by K. M. Scott
Lily broke the brief silence by beginning the formal introductions. Pointing toward her sister first, she said, “This is Denise.” Then moving around the room, she said, “Over there is Shane and, of course, that’s my mom and my dad is in the chair.”
I put on my best smile and said, “It’s very nice to meet you all. Thank you for welcoming me to your home.”
His sisters flocked around me and began talking about how wonderful it was to finally meet someone in Gage’s life. “We’ve waited all our adult lives to meet one of Gage’s friends, Jordan. How did you meet him?” Lily asked.
I had no idea what Gage had told his family about his life, so I tried to remain as vague as possible. “We met through mutual friends.”
“Are you from New York?” his sister Denise asked. “You don’t sound like a New Yorker.”
“No. I’m from Connecticut originally. Just a transplant to the Big Apple.”
“It’s nice to see everyone too after all these years,” Gage said behind me.
“We can catch up with you later,” Lily joked. “Jordan’s new.”
They peppered me with more questions about how long I’d know Gage and if New York was like it was on television and how long we planned to stay. I could easily have talked about how great New York was and how it wasn’t really like it was on Sex in the City, but the questions about Gage were trickier to answer.
Thankfully, he stepped up and saved me from having to say something I shouldn’t. “We’re going to be here just until tomorrow when we head for the cabin. It was a long trip, so we’d like to get a bite to eat.”
He walked toward the kitchen and stopped in front of his mother. “Hi, Mom. It’s good to see you again.”
As if the clouds covering her expression cleared, she smiled and took him in her arms. “I missed you, son. I’m so glad to have you home, even if it’s just for a day.”
Gage turned toward his father and stuck out his hand. “Dad, it’s good to see you’re still holding up after all this time with so many women.”
His father smiled and shook his hand, chuckling as he said, “I must have a guardian angel watching over me or I don’t think I would have lasted this long with all these women. But Shane I have gotten used to being outnumbered. It’s good to have you home, son.”
Escaping his sisters, I walked toward Gage’s mother and extended my hand to shake hers. “It’s very nice to meet you. Thank you for letting me stay here.”
She seemed to study me for a moment, her eyes trailing down my body and then back up to my face. For a moment I wished I’d worn something nicer and didn’t look like I’d been on the road for nearly twenty-four hours straight, but then her thin mouth spread into a smile and whatever fears I had about her seeing something she disliked faded away.
“It’s lovely to meet you, Jordan. My son doesn’t bring just anyone home. Well, he’s never brought anyone home, so you must be special.”
Her words carried a solemnity to them that impressed me. I’d naturally assumed Gage had brought Angela home to meet his family, and as I stood there thanking his mother for her hospitality, I saw in her expression that my being the first girlfriend Gage had wanted his family to meet meant something to her.
If only I wasn’t standing there living out that sin of omission.
“Thank you, Mrs. Varo.”
Rolling her eyes, she said, “Please call me Sandy. Mrs. Varo is so very formal, and we’re not that way in this house.”
From behind me, Lily said in a singsong voice, “Ooooh, Sandy. She must like you, Jordan. It’s not everyone who gets to call her by her first name.”
Before I could say anything, Gage came up behind me and took my hand in his. “Now that you’ve all gotten to meet Jordan, I’m going to take her upstairs and show her where we’ll be sleeping.”
The room fell silent, and the look on his mother’s face morphed into something that was a cross between angry, confused, and embarrassed. For a moment, I thought about saying I could sleep on the couch or in the car or anywhere not right next to her baby boy, but instead I remained silent as the awkward moment passed.
“Your room is just like you left it when you went away to the Navy,” she said quietly.
“I’ll grab some blankets from the hall closet since it’s only a twin and I’ll have to sleep on the floor.”
As if his announcement that he’d be sleeping somewhere other than right next to me made the clouds lift away, his mother’s expression returned to that sweet one she’d given me a minute before. “Lunch will be ready in a little bit, so rest up. I’ve made a big meal to celebrate. I hope you like ham, Jordan.”
“I love it,” I answered truthfully, instantly dying to taste the home-cooked meal I caught a whiff of coming from the kitchen.
Closing the door behind us, he followed me into his bedroom. It looked like it must have when he last slept there with posters of trucks and the Denver Broncos covering the walls. I’d never thought about who Gage was before I met him, but his room made me imagine as a teenager and I couldn’t help but smile.
“That wasn’t too bad. I told you they’d love you.”
I sat down on the bed and looked up at the poster of some very busty cheerleader hanging from the ceiling. “Nice décor.”
He chuckled and sat down next to me. “I was a red-blooded American teenage boy the last time I slept here.”
Looking at him, I couldn’t disagree with his assessment of himself. Gage was a true red-blooded American male. “I’m not sure I can sleep with her and those giant ta-tas hovering over me,” I joked.
“You can sleep on top of me then. Problem solved.”
“But you told your mother you’d be sleeping on the floor.”
Shrugging, he explained what I already knew. “My mother is old-fashioned. You saw her face when she thought we would be sleeping together. A little white lie about where I’ll be tonight was necessary.”
“More lies,” I mumbled as I looked around at where he’d spent his teenage years.
“I think my mother would handle you being chased by crazy people and wanted by the police better than the two of us sleeping together here, to be honest. It’s crazy, but that’s how she is.”
“You’re her little boy, Gage. No mother likes to think of her son sleeping with a woman. No matter how old you are, you’re her boy.”
Gage grinned like the cat that just ate the canary and pulled me into his arms. “Well, her little boy has every intention of sleeping with you tonight.”
“You don’t think that’s a little weird? I mean, your whole family will be right nearby.”
“I’m a grown man here with the woman I love. I’m not a boy anymore, no matter what my mother thinks.”
Looking up at the poster over our heads, I smiled. “Tell Miss D Cups there. She didn’t get the memo.”
Gage kissed up my neck until his mouth met mine. “I’ll take her down. She had a good run, but she’s been kicked off the team. There’s a new girl in town.”
As I kissed him there in his old room where he’d grown up, I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of a teenaged Gage. Leaning back on his bed, I asked, “So this was your room when you were a boy?”
Nodding, he smiled. “Yeah. As the oldest boy, I was the only one who got a room to myself. I swear even my father was jealous.”
“Do all your siblings still live here? I mean, other than Lily, who’s at school.”
“No. Shane does, but Denise has a place of her own.”
“They must care a lot about you if they all gathered here to see you today.”
Gage shrugged. “I think it might have been more curiosity than anything else. They haven’t seen me in years, and when I told Lily I was bringing a woman with me, it was too intriguing not to drop everything and come here to see.”
“They’re really nice people, Gage. You have a nice family.”
“Thanks. I wish you were meeting them under different circumstances, but next time we come to
visit we won’t be on the run.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “That’s what we are, aren’t we? On the run.”
“I think that’s the only way to describe it.”
“Like Bonnie and Clyde,” I said, trying to find something amusing in the reality of our situation.
Gage leaned over me and pressed his lips to mine. “Yeah, except we didn’t hold up any banks. So not really.”
For a moment, I couldn’t help but worry about what would happen to us. Would the police arrest me when they finally found us? Would they arrest both of us? Closing my eyes, I asked him the question that had sat in the back of my mind since we left the Richmont in Hilton Head.
“What’s going to happen, Gage?”
I opened my eyes to see his dark blue eyes full of love staring at me. “I told you not to worry. I won’t let anyone or anything hurt you. I promise.”
“That might be a hard promise to keep.”
“Doesn’t mean I won’t.”
He lay down beside me on that tiny twin bed and took me into his arms, and I believed what he said about protecting me. He was my knight in shining armor, after all.
Gage’s family gathered around their kitchen table, making feel like I was being surrounded. They didn’t mean any harm, and I was the visitor there, but every time one of his sisters looked at me, I had the feeling they were dying to ask me a million questions I definitely didn’t want to answer. I hated doing the whole sin of omission thing with people who had been nothing but truly kind to me.
His mother seemed to be disinterested, thankfully. And his father didn’t appear to even notice me there three seats away. For that alone, I liked him. He reminded me of my own father, which made me like him even more.
Gage sat next to me, but although I knew he was only trying to help protect me, sitting there just made everyone look in our direction. Each family member passed around dishes of corn and peas to start the meal, making small talk about the weather and how Lily would be heading off to school soon, but they never took their eyes off us. If I didn’t feel like I stuck out like a sore thumb, it would have been a very cozy place to be.
As I enjoyed the fluffiest and most buttery mashed potatoes I’d ever tasted, at the opposite end of the table Lily handed her father the salt and casually asked, “So is Jordan going to be the newest member of the family? She fits in, don’t you think?”
I nearly choked on my food as the table erupted into outraged women scolding poor Lily and her attempting to defend herself as merely curious.
“Lily, that’s no way to treat our guest,” Gage’s mother chastised. Looking down from the head of the table, she smiled sweetly at me and said, “I’m sorry, Jordan. Gage’s sisters and brother are dying to know what their brother has been up to for the last few years. That doesn’t mean they should put either of you on the spot, though.”
I forced a smile and nodded, unsure what to say as I stared down at the peas I was busy arranging into a design on my plate. Gage took a deep breath in. “For the record, yes, Jordan and I are together.”
Unsure what he had tried to set straight by stating the obvious, I looked at him and silently begged for some relief. He just smiled, like this was all perfectly normal, and squeezed my hand under the table.
Everyone lowered their heads to stare at the meal on their own plates. Talk about tension at the dinner table. I would have given anything for some good ole’ sibling rivalry to rear its ugly head at that moment.
“So what do you do in New York, Jordan?” Gage’s father asked, breaking the awkward silence as he took the platter of ham from Denise.
Clearing my throat, I quietly said, “I’m an elementary teacher at a private school, Mr. Varo.”
“Very nice,” he mumbled as everyone waited for our conversation to continue. When it didn’t, the disappointment in Gage’s sisters’ faces was palpable. I was relieved. I enjoyed talking about my work, but I’d never felt so on display in my life.
For another five minutes, we all sat in silence eating our ham lunch until Denise looked over at Gage from across the table and asked, “How long do you plan on staying?”
Her question sounded staged, as if she knew the answer already because she and Gage had discussed it.
“We’re staying here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll be heading up to the cabin.”
Everyone looked over toward Gage’s mother for her reaction to us staying at the cabin together, but she didn’t flinch. Without missing a beat and in a voice that made it seem like none of the meal had been awkward, Gage’s father said, “Shane and I cleaned it out earlier this summer, so you should find it pretty comfortable, Jordan. Just remember to stop for food before you head up there, Gage.”
And that was that. For the rest of the meal, they all talked about local happenings and who was doing what in the neighborhood in an attempt to bring Gage up to speed, and he politely nodded and smiled with each piece of gossip, although I could see he didn’t care. He was still a Varo, but he’d left that teenage boy from Riverton behind when he headed off to the Navy all those years ago.
Chapter Four
Gage
Jordan closed my bedroom door behind her and saw I was already in bed—the bed she was supposed to sleep in while I stayed on the floor. With a smile, she asked, “And if your mother comes in at some point in the night?”
I leaned back on the pillow and put my hands behind my head. “My mother hasn’t come into my room unannounced since I was twelve. She knew better.”
Rolling her eyes, Jordan walked toward the bed and stopped to look down at me lying naked under the covers. “I’m not going to ask why since I don’t want the vision of a teenaged Gage doing God knows what in this bed haunting me for the rest of my life.”
“Boys will be boys,” I teased as I lifted up the blanket to let her slide in next to me.
Once she got settled, she looked up at me and for a moment I sensed something was wrong. A look I couldn’t place crossed those beautiful green eyes, casting a dark haze over them.
“Talk to me, Jordan. What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t like lying to your family today. I know what you’re going to say. They don’t need to know, but I still didn’t like feeling like I was lying to them. They’re good people, Gage. It just felt wrong.”
Gently, I touched her cheek and kissed her like I’d wanted to for hours. “They don’t need to know that you were misused by those people.”
“What if the police come in the middle of the night and bust down the door to get us?”
I tried to stop my smile, but it was no use. “You’ve seen too much TV. They don’t just bust down the door, especially if you open it for them. Also, they have to show a search warrant to come into your house without your permission and a warrant for someone’s arrest to take them.”
“What if they get those things? Then what?”
“They won’t, at least not while we’re here. Tristan texted me this afternoon to tell me that the Hilton Head police consider the missing car from the Richmont as a theft, but as of now, they aren’t connecting that to me. They don’t even know I’m part of this, so there’s no reason any police would come here looking for you.”
Jordan buried her face in the pillow. “I just want this to be over. Is that too much to ask?”
Pulling her next to me, I tried to make her feel better. “It’ll be okay. I promise. When we get to the cabin, we’re going to start figuring out what Hailey and Justin’s game was and how Dalton Spear figures into it. I’ve had Daryl looking into it the whole time we were driving here, so he might know something by the time we get up there tomorrow. Then we’ll find out what was going on, clear your name, and live happily ever after.”
She lifted her head and that same look crossed her face again. Was it fear or sadness? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to push her to tell me what had happened in Hilton Head. When she was ready, she’d tell me.
In the meantime, it was my job to take
her mind off whatever was bothering her, and at that moment, I knew exactly what to do.
I kissed her long and deep, my tongue sliding into her mouth to tease hers with a preview of what I wanted to do to her. She responded with a level of passion I hadn’t expected, and leaning back, I looked at her in surprise.
“I figured I’d have to convince you a little more than that.”
“You said your mother isn’t coming in, right?”
“Right.”
Jordan spread her legs and sat up on me. “Well, then I don’t see why we shouldn’t make love. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t yell out and alert the whole house to what we’re doing in here.”
I slid my hands down her sides to rest them on her hips and looked up at the gorgeous woman staring down at me with a look of desire. She never failed to thrill me.
“You’re not really a yeller,” I said as I nuzzled her neck. “So I don’t think we have to worry.”
“I know, but you never can tell when it could happen,” she said in a faraway voice as I pushed my cock over her already wet pussy. “Like right now, I feel like I want to moan because of what you just did there.”
Grabbing her ass, I squeezed as I moved her just enough to give my cock easy access. “Moan away. If anyone hears, I’ll just tell them I was doing what I used to do with Miss D Cups.”
Jordan stopped the incredible thing she was doing by rolling her hips and sat up straight on top of me. “Not cool. I’m right here and you’d let someone think you were jerking off to that silicone thing above us?”
Her expression told me she wasn’t truly angry with me, but I had succeeded in killing the mood. Reaching up to cradle her face, I smiled my best “I’m sorry” grin.
“Just kidding. Of course I’d tell them that we were having sex.”
“You’re hopeless. Remind me, why do I love you again?” she asked as she rolled her eyes at my joke.
“Because of all my great qualities and because I can do that thing when we fuck that makes your eyes roll back into your head.”