Because I Can (Montgomery Manor)

by Tamara Morgan

  He did, but he had the feeling he was being challenged on some unknown point. “Maybe you can show it to me next time.”

  “Sure. Maybe at her funeral—or perhaps your own.”

  “Don’t even think about it.” Georgia turned to Monty, her lips twisted in an apologetic grimace. “I’m so sorry about this. My family isn’t usually this intrusive in my personal life. I swear.”

  “Yes, we are.” Her brother stuck out his hand. “Daniel Lennox. Older than Georgia by eleven months and smarter by thirty IQ points. That’s documented, by the way. Mensa.”

  Although the aggressive way Danny offered his credentials took Monty aback, he accepted the other man’s outstretched hand with a semblance of ease. At least this family made conversation simple. He was lucky to get a word in edgewise.

  “I’m John. John Montgomery, but most people call me Monty.”

  The man’s eyes widened in an expression similar to Georgia’s, and he looked back and forth between them without dropping Monty’s hand. “Seriously? As in, the real John Montgomery? Here? With my sister?”

  He wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, but was saved from having to when Georgia pulled the wrench from her belt tie and waved it menacingly at her brother. “Out. I mean it.”

  The threat of physical violence finally did the trick. With a long-suffering sigh, Danny finally released Monty’s hand and made for the door. He offered some last-minute porn-access tips as he went, and ducked just in time to miss the wrench that sailed over his head and out the door.

  Monty assumed Georgia would want to put on some clothes before they got down to business, so he turned and studied the trophies on the casket bookcase with feigned interest—though his interest didn’t stay feigned for long. The trophies weren’t for baseball, as it turned out, but softball. And there were a lot of them. State champion, regional champion, national champion... There was even a kids’ trophy dated last fall, with a propped-up handmade card containing about twenty signatures and a liberally crayoned “Your The Bestest Coach.”

  He wasn’t sure why, but the fact that Georgia ran a handyman service, coached softball, played softball and spent her free time building houses for the underprivileged made him feel like the biggest slacker in the world. Never mind that he was standing inside an apartment so small the bed was literally five feet away from the front door, or that he’d been up since four that morning hard at work of his own. Georgia was a woman who lived.

  Ashleigh was right. He never had fun, never even left the house without an agenda inside an itinerary wrapped up in a responsibility. No wonder she’d run as far and fast from him as she could get.

  He was a vacuum of excitement. A black hole of entertainment. Basically, he sucked.

  “So. That was awkward.” Georgia hadn’t, as he’d hoped, changed into something slightly less revealing—and the absence of anyone else in the room only made her legs that much more noticeable. The apartment, which was already small to begin with, started closing in around him, but he forced himself to stand firm.

  He needed to do this. Maybe using Georgia’s hammer to break out of his shell was a bad idea, but he didn’t know where else to turn. He didn’t have friends or acquaintances except for work contacts. His family had given up on him years ago. And the one woman in the world he’d opened his heart to was getting married.

  There was no way he could ignore it anymore. Everyone around him was building lives, throwing themselves into activities they loved, creating the kinds of memories that mattered. Except him. Alone at his desk. A conversational bore. A hulk of nothing that no one would miss should he disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow.

  Georgia might not have intended it, but she’d thrown him a lifeline that morning. Now he found himself gripping at it almost desperately, fearful lest she take it back again.

  “It’s my own fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have barged in on you like this, but your offer came at the perfect time.”

  She swallowed, her eyes flicking over him in a way that felt offensive and pleasant at the same time. Or maybe it was just him, his awareness prickling awake after a long period of dormancy.

  “I wish I could have taken advantage before, but...” He trailed off. There was no good excuse. He never had a good excuse—and that was the problem. In order to have an excuse, a man had to have a life first. “I’m sorry. You deserve better than halfhearted apologies. But I’m here now, and I’d like to know what I can do to serve you most.”

  Georgia shook her head, unsure if her hearing was accurate, or if she was imagining the entire conversation. No way was Monty standing in her apartment, all six feet two inches of him devouring the oxygen and transforming it into heat, asking how he could serve her. There were impossible dreams—for instance, that she’d be crowned Miss America after showing off her birdhouse-making skills in the talent competition—and then there were dreams so ridiculous she might as well wish for the moon.

  This moment was about two galaxies away from the moon.

  She pinched the inner skin of her forearm—right where it hurt the most, a location she and her brothers had made the subject of intense study over the years. It hurt, but not enough to convince her, so she did it again. Ouch.

  Monty watched her with a perplexed frown, but didn’t comment. She was coming to appreciate that about him.

  “Do you mind if I sit?” he asked, indicating the bed.

  “Oh. Um. Sure. Make yourself comfortable. Should I go...” She eyed a chair across the room and decided it would be safer. Now that she had this man in her apartment, the enormity of what she was about to do hit her on several different levels—only half of them related to the throbbing spot between her legs.

  She slipped off her rubber boots and curled up in the seat, hoping the appearance of relaxation would force the reality upon her. Unfortunately, her movements only served as a reminder that she had nothing on underneath her robe. She was pretty sure Monty had just gotten an eyeful.

  “So,” he said, politely keeping his gaze trained above her neck. “What exactly does the job entail?”

  “Um...the usual, I imagine.”

  “The usual being, what, exactly?”

  Surely it wasn’t that difficult for him to work out on his own. “To be honest, I was sort of assuming you’d take the lead here.”

  “O-kay. But maybe you could be more specific, at least for this initial meeting? This is all new territory for me.”

  “All of it?” Did he mean the casual nature of the affair, or the act of insertion? Because that second one could be a major problem.

  A twitch near his eye was the only visible sign of his distress, but Georgia knew it for distress all the same. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to scare him away before they shared so much as a kiss.

  She at least wanted a kiss. Oh, God, how she wanted a kiss.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, licking her lips in anticipation of his mouth on top of hers. “I didn’t mean to make that sound so judgmental, but I’m counting on you a lot more than I probably should. You’re my last chance.”

  “I think you might be overestimating my abilities a little.”

  “God, I hope not. No man has been able to get me even close to an orgasm before. I figure if the most gorgeous, eligible man in the state of Connecticut can’t get me off, I might as well roll over and give up.”

  If Monty had been eating something at that exact moment, Georgia had no doubt he would have died. The rate at which air moved into his lungs as he shot up off the bed would have worked to lodge even the tiniest crumb into his trachea, thereby forcing her to pull out the bookshelf coffin way earlier than she’d planned.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s not that I mean to put too much pressure on you, of course.” Her words came fast and frantic. Dammit—she’d been too
direct. She was always too direct. She possessed no feminine arts. She was unable to flirt or bat her eyelashes. She could hit the bull’s-eye on a dartboard with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back, but coy mating rituals were beyond her. “You wouldn’t be the first man to have tried and failed, but you’re, you know, you.”

  He didn’t respond, opting instead to stare at her as if she might go up in flames at any moment. Which, given the rate at which her blood was coursing through her veins right now, seemed entirely possible.

  “But I totally understand if you’d rather not now,” she said. “I don’t want you to feel obligated.”

  “You want to have sex with me?”

  Well, obviously. “Yes?”

  “Because you...? You haven’t...?”

  “Had an orgasm?” she supplied. “Oh, I’ve had them. Just not with a man.”

  She stopped short of telling him that the primary way in which she had been able to seal the deal was by imagining him in various states of undress—and distress. Even she had a limit when it came to embarrassing herself.

  “And, um.” He continued staring. “I’m sorry. I’m not used to this kind of plain speaking. Are you trying to tell me that you normally have them with women?”

  “With women?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah... No. Sorry. There’s no trading on this team.”

  If he looked slightly disappointed at that confession, she was willing to ignore it in the name of self-interest. The chances of this situation repeating itself anytime in the near future were slim, and she wasn’t about to throw him out for acting like a hot-blooded man.

  In fact, if he didn’t start acting like a hot-blooded man anytime soon, she was going to have to take matters into her own hands anyway.

  No hot blood emerged in the next thirty seconds. Neither did any cold blood. He just kept staring at her with that same concerned pucker to his brow, as if he was trying to work out a particularly difficult puzzle. Georgia had an inkling what would happen when he did—and that she wouldn’t like the outcome—so she gave herself permission to attack.

  It was now or never, and never seemed like an awfully long time to spend alone.

  There was only a short distance between them, and she covered the ground quickly, her arms out and ready to embrace him. As she’d hoped—dreamed, imagined, prayed for—he was a hard rock of a man, warm and stalwart. Not even when she threw the full force of her body against him did he falter, and although his arms didn’t come up to hold her tight, he didn’t push her away either.

  She brought her lips to his in a gesture that was more experiment than kiss. She wanted to know if he would kiss her back, if he could kiss her back.

  The answer, as it turned out, was yes.

  It took a good ten seconds of pressure before he responded, but she knew the moment the press of her mouth against his transformed from assault to reciprocation. He sighed and softened just enough for her to slip in some tongue, and that was all it took to move into a full-blown embrace. He wasn’t quite as firm as she’d been hoping, and he didn’t grip her by the back of her neck and throw her to the bed to ravage all her senses, but he did drop a hand to her waist, resting it naturally where her hip flared out.

  There was a tender possession to the gesture that tingled through her pelvis, and she deepened the kiss without thought.

  Monty tasted, inexplicably, of almonds. It took her a moment to realize she wasn’t tasting him, but smelling, her senses so jumbled she couldn’t discern between the two. His lips grew increasingly warm and responsive, and when his tongue rubbed against hers with a delicious sense of urgency, she felt the pull of it deep in her belly.

  This might work. This might actually freaking work.

  But then he groaned and pulled away before the kiss started to get really good, and she stood there—in her robe, turned on and aware that something was terribly wrong.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, his hands falling heavily to his sides. “You can’t do that.”

  “Kiss you? Why not?” The terribly wrong part of the situation only grew more insistent, a warning flashing in the periphery. “Isn’t that what you came here for?”

  “Isn’t that what I...” He shook his head, his frown directed in and out and all over the room. “No. Georgia. No. Is this what you thought I invited myself over to do?”

  She heard his words. She registered them. They made some sort of indentation on her ability to process thought—but not enough to actually bring any of the wheels to a grinding halt. “Does it matter? That kiss was incredible. Don’t you want to do it again?”

  “No. I most certainly do not.”

  She didn’t have time for the familiar crush of disappointment to hit, because she was pulled up against his chest once again—and not of her own volition. This time, he didn’t hold himself back, and he was every bit as firm as a woman could wish.

  No. Firmer.

  While she’d always assumed Monty was strong, there was no way she could have known he’d use quite so much of his arms to wrap around her and press her body next to his. She didn’t know that her limbs would react quite so overwhelmingly either, clinging to him like some kind of wilting vine. Georgia had always prided herself on being able to stand on her own two feet, but in Monty’s arms, she was a swooning, dainty scrap of a woman.

  Georgia had never been dainty in her life. Not even as a baby. She’d cracked her mom’s pelvis on the way through the birth canal.

  Monty’s mouth moved over hers again, tongue rough and teeth engaged, and she felt herself being backed toward the bed. Her body ached for that bed, for him to crush her to it, and she gripped his shoulders in anticipation of the fall.

  And then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t kissing her anymore.

  “This can’t be happening.” He pushed her away, and she lost her balance, falling to the mattress with her robe askew. She could see him gaping at where her breasts almost escaped from the material, but her hands were shaking too much to close herself off from view. “Georgia—when I told you I wanted to take you up on your offer, did you think I meant the offer of sex?”

  “I...”

  Oh. Oh, no. This couldn’t be happening. She looked down at her cleavage—unimpressive as it was—and back at him. Monty was the most disheveled she’d ever seen him, his skin flushed with color, his tie crooked, a spark of life to him she’d never known existed before. But even in an obviously flustered state, it was impossible to miss the signs. The business suit. The calm way he’d talked to her mother. The fact that before she’d made the somewhat clumsy offer for him to sleep with her, she’d also asked him to volunteer for Homeward Bound.

  “You came here about the construction stuff,” she said, shock rendering her voice hollow. “You want to build houses with me.”

  Just like that, the pieces came crashing down. They hit like golf-ball-sized hail, and she had nowhere to hide. All she could do was sit there and take it.

  There would be no sex. No plowing. No orgasm. Nothing even remotely approaching desire.

  “It’s my fault,” Monty said. “After the incident in the kitchen this morning, it was my responsibility to be more upfront about setting boundaries—”

  “No.” If Georgia was clear on one thing right now, it was that she had to be the stupidest woman on the face of the planet. Of course Monty hadn’t come here to ravish her. If he was a ten with a somewhat stilted personality, she was a three whose personality bordered on the slightly manic. On no planet did those two combine. “I don’t know why I was ever deluded enough to think you might have wanted...well. Me.”

  “Georgia.”

  She shook her head, hoping the rapid movement might drown out the sound of pity in his voice. “I have a mirror. I know how these things work.”

  “Of course it’s not
that.”

  “You don’t have to be nice. It’s okay.”

  He took her at her word and said nothing—all that was needed to tie up this moment in a tidy bow of humiliation. He could have been a little nice.

  “I think maybe you should leave now,” she said, feeling sick to her stomach.

  “Do you, ah, want to talk about it first?”

  Talk? There was nothing that Monty—this taciturn, sexily rumpled, oh-so-uninterested-in-her man—could say that would render this situation acceptable. Even if he were a golden-tongued wordsmith, there were only so many combinations of letters in the English language.

  “Not really.”

  “But maybe we should—”

  “No.” Humiliation had sharpened her mood, honing it into something dangerous, and she pointed it outward in a familiar gesture. Attack or be attacked. Defend at all costs. She might not have ever been any good at making the boys on the playground like her, but she’d been damned successful at making them respect her. “If you overheard everything from earlier today, I think you’d realize that conversation is the last thing anyone wants from you. Please go.”

  She regretted the words—cruel and unforgiveable—the moment they crossed her lips, but she couldn’t regret how effective they were in helping her achieve her goal. With a hurt look, penetrating in how deeply it touched her, Monty nodded once.

  Then he was gone.

  Chapter Four

  “I’m sorry, John, but it’s not optional. We can’t afford for the world to think there’s any bad blood between us and the Bridgertons. You’re going to that wedding.”

  Monty clutched his hands firmly behind his back, using the pressure of intertwined fingers to save himself from saying something he’d regret later. It wasn’t often that he had to fight to keep the words at bay, but this had been a week of rare and unnerving circumstances.

  “I think you’ll come to realize it’s best for all of us,” his dad added. “You need to at least give the appearance of having moved on.”