His smile hit her fully in the heart, and she sucked in a silent breath. This whole keeping herself apart wasn’t being made any easier by Mason shooting his man magic at her.
When they’d come to the edge of the property, Mason vaulted over a wooden fence and held his hand out for her. She hesitated. Slipping her hand into his seemed to be inviting trouble. The way his skin slid across hers sent shivers and tingles across her body, but she slipped it in anyway.
Swallowing became a chore, and her lips had gone dry. She sucked in a breath and pulled her hand away. She wanted him, right here, right now.
“Billie?”
She didn’t need to look up from examining the bottom of the basket to know the growl in his voice and what it meant.
He cupped her hand. “What are you thinking right now?”
This could go one of two ways. She could lie and walk away, or she could speak the truth and refuse to hide. No hiding behind protecting her mother. No hiding behind her sham of her marriage, and no hiding that she wanted him. Right here, right now, her body craved his touch.
She dropped the basket. “I’m thinking you’re juicy. I’m thinking I need to feel you inside me. I’m thinking I’m kind of wet just standing here, thinking of you inside me.”
He didn’t speak, just pulled her to him, his eyes blazing, and then his mouth was on hers and her tongue was doing a victory dance with his. She pushed her hands under his shirt and purred into his mouth at the way his muscles flexed under her touch.
He pulled back slightly and between planting a line of kisses down her neck asked, “How wet?”
“Dripping,” she replied.
“Fuck,” he growled.
“Yes, please.” She grabbed his hand and led him toward a wall of bamboo. She pushed through the bamboo until they came to a stretch of grass. “No one knows about this place except Sarah and me.”
“I don’t care if we’re in the fifteen items or less line, I’m going to be inside you.” He grabbed her shirt and pulled it over her head. “Take off your bra,” he said, his gaze never leaving hers.
Shivering in anticipating, she reached around and unhooked her bra, then let it drop to the ground. Her hand went to the button on her shorts, and his eyes drifted downwards, his face flushed, his eyes darkest blue.
She slowly undid the button then maneuvered the zipper down and wiggled the material over her hips, inching it down her thighs until the denim dropped to her ankles. She kicked them to one side. A deep pulse between her legs begged her to trail her fingers through her slick folds until she hit the spot. Mason’s face flushed as he tracked her hand in her underwear. She slowly slid her cotton underwear down her thighs, over her knees, and past her ankles. With her toe, she flicked them to one side.
“Your turn,” she rasped.
In record time, he stood naked in front of her, his desire for her evident. She swallowed and bit her lip.
“You kind of cheated on the whole sexy strip tease thing.”
“You? Yeah. Me? Nope.” His eyes trailed over her body.
“I want to explore,” she whispered, and before he could answer, she licked a line from his jaw to his bulging pec, then lay a trail of kisses until she tasted his hardness. She smiled when he groaned, and she took him deeper. She loved that she could make him quiver with her touch. She locked her mouth on him and wetness hit between her legs. A few seconds later she was pulled upward.
“Hey, I wasn’t finished,” she protested.
“Yeah, you are, or I will be.”
Then his mouth was on hers, on her neck, on her swollen breasts. She arched her back as he went lower, dropping to his knees. She shivered and bucked into him when his finger stroked high into her, and when his mouth made contact, she moaned. Her hand went to his head, dragging him closer. The wave that had started when she’d taken off her bra built. It carried her higher and higher until, with an arch of her back, she rode his fingers and his mouth and then she cried out his name. Her legs gave way, and he caught her as she dropped.
He eased her down so she straddled him. Her hands on his chest, she leaned forward and kissed him.
“I taste good on you.” She shivered as his hands traced over the curved of her hips.
“Yeah, you do.” He traced her chin with his finger. “I want to watch you. You’re beautiful.”
She positioned herself over him, sinking onto him inch by exquisite inch until she couldn’t stand it. When she took him in, hard and fast, he filled every part of her, and she moaned.
“Shit,” he said, biting his lip, looking pained. His hands squeezed her swollen breasts, and pleasure shot through her as he palmed her nipples.
She stilled, barely able to get the words out. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, but you’re so wet and tight, I’m not going to last long.”
She smiled and moved slow, with exquisite strokes, until his face was flushed dark. Another wave built and expanded. The pressure increased until she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hold still, couldn’t do anything but ride him fast and hard. Then in a long cry, she moaned his name and slumped against his chest, totally and utterly spent. He gripped her hips and shuddered into her, his arms holding her with such heartbreaking tenderness that she bit the inside of her mouth to keep from crying out.
The bubble of emotion that she’d been suppressing expanded against her internal organs. When his hand stroked the back of neck, she held her breath and struggled against the dam in her heart. It pushed against her ribs until it turned into a physical ache. I love him. The thought was so astounding, it silenced every other thought struggling for attention. She flat-out loved him. He was the worst person in the world for her, but there it was. Maybe she was reading into it, and maybe she was deluded, but she thought he felt something for her, too. Maybe it wasn’t love, but the man had feelings for her. Lost in a cloud, she didn’t quite catch his next words.
“Pardon?” she ran her finger across his chest, loving the way his body responded to her touch.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“What about?” She hoped they were in the vicinity of the same ballpark here.
“When this deal is done, I was kind of thinking I’d need someone.”
Her hand stilled, and her skin prickled in anticipation. They’d done a mind-meld.
“Someone like you.”
She held her breath.
With his free hand, he ran his fingers through her hair. “Someone who can cook, be my assistant, and, you know, have benefits like this.”
Wait. What?
She jerked away from him, her face burning like she’d been slapped.
Oh, my God. I had it so wrong. How could I have been this stupid?
“You want me to be your traveling hook-up?” she said slowly. She stood and started pulling on her underwear, very aware of the tears she couldn’t even hold back. Tears of anger and hurt. Her throat closed, and before she could stop it, a sob leaked out of her.
“No, not a hook-up.” Mason stood beside her and gently grasped her arm. “We both like sex, we fit. We get along. We work well together. We both like The Princess Bride. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.”
She pulled on her shorts and yanked the tank top over her head. “I am not your hook-up.” She swatted at her eyes.
He cupped her jaw in his hands. “I’m not getting the anger here, and this isn’t about us hooking-up. This is about the two of us. We get along. It will be mutually beneficial.”
“Are you serious?” she whispered. “You want to pay me to be your cook and PA, and we can hop into bed when the mood strikes us?”
“As I said.” His eyes narrowed, and she jerked her chin out of his hands. “Not getting the anger.”
“I need to go, Heraldo.”
“What?”
“Please put some clothes on.” She licked dry lips and swallowed over the burn in her throat.
“No. Fucking talk to me.”
“I am talking to you.�
� She squinted up at him.
“Why don’t you ever call me by my name anymore? It’s always Heraldo, or Jimbo or Vladimir.”
She picked up his T-shirt and passed it to him, but he ignored it and let it drop to the ground.
Silence wrapped around them.
“I don’t call you Mason anymore because even if you call me Billie, I’ll always be Forty-Two. But before you proposed your boss-with-benefits scheme, I was figuring out how to tell you I’ve fallen in love with you.” His face went blank and she continued. “I know your thoughts on love. You’ve had your shot at perfection with your ex-wife. Well, I want to be someone’s perfection. Someone they’ll love unconditionally. Someone who will accept my unconditional love. I thought we might have had a shot. Obviously I was wrong.”
Without looking back, she crashed through the bamboo, collecting the fallen basket as she went.
…
Hours later, Mason’s muscles screamed from the rigid stand-off they were in. He stood in the kitchen as Billie wrote labels for the upcoming jam festival. She hadn’t exactly avoided him. If he asked her a question about someone or something, she answered, but she stayed in his space for the shortest amount of time possible. She’d shut him out, and rightly so. He loved what they had here. No commitments, no undying promises he couldn’t keep. It was perfect. His perfect. Not hers. When she’d said she loved him, he closed off. Didn’t know what the fuck to do. The pain on her face scared the shit out of him.
She deserved to be tied to someone, have someone stake their claim to her heart, but it wasn’t him. At the same time, he didn’t want anyone else to be that guy either. Jesus, he really had to book a session with a professional for what was going down in his head.
Ice crawled through his veins. He could almost feel his barriers fall with giant thunks that shook his world.
“What started this festival?” he asked, wanting her to talk to him. “I need to understand what all this means. Maybe there’s a way I can work it into the sale.”
“John and Shirley Henderson,” she said with a flat voice, glancing at him before carrying on with the labels. Talking to him like she was reading the sodium content on a box of cereal. “They built this house and planted the orchards. They made their children, Frances and Patrick, promise that they’d come back here once a year on harvest day, no matter what. Frances died in childbirth, and Patrick drowned about a year later. Shirley died a short time after Patrick.”
“Just a happy story all round,” he said, picking up a label. She’d drawn a large strawberry on it where previously she’d been drawing love hearts with little arrows sticking out the sides.
“John and Shirley used to make jam for everyone. It was their thing. Not long after Shirley’s death, Sarah’s grandmother saw John out here, bent and broken trying to gather the fruit from the trees. She rallied the community and everyone came to support John and make his jam. The town became his makeshift family, and in a way he saved the town. I know it sounds corny, but coming together every year to do this draws everyone back together, and I think that’s wonderful. Fights are forgotten, even if it’s only for the day.” She paused. “Even though there are no direct descendants of the family left, the rest of the community have taken on the job of being the family. I like the idea of people pulling together to continue the family tradition. Having roots.” The way she said roots sounded like a deliberate attempt to insult him.
She turned her back and moved away. Looked like her sidling phase had ended. He hated her monotone voice, but he sensed that she needed space. “Good to know.” Well it wasn’t. He couldn’t use any of that to move the house. With nothing to do and the walls feeling like they were pressing in, he cracked a beer and walked outside where Stanley looked up at him with big, tired eyes. When Mason had told him to stay while he’d disappeared with Billie, the dog hadn’t moved. A strange thump in his heart threw him, and the edges of his sight got fuzzy. Fuck, he was going to miss the dog when he left here.
His hand settled on the dog’s head, and he stared out at the dying day. Birds of unknown origin streaked across an orange and pink sky. A rope swing on the giant apple tree to his left swung in the gentle breeze. Only the lovelorn hoot of a native New Zealand owl echoed across the hills.
“What am I going to do, old man?” Stanley looked at him, no answer in his eyes. “Can’t stay. Don’t want to leave.”
A vibration and a dinging sound to his left got his attention. Billie had left her phone out here. He picked it up to take to her and glanced at the screen. It was a text from Sarah asking about when they were going out hunting for juicy men. A vein throbbed uncomfortably in his temple. If he had to go and delete another dude’s name from her contacts, he would.
He read down the text chain and froze. Bile inched up his throat.
“What the fuck?” he whispered, not wanting to understand, but with each word he read, it became abundantly clear. Billie had betrayed him.
He found her curled on the sofa.
“Why’d you do it?” He kept his voice neutral. Just. He wanted to hurl something at the wall.
She uncurled and stood. “Why’d I do what?”
“You told them about the Heritage Act and the lands. It was you who stopped the house being sold.” He held her phone toward her, the incriminating texts right there.
He had no idea someone could pale so quickly. Her hand went to her throat, and he swore she wobbled.
“I can’t believe you’d do that to me. Jesus.” He paced the room.
“I’m sorry. I am. At the beginning, I really thought I was doing the right thing. This means so much to everyone, and I was only Forty-Two. I thought if you could see how much this place meant to everyone, I could convince you to change your mind about destroying the land. Then…” She gulped.
“Then what?” He bit out. He could barely stay in the same room with her. The one person he thought he could trust had kicked him in the balls.
She stared at something interesting on her feet. “Then it changed. I started to have feelings for you.”
He stared at her until he couldn’t see her image, just a blur.
“But I know there’s no future for us. You’ve made that abundantly clear. You’re still buried in the past and with your ex-wife.”
Monica? Jesus, he hadn’t thought of Monica, not really thought about Monica, in a long time. Not since Billie….
His skin seemed to sag loose from his frame. His insides tightened until everything felt compressed into a small ball and a knife cut through him.
Air was traveling in his body but didn’t appear to be making it to where it needed to be.
“Since this is the night for confessions. I’ve got another one. One I should have figured out earlier. I’ve been emailing with Mr. Takahashi’s PA about the Coromandel property. I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t think of this sooner.”
His skin crawled. “I’ve already put forward the idea of Coromandel to Takahashi, he isn’t interested.”
“No, but his wife is. I’m tight with his PA, Iris and when I told her about the property and the manicured lawn and rose gardens that dip toward the sea, she was very interested. His wife grows miniature roses to show. As of this afternoon, they’ve reached a compromise. He’ll forgo the lap pool to keep the roses.”
He just stared at her blankly while his mind screamed at her to slow down so he could digest her words.
“Takahashi’s wife was very taken with the photos I sent. It isn’t a sale as yet, that’s your part, but Mr. Takahashi loves his wife, and he likes to keep her happy. So I think it’s looking good. Now, I don’t know what you’re going to do about this property, but at least you won’t lose money or your reputation on the Coromandel property. I’m sorry about telling the Council your plans for the garden ran afoul of the Heritage Act.” She ran her hands through her hair and finally met his gaze. After a long pause she said, “I guess we’ve said all there is to say.”
“Guess we have.” He hurt al
l over, like he’d been beaten with a two-by-four, and he didn’t know what to do with the pain. Especially when seeing her stricken look only made his pain that much worse.
When she went to bed, he sat on the couch, Stanley at his feet.
He stared out at the night until dawn streaked across the sky and Billie reappeared looking like as haggard as he felt. When she wandered into the kitchen and saw him, she froze.
He liked her in his T’s. Liked that she’d taken to wearing them. When she’d first started doing it, he hadn’t really read that much into it. But since her confession, he understood much better.
He stood. He needed to get out and away.
Ten minutes later, he was out the door, a backpack on his shoulder. He stopped long enough to pat Stanley’s head before he jumped in his car and started driving.
…
Billie wandered around the office, trying to figure out what to do before she left. Tomorrow, she’d be gone. She’d stay with Sarah in the interim, until she found a place in Auckland. She’d already contacted the culinary school and had submitted her application online. Plans to exit stage left were in place.
As badly as this had ended, she wished there was something she could do for Mason. Something that might offer him his own stage left exit, away from his past and all the pain he still carried around.
She stopped in front of his laptop. She’d been waiting on him to send her a file so she could send Takahashi a report on the housing market on Coromandel and the surrounding areas. She didn’t want to go through his computer, but she needed to find the file and get out of here. His computer had gone into screen-saver mode with photos flashing on the screen, and she gasped and smiled at the picture of Stanley sitting in front of a heap of pinecones. She smiled and clicked on the picture. It was the best photo of Stanley she’d ever seen. He’d never looked happier. Surely Mason wouldn’t mind if she emailed herself a copy. She clicked on the pictures folder and didn’t see one named Stanley, so she clicked on a random image. Her hand stole to her throat, and she slumped into his chair at the picture of a beautiful blonde woman and a baby. In one, the blonde wore scrubs and held the baby in her arms while Mason, also in scrubs, stared down at the tiny bundle. Billie wrapped a thin cardigan around her shoulders.
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