Dirty Sexy Knitting

by Christie Ridgway

  Gabe stroked her thigh, pushing her short skirt up toward her hips.

  —and sexy.

  It was better than fettuccine.

  He drew gentle fingers up and down her leg, moving from her knee and up as far as her skirt’s hem would allow, even then always pushing it up, so that he could tickle the insides of her thighs. Her hot blush didn’t stop her from opening her legs and letting him explore as he wanted. He found the edge of her panties, then brushed across the satin that covered her most sensitive area. She gasped, but he didn’t linger, moving on and down to touch her other thigh.

  Cassandra turned her head to look out the window, because watching his hand on her flesh was making her too needy. Any second now and she’d beg him to pull over, when surely what he wanted was another slow session of lovemaking like they’d experienced that first night.

  By the time they arrived at his house she was shaking. Her nipples throbbed, her breasts were swollen, and the place between her legs felt soft and achy. He touched the small of her back as he ushered her to the front door and the brief contact thrilled up her spine and down the backs of both bare legs.

  In his bedroom, he didn’t turn on the light, but instead flipped on the gas in the tiled fireplace that occupied the wall opposite the big bed. Then he sat on the edge of the mattress and drew her to stand in front of him. She’d already kicked off her shoes, her tights lay abandoned in his car, so all he had to do was unbutton here, unzip there, and soon she was standing in front of him, completely nude. She tried to hide her quivering as he pulled back the covers and urged her between the sheets.

  Her breasts were heavy. She was so wet between her thighs that surely he could see the gleam of moisture in the firelight as he crawled, himself now naked, between her legs and gazed on her there. She swallowed, more aroused by the intent look in his eyes than she thought she could be if he touched her.

  His gaze jumped to hers. “Your cats. Moosewood, Breathe, and Ed. Do they need to be fed tonight?”

  Oh, God. Not only was the man sexy, he was thoughtful, too. “No,” she answered, her voice husky. “I took a break in the late afternoon and took care of them.”

  Smiling, he bent his head. “Oh, good, then I can take care of this pussy.”

  She started. He hadn’t just said that. He had just said that! Because he was laughing and pressing open her thighs with the palms of his big hands and then . . . and then . . . and then she was gone, reeling, rocketing, streaking skyward from the first lap of his silky tongue.

  Coming back to herself, she was mortified to find him staring at her face, his expression bemused. “I . . . I messed that up,” she said, embarrassed by how eager and easy she’d been. It was his fault—all that maddening foreplay in the car. “I’m sorry.”

  “Froot Loop,” he admonished. “Shh. I’m thanking you, sweetheart.” He leaned down to place a kiss on her still-throbbing center. “Because you’re always giving me second chances.”

  He did so well with them, too, she thought, her head digging into the pillow as her neck arched. His second chance was her pleasure, the kind of pleasure that had her squirming, twisting, begging. He made her come again, and then he rose up and slid into her—no pain on entry this time—but just a delicious, satisfying fullness as he took her mouth and she tasted herself on Gabe’s lips and tongue.

  A taste worth the future she’d foreseen.

  Afterward, they turned together and he drew up the covers. His body was curved around her back. He slid a hand down her hip, and then insinuated it between her thighs, petting her there in languid strokes. She wiggled a little and he smiled against her shoulder.

  “Shh,” he said. “Go to sleep.”

  She was drifting off, only half-aware when she felt one of his long fingers slide into the still-damp entrance of her body. It could have been sexual, but now it just felt like the connection they both needed.

  “You won’t leave my bed,” he murmured.

  She couldn’t help responding with a whispered promise she knew she was going to regret someday. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Fourteen

  Where does family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl—no superior alternative has yet been found.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  Marlys had a good reason for calling Dean. “I require the transporting of a heavy object,” she said, leaving off the traditional “hello” and “how are you.”

  When he tried that tack himself, she refused to respond. The first was a waste of time; the second was obvious. She would only dial his number if she was in desperate straits. “I require the transporting of a heavy object,” she repeated.

  “Will it fit on the back of my Harley?”

  Oh, crap. She hadn’t thought about that. She’d been so overwhelmed by that big-and-getting-bigger thing in her living room that she was ready to put a FOR SALE sign on the Palisades house and leave the two-ton object behind.

  “I thought men always had access to utility vehicles.” At one time, she’d considered it the only good thing about them.

  “Maybe your friend Phil—”

  “No!” Her free hand immediately rubbed at her arms and legs. Poor Phil. He’d been relegated to spider status—in the way that once an arachnid was mentioned, a person would sense them crawling across their skin. And though it wasn’t his fault, in her mind his name was now synonymous with “brown recluse” and “tarantula.”

  She scrubbed her skin again. “I’ll . . . I’ll find someone else to help me.”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t help, Marlys.” His voice was quiet. “Is that what you’re asking me for?”

  “Yes.” She should have taken it back. She should have at least hesitated, but she was at risk of being flattened under the weight of what was growing in her living room. Even Blackie was affected. He had taken to slinking low as he moved about the house, always looking over his shoulder.

  “I’ll be right there,” Dean said.

  She and Blackie were waiting on the front porch steps. They both tried appearing nonchalant, lolling on the red bricks in the warm winter sunshine, but when Dean pulled up in a truck—she recognized it as Noah’s—Marlys and her dog both shot to their feet.

  Blackie rushed to the long-legged man and tried scaling his knees so he could plant a doggie kiss on the soldier’s face. Marlys couldn’t object, since she had approximately the same desire the moment his silver eyes met hers.

  “Sit,” he said.

  As usual, like Blackie, she wanted to succumb to the command in his voice, but she kept her place as he strode over to her. “I’ve missed you,” he said, and now her knees did bend, softened by the low note in his voice.

  He kept her upright by cupping her face between his big hands and kissing her.

  Heat flashed over her skin and her stomach turned inside out. She clutched at him, sagging again, affected by the melting kiss and the way the weight of the object in her living room seemed to rest upon her shoulders. The weakness galvanized her, giving her the nerve-ridden ability to push off his chest and sway on her own two feet.

  He was here so she could find a way to shore herself up, not strip herself down.

  Dean rubbed his thumb over her lips. They burned, so she yanked her head away and looked over her shoulder at the front door. “It’s in there.”

  With a puzzled glance at her, he headed up the front steps. “It’s not a rat, is it? I charge extra for rodent extermination.”

  “It’s dead,” she whispered at his back. But it seemed alive enough to her as she moved about the house. It had taken on this living weight that she needed to be rid of in order to stop feeling so much about it. Stop feeling so much about the man it represented.

  She plain wanted to stop all these damn feelings!

  At the threshold of the open doorway, she lingered, her gaze on the wide vee of Dean’s shoulders and the heavy muscles of his back. If only she were that strong. He was staring at the . . . the thing. The albat
ross that stood in the corner of the living room but also seemed permanently tied around her neck.

  The cutout of her father had been sitting in that spot for days. She didn’t give it ghost status—she didn’t believe in those and she didn’t think her father would choose to haunt her anyway. Instead she knew it to be the weighty embodiment of her disappointment, of her fears, of her grief.

  She wanted freedom from them. From it.

  Her hand crept up to grasp the silver tear that held a trace of her father’s ashes. She’d started wearing it around her neck when Dean had left last fall, hoping it could contain all the emotions and weakness she didn’t want to feel.

  He turned to face her. “What are we going to do with the thing?”

  “We’re taking it to Malibu Creek State Park,” she said.

  She gave Dean directions. It was in the Santa Monica Mountains and a popular place for hiking and fishing and picnicking. Movies and television shows had been filmed there. She’d visited it with her father when she was twelve.

  It was the first time she’d seen him after her mother had moved them off base. Her dad had been out of the country at the time and she’d counted on him reuniting them as a family when he returned. That day, he’d come early to the rental house where she was living. She’d been a typical preteen, nowhere near awake at seven A.M., but so happy to spend time with her father and so certain he was going to make everything right again that she’d agreed to go along on the hike he suggested.

  She’d yawned through the first couple of miles, tramping on a trail that took them through oaks and sycamores and over chaparral-covered slopes. He’d been silent by her side.

  They’d stopped at an isolated picnic spot. Sitting on the wooden table, he’d rummaged through the pack he’d had slung over one shoulder. She didn’t take the orange juice he offered.

  She’d been shocked when he dragged out a can of beer for himself and downed it without taking a breath. Her father never drank during the day. It was still morning!

  Then he’d told her that he and her mother were getting a divorce.

  She and Dean took a similar path to the one she’d hiked with her father that day. She didn’t know if it was the same, and she didn’t care. You could get to the site where they’d shot both the M*A*S*H movie and TV series. A replica of the iconic signpost was even planted in the dirt, but that wasn’t the way Blackie chose. He was with them, and it was he that selected their path, his plume of a tail waving.

  They didn’t encounter anyone in the parking lot or along that trail, which she figured was Dean’s good luck at work. He was the one carting the nine-foot figure of the general, after all.

  Up ahead, Blackie came to a picnic site and plopped his butt on the powdery brown silt to wait for them. Marlys eyed the area, her gaze snagging on the fire ring. “This will do,” she said.

  Dean guessed what she had in mind. He held up the cardboard figure, glanced at the size of the fire ring, then without a word, proceeded to fold the cardboard into a manageable size. She looked the other way, not because she was freaked to see him accordion the image, but because it was so tempting to think that he could do the same with all that had been troubling her since last fall . . . since last year . . . since she was twelve. If she surrendered to Dean’s confident hands, her sissy psyche wanted to think, she could be saved.

  Hah.

  If he knew what she’d done with Phil, Dean would be loathe to touch her at all.

  Blackie whined—sometimes she thought he was as good at reading her as Dean—and she petted his head as she reached into the pocket of her jeans for the disposable lighter she’d brought along. When she turned back, the cardboard was stuffed into the fire ring.

  Dean stepped back. He didn’t offer to take the lighter from her.

  She lit as many folded corners as she could reach. As the flames began eating through the layers of paper, she figured she owed Dean some kind of explanation. “He told me he and my mother were getting a divorce in this park.” She watched a glowing piece of the board shrivel. “Just that brief statement, and then he said, ‘You’ll be fine.’ ”

  Though she’d known she couldn’t comply with what he’d put to her like an order, she hadn’t contradicted her father. She was a soldier’s daughter, after all. Instead she’d stood there in silence, less than five feet of stricken girl-going-on-woman and knew what it was to feel impotent and despairing and abandoned. Quite the preparation for the rest of her life.

  She’d done okay, though. Sure, she’d always been a bit prickly with other people, but she hadn’t felt the lack of anything until her father died. Until Dean entered into her life.

  Then, emotions had risen from that deep place where she’d always stuffed them, growing bigger and heavier until she found she couldn’t breathe. Those feelings were what she was hoping to burn away.

  And as the fire consumed the cardboard, making it smaller and smaller and smaller, she began to feel lighter and lighter and lighter. She curled her fingers into the thick fur of Blackie’s scruff and blinked away the sting the smoke put in her eyes. Her plan was working!

  She looked from the fire to Dean’s cool silver gaze, trying to put the past into perspective. “Surely he realized that it wasn’t going to be easy for me.”

  He shrugged. “I suppose it was more convenient for him to believe the opposite.”

  “De Nile,” she murmured, “not just a river in Egypt, huh?” Her attention returned to the firepit and the satisfy ingly small pile of cinders that the nine feet of hurt and unpleasant memories had become.

  Blackie pressed against her leg, and in the well of her belly, something released, a buoyant something that rose to hover in her chest. Her heart. Free?

  “Marlys?”

  Almost weightless herself, she turned to him, overjoyed to think that perhaps she’d left the past behind her. “Thank you,” she said. “You once told me you’d take my tears away and I think that you just did.”

  “Have a little sympathy for your father if you can,” Dean said softly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m sure it’s hell to know you’ve hurt the one you love.”

  She froze, the general forgotten as her mind reversed, leaping to last November. I’m sure it’s hell to know you’ve hurt the one you love. She saw Dean standing at the front door of her house, the anticipation on his face sliding away as Phil trotted down the stairs. Her palms scraped against her upper arms, her hips, her thighs.

  Dean’s eyes narrowed. “Marlys? What’s wrong?”

  Without a word, she hurried back on the trail the way they’d come, though certain this new feeling wasn’t something she could leave behind at the park. The past just wasn’t that easy to get rid of, she realized. Because though she might feel the weight had been lifted off her shoulders, she had the distinct sense that the rest of her would never feel clean.

  Back at the house, she burst through the front door and headed for her bathroom. With every quarter mile they’d traveled away from the park, the shame of what she’d done in November tightened like a dirty, second skin. I’m sure it’s hell to know you’ve hurt the one you love.

  It was ugly, is what it was, and she needed to wash it away if she could.

  Naked, she stepped under the scalding spray of her shower. She lifted her face, letting the needles of water bounce off her flesh, then picked up the bath sponge and doused it in gel soap. The scent bloomed in the steamy air, and she breathed gulps of it, hoping to dispel the olfactory memory of Phil’s Armani cologne.

  She scrubbed at her arms and legs, rubbed the sponge in harsh circles against her throat and over her breasts and between her thighs, her eyes squeezed tight as she tried to send the psychic stain on her skin down the shower’s drain.

  “Marlys.” A hand clamped over hers.

  Eyes flying open, she gasped, shocked to find a fully dressed Dean inside the tiled stall. His expression was grim as he used his free hand to adjust the temperature. “You’ll be parboiled.”
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  She’d never be clean.

  “Get out,” she said, yanking her fingers from his grip. Soap bubbles flew from the sponge. One landed on his chin. Stuck there. Marlys backed against the wall and told herself she wouldn’t touch it. She wouldn’t touch him.

  He had no such compunctions. His hand slid behind her neck and she jerked away.

  “No! I’m dirty.”

  He froze. Then his silver eyes narrowed. “Never,” he said. “Never.”

  Without another hesitation, he pulled her into his arms, her naked body against his wet clothes. They scratched her overheated, overabraded skin, and she found herself crying at the tiny hurt. Crying, sobbing, falling apart like she’d never wanted to fall apart, had never allowed herself to fall apart, since she was twelve years old and her father had taken that emotional outlet away.

  You’ll be fine.

  She hadn’t been fine, she wasn’t fine, she was a basket case who could no longer hold it together. But Dean was doing that for her now, holding her close, holding her so that she wouldn’t shatter into a million pieces of emotional glass.

  The catharsis lasted long enough for the water to cool. When she was crying and shivering, Dean lifted her legs and carried her like a child out of the shower. With one hand he reached for the towel and wrapped it around her. She watched her hair drip on the tile floor as he set her down on the closed toilet seat.

  “Shut your eyes—or at least look away,” he said, with a little smile. “I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes before they shrink while I’m inside them.” She didn’t have the energy to do either. Instead, she huddled under the terry cloth and watched more than six feet of sometimes lean and sometimes bulky muscle emerge from the chrysalis of his saturated clothing.

  Another time she might have thought, Wow.

  Now she could only reach over and hand him a second towel.

  “Don’t cry,” he said, as he tucked it around his waist. “Don’t cry.”