by Cara Colter
“I just didn’t want to hurt you if you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I like talking to you about it,” he said softly, as if that came as a surprise to him. “It makes me feel not quite so alone with the grief.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Eight months, one week and six days.”
His arms tightened around her. Did his lips touch her hair?
“When you called to tell me,” Molly said softly, “you said he just went to sleep one night and didn’t wake up. He was only twenty.”
“His heart stopped.”
“All those years of swimming,” she offered pensively, “and he never seemed to have a health problem.”
“It went undetected, though lots of people with Down syndrome have heart problems. Fifty years ago, it was rare for someone to make it past twenty-five, now their life expectancy can be in their sixties. They think it’s partly because they used to be unfairly institutionalized. They do better at home, surrounded by family.”
“Of course, they do better at home. Sheesh!”
Someday, it would have been Oscar’s home. Where Cynthia would not have welcomed Ralphie. She knew it wasn’t fair to hate someone you had never met, but Molly didn’t let that stop her hating Cynthia just then.
“Ralphie had such a good heart, spiritually, if not physically. I guess I took it for granted that he was always going to be part of my world,” Oscar said softly.
“I’m so sorry, Oscar.”
He smiled sadly. “I like to think his great big heart just outgrew his body.”
They sat with that for a bit, quiet, comfortable with each other’s sorrow.
“What happened between you and your latest?” His finger was wrapping one of her curls, unwrapping and then wrapping it again. She wished he would kiss her head again, so she could be certain that he had.
“I found panties under the bed. Not mine. Maybe that’s why I’m sensitive to underwear discussions.”
“You deserve so much better,” he said quietly.
“You, too.”
“I meant in the underwear department,” he said.
And then they were both laughing again.
“Maybe you deserve better in that department, too,” she said. “How would I know? I haven’t seen them, yet.”
Yet?
Thankfully, Oscar didn’t pick up on her Freudian slip. In fact, Molly could feel the spaces between his breaths get longer, and his finger remained in her curls, but he wasn’t playing with them anymore. The rise of his chest was steady and strong.
A man with a heart every bit as big as his brother’s had been.
Feeling as safe, as secure as she had ever felt, Molly let her eyes close. Sleep enveloped her.
When she woke up, she had a sore neck. She glanced at her watch. She was turned around despite herself. She had only slept a few hours. It was 6:00 a.m.
Still, sleep deprivation aside, she had a good feeling. A delicious feeling. Oscar was still behind her, propped up on the couch cushions, his arms wrapped around her midriff, his breath stirring her neck. The scent coming off him was heavenly, utterly male, clean, sensual.
He was going to have a sore neck, too. She should wake him up. But first, she had to look her fill of him, take in the sleep-mussed hair, the lines of his face, the masculine bow of slightly parted lips.
Had she ever noticed before how long and thick his lashes were? They were sweeping the high plain of his perfect cheekbones. His stubble had thickened, dark and roguish around the line of his lips. She wanted to touch it.
And his lips.
“Hey,” Molly said, softly, before she did something stupid. “Hey, sonya, wake up.”
His eyes opened slowly. He took her in with grave surprise. His arms tightened around her waist.
“I love it when you speak Russian to me,” he said, his voice a drowsy growl.
“Sonya means sleepyhead. Sorry, nothing sexy. You should get up and go to your own bed before you have a permanent kink in your neck.”
He ignored her suggestion. “Should you and I discuss kinks? Probably not. Aw, hell, let’s throw caution to the wind. Do you know anything sexy?”
She went very still. The temptation to touch the stubble on his face grew.
At the look on her face, he grinned and amended hastily, “In Russian?”
Probably better not to play with fire. “Nope, sorry.”
“Ha. Could you hand me my phone? It’s on the side table there.”
Molly felt disappointed. One of those kind of guys, then. The first thing they did in the morning was check their phone. Well, you probably didn’t get to an apartment like this by not being on top of things at your business.
He looked at his phone. He yawned. He tapped. He scrolled. Then he typed something in. Answering texts already.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“EVERYTHING IS AT our fingertips these days. I’m looking up something sexy. In Russian.”
So Oscar wasn’t opening texts from the office. It suddenly felt as if they were playing, but somehow an innocent game had transformed into a very dangerous one. Russian roulette.
But she could not bring herself to stop it, even though her heart was pounding, and she wanted to touch his stubble more than ever.
She nodded. Oh, sure. Why not see if it was loaded?
“You be Ursula,” he said. “I’ll be Dimitri.”
“I don’t like my name.”
“Choose, then.”
“Anastasia.”
He raised his eyebrows as if she had said something deliberately wicked.
It was just like in the old days, when the playfulness leaped up between them as naturally as breathing. Only this had a different thrilling element to it, as if they were walking a tightrope between the young people they had once been and the adults they now were.
In a low voice, definitely sexy, Oscar/Dimitri spoke into his phone. “You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”
The phone translated, and spoke Russian to them.
“The voice is a little mechanical,” Molly said. Molly was the girl who never giggled, but Anastasia didn’t have that problem. “I think it scares me a bit.”
“Scares you? That won’t do. Here let me try to say it myself.” He listened carefully to the mechanical Russian voice. He gave her a look worthy of a Cossack warrior who had galloped a white stallion across an endless steppe just to see her, and then he said the phrase. Not that she was any kind of expert in Russian, but to her his accent seemed pretty good. Not that it mattered. The tone of his voice, husky, intense, commanding, was dreamy.
“I think I’m going to swoon.” Anastasia was free to say things Molly never would. And Anastasia was only partly kidding.
“Here, Ana, you try it.”
She looked at the phone he handed to her. She took a deep breath. She took a risk. She looked at him. “I want to touch your stubble,” she whispered into the phone, her voice hoarse.
The mechanical male voice spat it out.
“That was creepy,” Oscar said, pretending horror.
She repeated what she’d heard, working the accent, blinking her lashes at him, making a little pout with her mouth. His eyes darkened. He touched his stubble. Her eyes followed his hand, yearning.
“Okay,” he said, his voice a croak. “Whatever you want to touch is fine with me.”
Even before the phone spat out the garbled translation, Molly, freed of her inhibitions by Anastasia, was reaching for his face.
Her fingertips scraped the rough surface of his stubble. And then her palm slid down his cheeks, cupped his chin. She closed her eyes, just letting the sensation of it sink in, the beautiful intimacy of it all. And then her fingertips trailed upward...
He stopped her hand. He held it, and held her gaze. Without saying a word, O
scar was asking her a question.
Was she sure she wanted it to go there?
Molly nodded, ever so slightly. “Da.” She remembered the Russian word for yes from her childhood.
But then Anastasia gathered her cloak around herself and faded away. Dimitri galloped off into the sunset.
Just like that, it was so real. It was Molly and it was Oscar.
“I have to tell you something,” he said hoarsely. “About Cynthia.”
Now?
“It wasn’t about Ralphie. Not really. It was about you.”
“Me?” she whispered.
“You turned my life upside down. When you left. So suddenly. Cynthia, in a way, represented everything I’d ever known. She was safe and she was predictable, and I retreated to that. But I never stopped missing the way you made me feel. Feeling like this—on fire with life—is what was missing.”
Molly felt the fire he was talking about. She let him guide her hand to his lips. He touched her fingertips to his mouth. She explored the warmth, the softness, the texture. Ever so slowly, like a cowboy working with a wild colt, being ever so careful not to startle with the quick, unexpected move, he drew her fingertip of her index into his mouth.
His eyes never leaving her face, his tongue tangled around it. He drew gently on it, pulling it deeper into the soft cavern of his mouth.
No translation was needed for the jolt that shot through her, white-hot. No translation was needed for the delectable weakness she felt. No translation was needed for the all-consuming hunger that licked at her as surely as his tongue had.
And no translation was needed for what happened next, either.
Oscar groaned with such helpless need, with such pent-up wanting, that Molly felt herself melt further into the thing she hated most: weakness. She felt her bone and her sinew turn to putty.
Part of her tried to warn her this was Oscar. This was her best friend. She could not risk this friendship. She had to think about tomorrow, about the future, about consequences.
But another part of her wanted only this moment with all its seductive and enchanting power.
She didn’t want to be brave anymore. She wanted to surrender, to fight no more.
She acknowledged the part of her that gave up wanted something, and maybe had always wanted it. It was one of those hidden longings that became more powerful when you unleashed it.
This is what Molly wanted: something more complex than friendship, more layered, as multifaceted as a diamond.
It suddenly felt, not as if this was wrong, but as if this was the most right thing that had ever happened to her.
As if a hole inside of her made itself apparent, and with that knowledge of its existence came the knowledge that only Oscar could fill it.
Molly had a deep sense that if she did not explore this thing unfolding between them, she would spend the rest of her life—and possibly beyond, into eternity—carrying the emptiness. Feeling the void of not having known Oscar completely.
She fell toward him with the inevitability of a leaf falling to the ground in autumn.
He stood up off the couch, taking her with him, in the cradle of his arms. Carrying her easily, as if she weighed no more than a feather, he went down the hallway to his bedroom, nudged open the door with his foot, crossed the room and laid her across his huge bed.
She sank into the incredible softness of it.
Oscar stood, motionless, looking down at her with a heated gaze. As Molly watched, his hands moved to the buttons of his shirt. A smile tickled across his lips as he tormented her with slowness, flicking one button open, pausing, and then doing the next one.
Each open button revealed him to her.
She had just spent an evening with him in the swimming pool. She knew what he looked like. She had hardly been able to take her eyes off him.
But this was different.
Totally different.
Because this was a giving of himself to her and only her. This was Oscar, declaring silently, with actions rather than words, what he was about to unveil would belong to her.
Completely.
To touch. To explore. To discover. To know.
He finished with the buttons. He peeled off the shirt.
He stood there, in the half dark, holding the shirt loosely in his hand. Golden morning light was beginning to spill through the windows, gilding the broadness of his shoulder, the depth of his chest, the perfect cut of pectoral mounds, the pronounced line of his triceps, that kiss-worthy hollow at the base of his neck.
He let her look, and then Oscar let go of the shirt and it whispered to the floor. He moved to his slacks, a flick of a powerful wrist dispensing with the snap, his hand gliding down the fly. Slowly—so slowly—he slid off the pants, revealing the narrowness of his waist, the jut of his hips, the dent of his belly button, the arrow of dark hair leading her eye downward.
“You don’t wear tighty-whities anymore,” she squeaked.
He didn’t smile. He didn’t allow her to distract from the intensity of what he was revealing to her.
Instead, he bent, sliding the legs of the slacks off one at a time. He straightened and stepped out of the puddle of his discarded clothing. Her eyes trailed down the length of his legs. She shivered from the pure power of his masculine form. She looked back to his face, to see his eyes had never left her.
A smile tilted his mouth—a smile that knew what he was doing to her, that he relished it—when she licked her lips.
She could stand it no more. She held out her arms to him. With a groan of need and desire, he surrendered into them.
“Are you—”
She stopped his words with her mouth. The time for talking was done.
Oscar woke up to the sound of rain, the promise of sunshine early this morning gone, as was so often the case in this coastal city. He looked at the clock.
Had he ever slept until noon? It felt luxurious to be nestled deep into the goose down comforter, rain hammering on the windows. It felt glorious to have Molly beside him.
He got up on his elbow and looked at the woman sleeping on her side in a tangle of sheets. One arm was under the pillow, and one leg straddled the pure white squares of the comforter.
His bold and beautiful Molly.
But she had not given him that side of herself last night.
She had honored him with the other side. The hidden side. The side that sometimes he felt only he knew about, that part of her that was sweetly vulnerable, that didn’t trust easily, that waited for the other shoe to drop.
The Molly that was so tender, and so sensitive. The Molly that was fragile, not strong. The Molly who might be filled with doubts this morning.
He was aware he did not want her to have a single doubt.
He tossed on a robe and tiptoed out of the room. He made coffee, and he checked on her. She was still sleeping deeply. So much for her jet-lag strategy, he thought wryly.
He didn’t want her to wake up if he slipped out to get a few things, so he called the florist and the bakery. He was not sure it had ever been quite so satisfying to have enough money to do anything you wanted, to buy the contents of an entire florist shop, to order hot croissants delivered immediately.
All Oscar wanted to do was sweep that girl right off her feet.
By the time she woke, he had filled every available space in that bedroom with flowers. He had coffee and croissants on a tray for her.
Molly waking up was the cutest thing. A stir, a lapse, another stir. A blink. A stretch of one hand out from under the pillow, that slender leg finding its way back underneath the covers.
Finally, an eye opened. And then the other one.
He grinned at her.
What he saw in her face was not a single doubt.
She took him in slowly, and with wonder that made his heart go still.
<
br /> “Did I die and go to heaven?” she asked huskily.
Had he made her that happy?
She set him straight. “What is that scent in here?”
Oh, so that was what was heavenly. He made a sweeping gesture to the flower-filled room.
She got up on her elbows. “What the heck?” she asked, looking around the room.
“I didn’t want you to think the rain was depressing.” He spoke the words into his phone. The message was redelivered to her. In Spanish.
“Depressing?” she said, her voice throaty, “It sounds like the perfect kind of day to stay in bed.”
He said something really naughty into his phone. It was translated. She blushed. She laughed. She held back the covers for him. He climbed into bed with her.
“A perfect day for a trip around the world,” Oscar whispered in Molly’s ear, taking advantage of his close proximity to give it a little nibble. “We’ll start with Spain and see how far we get.”
“Okay,” she agreed. “You be Bruno, I’ll be Isabella.”
“I don’t like Bruno,” he said.
“Okay, choose.”
“Angelo,” he said.
“Perfect. My angel.” She took his phone from him. And spoke into it. He was pretty sure he blushed. Before he laughed. And then the laughter died.
When night fell, it was still raining. They had made it to Iceland, sitting in his hot tub, faces held up to the rain, pretending it was the Blue Lagoon. Bjorn and Hallveig were murmuring Icelandic endearments to each other and trying not to get the phone wet.
They fell into bed, finally, exhausted.
“It’s the first day I haven’t thought of Ralphie,” Oscar realized, loving the feel of her head on his chest, her hair springy and wild under his fingers. “Until now. And it’s weird because it’s his birthday tomorrow.”
“Eight months and two weeks,” she said, softly, always knowing the right thing to say. “Do you feel guilty that you didn’t think of him until now?”
He thought about that.
“No, his whole life was about love. He celebrated it like no one else.”
There. He’d said it. Love.