. I’m not an idiot.”

  Cal scoffed.

  “If you want to pretend there’s nothing between you and Winnie, then fine, I’ll pretend, too.”

  Cal ruffled his hand through his wet hair. “Jesus, Carter. I don’t know.”

  Carter stood quietly, waiting for his friend to elaborate.

  “There’s a thing,” Cal begrudgingly relented.

  “A thing?”

  “Yes. We…well, we’re feeling things out.”

  “Literally?”

  Cal glared at Carter, but his non-answer was as good as a confirmation and only made his friend’s grin grow that much wider.

  “No shit,” Carter said, his tone coming off as partly shocked, partly impressed.

  “It’s nothing I planned. It’s the opposite of what I planned,” Cal confessed. “I just… well, I couldn’t help myself. And she’s happy to participate.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  “The problem? Only that we’re professional associates. That my meddling mother is her landlady. That…” He trailed off, lost in his thoughts.

  “What?”

  Cal sighed deeply. “It’s just… it’s stronger than usual, my attraction to her. Not just physically, either. It’s not good. I shouldn’t have started this.”

  Carter assessed him in that haughty way he had. Granted, the man had survived an unfathomable personal loss, but Cal didn’t appreciate the sense of moral authority he came out the other side with. It was as if Carter’s own experience with loss and grief gave him the right to issue out carpe-diem style life advice to everyone in his midst.

  “Have you ever wondered, just once in your life, what would happen if you could get your head out of your own ass?” Carter asked.

  Cal stood up from his stool, testosterone surging defensively through his veins.

  “Carter—” he started before his friend cut him off. If anyone understood Cal’s legacy, understood just what a selfish bastard Cal’s father had been, it should be Carter.

  “No, man, I’m serious,” his typically cool-headed friend shouted. “You’re so used to playing the victim, I’m not sure you’d recognize happiness if it walked up and slapped you across the face. Winnie’s a hell of a catch. She’s adorable. Funny. Smart. Professional. And I’m just sitting here wondering why you’re wracking your brain to find every possible reason not to give her a chance.”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “It is, Cal,” his friend countered, “and don’t tell me it isn’t, because I know you better than you know yourself.”

  Cal scowled.

  “You ever consider actually giving someone a chance? If anyone ever deserved a fair shake it’s Winnie.”

  “I know she does, damn it. She has nothing to do with it. It’s me.”

  You couldn’t grow up with a father like Cal’s, with the memories of his spectacularly selfish failures as a husband and a dad, and not decide then and there to keep your distance from sweet and lovely women like Winnie Briggs. He would stay single forever before he’d accept that fate.

  Carter shook his head.

  “You just keep telling yourself that, man.”

  Cal began his way to the door, feeling recuperated, resentful, full of testosterone and more than ready to get out of this space.

  “Looks like the storm has passed.”

  “Cal—” Carter called out after him, but he was already out the door. He ignored his friend. He ignored his pleading eyes, and his damned frustrating rationality. He ignored his heightened perspective on what it was to have loved and lost.

  “Thanks for the water, man,” he yelled behind him on the way out the door.

  And just like that, Carter joined Winnie on the list of people Cal was trying to run out of his brain.

  ~-~-~-~-~-~-

  “So, where is Corey again?” Winnie asked about Evie’s husband, pulling a warm slice of pizza out of one of the two boxes she brought to her friend’s house for dinner Sunday evening.

  Before Evie could answer, a tiny set of footsteps pattering through the dining room toward where the women sat at the kitchen counter.

  “I want to be with Winnie!” Ella, Evie’s five-year-old daughter, cried, her special blankie trailing behind her as she ran straight into Winnie's embrace. They’d only met a few times, but Ella was already deeply enchanted with Winnie, and the feeling was mutual. Winnie knew that the little girl’s fieriness made Evie’s life hard now, but she also knew it would serve her well down the road.

  Winnie gave her a squeeze, taking in her wild, curly blonde hair and her Strawberry Shortcake dress. She was like a little Princess Merida in the flesh.

  “Ella, you’re supposed to be having a picnic with the boys,” Evie sighed, glancing across the house to the family room where a blanket was spread on the floor and her two-year-old twins were destroying their respective slices of pizza in front of the TV. Evie had already confessed to Winnie that the boys skipped their nap today, meaning they were even touchier, and she even more exhausted, than normal. (Hence why Winnie offered to show up with pizza in hand.)

  “Are you two having a girl’s night?” Ella asked, her lips turning into a well-rehearsed pout as she spied the chocolate on the coffee table. Winnie couldn’t engage with Ella without remembering her own little brother. Born into the family as a complete surprise when she was 9, Johnny had been like her very own baby doll.

  “Maybe,” Winnie offered.

  “Well, I’m a girl!” she offered, her hands shooting dramatically onto her hips.

  “You’re a little girl. This girl’s night is only for big girls.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. How about if I come and watch ten minutes of your show, only i
f you promise that after that you’ll stay put and help watch your little brothers?” Winnie asked.

  “Okay!” she cried, delightedly sprinting back to the family room.

  When Winnie returned ten minutes later, she was glad to see Evie halfway through her first glass of wine and enjoying the dinner she didn’t have to cook.

  “You’re amazing. Thanks for handling that,” Evie said gratefully.

  “Um, no. You’re amazing because you handle that every other night of the year.”

  Evie just rolled her eyes.

  “What will truly be amazing is if I survive these years, that’s for sure.”

  “So, where is Corey?” Winnie asked again. She tried to keep her tone neutral, she really did, even if the man seemed like bad news. Evie didn’t like to talk much about her husband or her marriage, but the clues Winnie had picked up during their various conversations did not paint the guy in a very positive light.

  “Every fall he has these home shows he goes to all over the Midwest,” she explained about her husband, who helped run the family business, Finnegan Building Company, in town. “He’s usually gone Friday through Monday, at least a few weekends a month.”

  So, he’s gone the only time of the week he actually has to spend with his family, Winnie silently observed. But she wouldn’t trash talk him. Not yet. At least not out loud.

  “That’s got to be hard.”

  “It helps when friends come over and deliver pizza and wine.”

  “Well, I am always available for such support services,” Winnie laughed.

  “Plus, I usually try to book some extra shifts at Dewey’s. For everything else you could say about Betty Jean, she’s happy to watch the kids for me any time I ask. I know she really enjoys it.”

  “That really is great.”

  “Enough about my pathetic existence. Why did you call an emergency girls’ night? What happened?”