Barefoot and shirtless, dressed only in the cartoon character pants he’d pulled on after bathing Abraham, Jon pulled the door open. His body sprang to instant attention when he saw who was on his doorstep. Staring at his naked chest.
“Lillie! Come in.”
Stepping back into the shadows behind the door, he pushed the screen door outward.
She looked incredible in her tight jeans and a white, formfitting long-sleeved T-shirt.
He didn’t ask why she’d come. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
He’d bought the condoms. And there she was.
Not that he really believed he was going to have sex with her that night.
“I brought this for you,” she said, holding out a plastic bag.
A gift. He didn’t receive many. Wasn’t particularly good at accepting them.
Embarrassed, he pulled open the bag and glanced awkwardly inside. And then he recognized the softly padded cushion, the big zippers and buttons.
The gift wasn’t for him. He grinned.
“You ordered one for us?” he asked, glancing over at her. He’d checked with the day care owner about the educational tool, planning to order one, until he’d found out the cost.
He and Abraham would have had to give up fast food for three months. At least.
At the moment, he didn’t care. He’d sacrifice a year’s worth, a lifetime’s worth, of greasy burgers, if it brought Lillie Henderson to his door.
“Abe loves it and doesn’t get enough chances to play with it,” she said. “He’s good about sharing, and that’s important, too, but I thought―”
“It’s great!” Jon jumped in. “Really, this means a lot. Thank you.”
He was staring at her now, not at the toy in his hand.
“You’re welcome.” Her smile grew. And she wavered.
“Uh...how much do I owe you?” He knew the ballpark amount. Not exact. And hoped she’d take a check because he didn’t keep much cash on him—other than what he’d stashed in the emergency bag that he never touched.
“You don’t owe me anything.” Still standing in his doorway, her hair coming out of the ponytail he now knew she wore to work every day, Lillie shrugged.
“No way. I’m already so far in your debt I’m going to end up remodeling your entire house to get myself back in the black. Tell me how much I owe you.”
“It’s a gift, Jon. From me to Abraham. You don’t pay someone back for a gift.”
“A rubber ball—that would be a gift. This...”
He didn’t have to make it an issue. But it kept her standing there. He’d write a check later, for more than Bonnie had quoted.
And learn how to make hamburgers and French fries at home as well as the fast-food restaurant did.
“Bonnie gets things donated from wholesalers,” Lillie said. “And she also gets things at a huge discount. She shares with me.”
“Does she know you’re giving this to me? For Abraham?”
“Yes.”
He tried to come up with another argument, but failed. “Cute pants.” She was staring at his cartoon characters.
“I told you about them.” About the sticky fingers that had taught him to always keep a safe distance between strollers, shopping carts and goods that he didn’t want to buy.
“Yeah, they look a lot better on you than I imagined.”
Hoping she couldn’t make out particulars in the dim light, he stepped farther back and said, “You want to stay for a bit? Have some tea or something? I’d offer you wine, but I don’t have any.”
He’d done his share of drinking as a teen. Hadn’t had more than a beer or two at a time since he’d been let out of the prison for juveniles.
“I really have to get going,” she said, but she didn’t move toward the door. “I haven’t been home from work yet.”
He knew by now that when she was planning to stop anywhere on her way home, she changed out of her scrubs at the clinic. The jeans and T-shirt were telling him something.
“Have you eaten dinner?”
“Not yet.”
“I made spaghetti.” He heard the words coming out of his mouth and was proud of himself for thinking of them. “Homemade sauce. I’d be happy to heat up the leftovers. It’s not enough for another meal for Abe and me.”
“But you saved them.”
He shrugged.
“I do that, too,” she said, not moving from her spot just inside the doorway. “It’s my job to keep all leftovers until they start growing things. Then I can throw them away,” she said with a grin.
“So you’ll save me from having to be host to the container in the refrigerator until it grows things?” he asked.
“I guess.” She glanced around. “As long as I’m not disturbing anything.” Her gaze landed on the computer and tablet on the couch where he’d left them.
“Homework,” he said. “I’m pretty well caught up.”
He’d actually been reading ahead, in case he got offered extra hours at work in the coming days.
“I like your sofa.”
It was dark plaid. “It’s washable,” he offered. “The place came furnished.”
“I know. I helped Caroline a bit this summer with repainting some of her student rentals.”
“Was this one of them?”
“No. It wasn’t this complex. But she described the various decorating schemes she’d applied to make each of her properties a little different from the others.”
Lillie followed him into the kitchen and told him about some of Caroline’s experiences as a landlord while he heated the spaghetti. When it was ready, he sat with her at his little table for four and watched her eat.
“Caro is a firm believer in environment as a contributor to success. If she can offer students a nice place to live, she believes they’ll have a better chance at succeeding.”
Her plate almost empty, she was staring at the booster seat. Jon looked, too, expecting to see splotches of spaghetti sauce he’d missed. Toddlers had a way of leaving things in the most inconspicuous places.
“He had another tantrum today,” she said slowly.
Jon straightened. “Bonnie said he’d had a good day.” He’d asked her when he’d called. And again when he’d picked up his son.
“She wasn’t there when it happened. And it ended so fast we decided not to chart it.”
“Was he in a big group when it happened?”
“Yes, but the crying didn’t start until the kids all started to move.”
Disappointment hit him, although he tried to hold it at bay. They’d had such a good experience at the museum the day before. All those crowds, the hoards of unfamiliar kids, and Abe had held his own like a champ. A NASCAR driver and president all rolled into one.
Give him a year to develop some coordination and he’d be a professional ball player, too.
He’d thought they were through the worst of it.
“They were in movement class, learning to play ring-around-the-rosy, and when the kids started to walk around in a circle, he lost it for a bit.”
“A normal two-year-old tantrum because he liked the spot where he was standing?” Jon asked hopefully.
“I’m not sure.” She was frowning. “The good news is that it was over almost as soon as it had begun. All of Abe’s instructors know to kneel in front of him to get his focus and then ask him to use his words. As soon as the movement instructor did that, he stopped crying and responded to her. He was fine afterward.”
“Did he play ring-around-the-rosy?”
“Yep. And he laughed like crazy when they all fell down.”
So, a minor setback. They weren’t out of the woods, but they could see the clearing. “I love that laugh,” Jon said, grinning. Who’d ever have thoug
ht such a little thing—his kid’s laugh—could make him feel so good?
“Don’t you ever get the least bit resentful of having to do it all alone?” Lillie’s gaze was clear, direct.
“Nope.” She could report anything he said or did....
Jon stopped himself.
She was his friend. And his answer was still the same.
Lillie’s face had cleared and she was staring at him again. In that way.
“Did Caroline ask about us today?” He didn’t know where the words had come from. He hadn’t been thinking about them in that moment. At least not consciously.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I told her that we were friends,” she said, like the topic was no big deal. But there was something slightly whimsical in her tone, too. Something he could barely capture but wanted to hold.
“Did she let it go at that?”
“Pretty much.” She licked her lips.
He slid his lightly covered hips a little bit farther under the table. “So we have nothing to worry about?”
Except that the news had traveled all the way to Mark Heber by lunchtime.
“I wasn’t worried to begin with.”
“These people are your friends.”
“I don’t ask them about their sex lives―” Eyes wide, mouth open, she broke off.
Jon leaned his elbows on the table. “Is that what we’re talking about? Our sex life?”
He was a man. With a woman who turned him on. And God knew, he wasn’t perfect.
“No! Of course not.”
Her face was red. And he was hotter than hell.
“Are we going to have one?”
“I...don’t know.”
“We need to find out what it’s like,” he said out loud. But not loudly. “Sex. Between us. To put an end to this constant wondering.”
She nodded.
“It’s just a physical thing.”
She nodded again.
“Want to get it over with?” He did. Now before it was too late. Before the sheriff came knocking on his door with a copy of his criminal record in hand, asking questions. Before Lillie found out about his past.
Or turned him over to Clara. He needed her to know the real Jon Swartz. The man inside who would love and protect for as long as she’d let him.
After her third nod, Jon stood in front of her.
Taking her hand, he led her to the living room and the couch she’d admired, but didn’t sit down. Pulling her against him, he let her feel the extent of his arousal and gave himself the heavenly relief of pressing himself into her sweet body. Then he dropped his mouth to hers.
The kiss wasn’t “hello.” Or “I want to get to know you.” It wasn’t even “I want to taste you.” Jon, a man who generally held back in deference to his overzealousness, took Lillie in his arms and went straight for “I have to have you.”
Her response was better than anything he could have imagined.
* * *
LILLIE ENJOYED SEX. She felt the usual things in the usual ways. But Jon’s touch ignited feelings she didn’t know existed. A hunger and aggressiveness she’d never have believed possible of herself.
Like a stranger at her own party, she moved and reacted, and didn’t recognize herself at all.
And all they’d done was stand in Jon’s living room and kiss.
“Who am I?” she murmured aloud as Jon lifted his lips and stared down at her. Her only consolation was that his breathing was as ragged as hers.
“My dream come true.”
The words should have been corny. The sincerity shining from his eyes melted her.
Melted any last speck of her that his body hadn’t already incinerated.
Her hands moved of their own accord as they stood there staring at each other. Her palms had already traversed every inch of his smooth and muscled back. His shoulders.
Now, as they separated an inch, she slid her fingers around to the front of him, burying them in the mass of dark hair covering his chest. His nipples were there, waiting for her, but she avoided them for the moment—almost afraid of what that next step would bring.
“I’ve wanted to do this since that first walk we took on campus.” She couldn’t believe she’d told him that.
“You have?”
“Uh-huh.” The roughness of his hair tickled her palms as she lightly massaged his pecs. “You had your shirt unbuttoned and your hair was peeking through and...I noticed it.”
“You want to know what I noticed about you?”
She hadn’t thought she could get any more turned on. Any more needy. “Yes.”
“Your hands.”
“What?”
“Your hands. They’re slender and soft and feminine and so...capable.”
His hips, still pressing against her, shifted, drawing her attention to his very erect penis. She pushed her pelvis against him.
“You’re turned on by my hands?” It was different. But nice.
“Yeah...” The word was as much a groan as a verbalization. “And your legs and your butt. The slenderness of your waist. The way your hair falls out of your ponytail. But your breasts really do it for me....”
He pushed against her again with his lower half while separating their torsos just a bit as he glanced down at her top.
Could he tell that her nipples were hard and straining for him? “But then, looking at your knees does it for me, too,” he added.
She laughed. And stopped. Sex had never been funny before. Or particularly fun, either. It had felt good, but been focused. Serious.
“Is it always this intense for you?”
“You mean, has the sound of a woman’s voice ever made me forget my own name, like yours does?”
His honesty spun her out of control. Jon wasn’t only the first man she’d been truly interested in since Kirk, he was a whole new world for her.
“You’ve got it bad, sir,” she told him with newfound freedom, prepared to fly as high as he’d take her.
“Guilty as charged.” He didn’t seem to mind as he leaned forward and kissed her again, his lips open against hers from the start, his tongue probing the inside of her mouth.
It was just physical, he’d assured her.
But she couldn’t take him in far enough, couldn’t get far enough into him. Her whole being pushed toward him, needing far more than he was giving her.
Needing him to touch places that hadn’t been touched in too many years. And a thought struck her....
She hadn’t had sex since Braydon. She’d given birth to him naturally and things had...changed. Would sex hurt?
Would Jon be able to tell that she’d given birth?
She should know these things, but she didn’t.
There’d been no reason for her to ask her doctor about postnatal intercourse when she’d had Braydon.
“What’s wrong?” Jon had stopped kissing her.
She panicked. And still wanted him. “Abraham,” she managed to get out. “What about Abraham?”
“He’s sound asleep.”
“What if he wakes up?”
Frowning, Jon held her shoulders, gently rubbing them. “I’m not sure,” he said. “You’d know better than I would about something like that. What do parents do if their kids wake up while they’re having sex?”
“Best-case scenario is that they’re in their bedroom with the door locked so there are no surprises.” She could breathe again and was feeling better.
“I have a lock on my door.”
Okay. Good.
No one in Shelter Valley knew about Braydon. She’d lost him in her old life. “I don’t have any birth control. Do you?” she asked.
She was a professional who w
orked in the medical field.
And her body had been inhabited by a wanton woman who was taking her places she wasn’t sure she was ready to go.
But she wanted to go.
God, how she wanted to.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“I HAVE CONDOMS.”
Jon answered Lillie’s birth control question. But they weren’t going to have sex. At least, not that night. The shadows in her eyes made that clear, even if her questions did not.
Taking her hand, he led her to the couch, relieved to see that she followed him easily.
“Look,” he said right off. “I don’t want you to feel pressured at all. If this isn’t right for you, that’s okay. We don’t have to sleep together.” He meant every word.
“But—”
“No,” he interrupted her. “We can be as close as you’re comfortable with. Physically or not. We’re friends either way.”
“I want to have sex.” Her smile was tinged with sadness as she ran her fingers gently across his face. Jon turned and kissed them. “I guess I’m just not as ready as I thought I was.”
“Then we’ll wait.”
“Not too long,” she said, her eyes getting that hungry look again, confusing him with her mixed messages. “I’m... I just wasn’t prepared tonight and―”
Remembering the months he’d spent with Kate, prior to the pregnancy, he wondered if she was having that time of the month.
“I don’t want you to think I’m rushing things,” he told her again in case his first impression was accurate and she just wasn’t ready.
He could manage fine without sex.
At least, he’d been doing all right without it before she’d come waltzing into his life, a human aphrodisiac that just didn’t quit.
“I also want you to know that I just bought the condoms today. I haven’t had sex since before Abe was born,” he continued, holding her hand and hating that his body was still begging him to do so much more.
“I got them in Phoenix,” he added. “So no one here could see me buying them and draw conclusions about us.”
Lillie leaned into him and pressed her lips to his. “I wasn’t worried,” she said. “I trust you, Jon. Implicitly. And if people think we’re having sex, that’s okay, too.”
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