Ten Thousand Hours

by Ren Benton

  “It’s incredibly sexy that you scheme to get me out of my clothes.”

  It was incredibly sexy that she wrapped her lips around the straw in her milkshake and took a drag without breaking eye contact. “That’s how men spend the majority of their time.”

  “Not about me, or I’d have been naked more often.” Her eyes widened with innocent dismay. “Oh, no. I have carelessly wiped my messy hands on my pants. I shall have no choice but to remove them, as well.”

  What idiot wouldn’t tell this woman how desirable she was? It took so little effort to unlock her playful side. “Don’t you want men to respect you for your mind and value your kindness?”

  “Depends. Do you want me to fill out your 1040 and take care of your dog while you’re out of town, or do you want me to suck your dick?”

  She sucked a drip of burger grease from her thumb while awaiting his response.

  His focus contracted to the vicinity of her mouth and the pink tip of her tongue gliding over a knuckle. “Well, I have an accountant, and I don’t have a dog.”

  “Then it sounds like we should get this legendary pie to go” — she swiped her glistening thumb across her lower lip — “and get on with the removal of these dirty, dirty clothes.”

  Ivy tossed her ball of clothes at Griff and hooked her leg around the frame of the laundry room doorway in what she would like to imagine was a seductive pose.

  He looked her up and down, showing no visible signs of being seduced. “You’re not naked.”

  “I was.” Then she’d scavenged a T-shirt from the top of the hamper in his bathroom and covered the worst of her arms and thighs and all points in between. “You missed it.”

  “I knew I should have heeded my ungentlemanly instincts and followed you into the bathroom. Once again, chivalry screws me over.” He peeled apart the clothing ball and let her bra and panties drop into the washer. He watched them fall and then slid her a glance. “Are you wearing the red lace?”

  She bent her knees and pulled the hem of his shirt even lower. “It’s a surprise.”

  While he poured detergent on the stains in a masterful display of domestic competence, she placed the seam ripper on top of the dryer to be reclaimed when she again had pockets.

  After her shirt and pants joined her unmentionables in the washer and began their bath, Griff picked up the tiny pink tube and pulled off the cap to investigate. “The world’s tiniest dagger to defend the Duchess against the world’s tiniest assassins?”

  She thought of it as a diet fork because it would hold, at most, one grain of rice. “It’s a seam ripper.”

  “There’s a tool specifically for undermining the integrity of underwear? What a time to be alive.” He returned it to the dryer. “You sew?”

  “‘Sew’ is a strong word.” She learned she wasn’t much of a seamstress long ago when trying to let out a skirt she had grown wider than. “I can do minor fray-and-tear repair and button replacement, that kind of thing. Not considered one of my many talents.”

  “Sounds like a talent to someone who throws away a shirt when a button falls off.”

  Must be nice not to have to be thrifty. Her clothing budget had been co-opted one kid at a time. Unless an item in her wardrobe literally fell apart, she would find a way to make it wearable until it did. “Maybe I’ll rip your buttons off sometime and teach you a new skill.”

  “Speaking of ripping.”

  The reminder sent a hot stab of need between her legs, immobilizing her.

  His hand slid up her outer thigh, the soft cotton of the tee bunching around his wrist. Fingers curled beneath the lacy edge of the underwear she had painstakingly weakened. He gave a sharp yank.

  She shot across the inches separating them and slammed into his chest.

  After a moment of stunned silence, she smacked her hands against his shoulders. “You’ve got to be kidding me! These things disintegrate with one accidental trip through the washing machine, but now they’re indestructible?”

  She shuffled her feet out of the way of his as he walked toward her. “I can’t have panty-shredding sex even when I find an accomplice with big, strong woodworker’s hands who doesn’t balk at what a waste of money it is to ruin perfectly good lingerie!”

  She strung together every swear word she’d ever heard, which took a good long while, particularly with her determination to conjugate all the verb forms.

  Her butt bumped into the kitchen counter, where he had maneuvered her during her rant. He placed one of those big, strong woodworker’s hands over her mouth to dam the flood of profanity while the other reached around her to grab scissors from a canister on the counter. “I will take care of it — if you can be patient and practice self-deprivation for five more seconds.”

  She shivered at the icy slide of metal against her hip. He snipped the top edge of her underwear through the horizontal seam she’d overlooked. He fingered the bottom edge, located in the crease of her thigh, to ascertain the absence of another seam there. The scissors clattered on the counter behind her.

  He bent to inspect his handiwork. His breath fanned her thigh — and then he tossed her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and held her in place with a hand on her ass.

  Ivy closed her eyes and bit back a moan. She didn’t date men who manhandled her. Even if they’d had the muscle for it, such behavior wasn’t civilized or respectful.

  Lust wasn’t civilized or respectful. She’d always wanted someone to lust for her.

  Sometimes when she got what she wanted, it turned out to be less magical than imagined. This was not one of those times. The shoulder digging into her gut wasn’t soft as a pillow, but the pressure on her womb stimulated vaginal contractions that clamored for something to squeeze.

  To that end, she slid her hands around his front to get a head start on his fly.

  He slapped her hands away. “Unless you want to get dropped on the floor when I trip over my pants, stop that.”

  She’d like to be fucked on the floor, but preferably not after being dropped from shoulder height. She tightened her fingers in his shirt instead.

  He rewarded her good behavior with a rub of her butt.

  Despite all the space it occupied, that area of her anatomy had been sorely neglected. If she’d known how good that kind of attention felt, she’d have been rubbing it herself.

  He strode into his bedroom, turned the lights on, and in one step was too far from the switch for her straining fingers to flick it off.

  “Wai — oof!”

  Her lungs emptied when her back hit the mattress. He straddled her while she struggled to regain her breath. She abandoned that struggle in favor of holding down the hem of the shirt he tried to lift.

  He didn’t release his grip, but he didn’t force it, either. “I told you, I’ve seen it all.” With one hand, he traced the stretch marks on her thighs. “I’ve seen these tiger stripes and followed the direction they point me in.” His fingertips skimmed over the lace covering her sex before coming to rest on her stomach, which she sucked in. “I’ve seen this when you’re not trying to pull it into your spine.” The hand burrowed deeper into the shirt and closed over her breast. “I’ve seen these sweet things, too, unpadded and unpushed-up.”

  So much for the delusion she had desperately clung to that he hadn’t noticed every one of those defects.

  “Given that I’ve seen you and can’t get enough of you, can we please proceed under the assumption I like what I see and let me look as much as I want?”

  He wasn’t blind to her flaws, and he still wanted her. He could easily get a perfect woman, but he couldn’t get enough of her stretch marks and doughy belly and inadequate boobs.

  He liked something about her enough to find her phone number and call her. He liked something about her enough to want to see her again after sticky fake leather pants and dinner with four stressed kids.

  Maybe she really was a sex goddess, even if she didn’t look the part.

  She released her grip
on the shirt.

  He smirked in triumph.

  She caught his face between her hands. “Don’t look so smug. I expect great things from you in exchange for this concession.”

  He managed to look even smugger. “Honey, I’ve been operating with a handicap until now. My attention to detail when I can see what I’m doing will blow your mind.”

  She slipped his wallet out of his back pocket and rolled over on her belly to hide her grin. “Good to know there’s an excuse for your previous lackluster performance.”

  The swat on her butt forced a squawk of laughter out of her.

  She withdrew a condom from the secret compartment, and a slip of paper fell out with it. Tucking the paper back into hiding, she saw Gina, followed by a seven-digit number.

  She froze. No breath. No blinking.

  He probably didn’t file business contacts in his condom pocket.

  “There’s a box in the night table if we’re empty.”

  “I have one,” she said faintly.

  Ivy knew there were other women, and she was fine with that — in the abstract. Being presented with evidence of another woman was more of a blow than expected.

  Her bruised feelings were a pointed reminder not to take this non-relationship seriously, starting immediately.

  She tossed the wallet on the floor, along with her misplaced hurt. “Just prolonging the anticipation.”

  “This view is certainly conducive to anticipation.” He traced a frame around her ass and then painted a stroke with his tongue.

  Her toes fisted in response. He took good care of her body. Her feelings were not his problem.

  Gina might have him tomorrow, but tonight, he was hers. She wouldn’t waste another minute regretting the inevitable.

  Lace dug into her skin before giving way with a ragged tear.

  Griff transferred Ivy’s clothes from washer to dryer and returned to the bed from which he had forbidden her to move.

  The mutinous wench had moved enough to wrap the sheet around her body, making an Ivy burrito. She was lying on her back, tracing the underside of the headboard trim with a finger. “Do you sign and date all your pieces for posterity?”

  “I sign and date everything I own.” He crawled into bed beside her. “So if I get robbed, the police can identify my property.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Why aren’t you proud of your work?”

  The question threw him. “I am.”

  “You are cheerfully conceited about your prowess in every other domain, but you minimize your talent in this.”

  He knew his work was good, but he didn’t expect praise for it. “My ancestors didn’t drag themselves out of the coal mines and factories to produce a lowly carpenter. Even if I was award winning and world famous, it wouldn’t be something bragged about in my family.”

  “I’m not your family.” The back of her hand bumped his in the few inches of space separating their bodies. “How did you get involved with the seedy underbelly of common labor?”

  No one had ever asked. It took a moment to decide where the story began. He linked his fingers with hers. “There was a woman.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Her drowsy voice was laced with amusement.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter for the duration of this story, then put it back in, where it belongs. She was a neighbor when I was about eight and she was about seventy. She would always bring home junky old furniture and refurbish it in her garage. I asked her why she didn’t buy new things that were, you know, done. She tried to impress upon me the difference between a mass-produced piece of veneered particleboard crap that was ninety percent glue and the enduring quality of solid wood transformed into a thing of beauty and purpose by a craftsman.”

  “So you whipped out a pocketknife and whittled your first end table.”

  “No. I thought she was nuts.” He felt rather than heard her laugh — all the motivation he needed to keep the story coming. “You go to the store, you point at what you want, and a brand new one that no one has ever used is delivered right to your house. How is that not infinitely better than searching sales full of old junk for one particular piece of old junk you have to haul home, strip, sand, repair, stain, and varnish yourself before it’s fit to go in your living room?”

  “When did you overcome your crass consumerism?”

  “I haven’t. If I need barstools, I’m going to a store and pointing, not sitting on the floor for a year while I play around with designing and building my own. And I hate cleaning up antiques. I’ve seen some beautiful pieces, but I’m not spending weekends for the rest of my life scouring out dentil molding with turpentine and a wire brush.”

  “If only you had my patience.”

  It was his turn to laugh.

  She rolled toward him. The hand he wasn’t holding settled on his chest. “So how did you get started?”

  “I got a job framing houses after high school.”

  “Before you went to some snooty Ivy League university your ancestors would be proud of?”

  He wasn’t the only one with a blank-filling disability. “Instead of going to the state college that would take me after years of mediocre academic performance.” He hadn’t met even one of the criteria for a Rafferty scholarship. “I wasn’t interested in four more years confined to a classroom. The family didn’t support me being an uneducated bum, so I moved into a house with six other guys and got a construction job, which suited my lack of marketable skills.”

  “Your family cut you off?” Sympathy softened the question.

  He’d deserved it. “I was a brat. They thought having to fend for myself would show me the light. Little did they know the appeal of communal disarray after eighteen years trying to buck the rules. Beer and cold spaghetti for breakfast. No shirt, no shoes, no problem. Seven times minimum wage goes a long way in a flophouse. Life was good.”

  “You made up, though. You still buy pornographic sculpture for your mom.”

  “They miss me every time they disown me and take me back into the fold eventually. It’s been a good ten years since my last serious shunning.” She looked more traumatized about the rift than he’d ever been. “Hey, it’s not that bad. ‘If you won’t do what we want you to do, we’ll stop trying to force you to do what we want you to do’ isn’t much of a threat the first time, much less the fifteenth.”

  “It would work on me. I’d be lost without my parents even now. At eighteen?” She shook her head, tickling his arm with her hair. “I’d have crawled home and done whatever they wanted me to do.”

  “That’s because you’re the perfect child, like my brother, only sexier and less obnoxious.”

  “According to my sister, I couldn’t be more obnoxious. She’s the rule bucker, like you.”

  She treats you like shit, so to hell with her. He didn’t often get along with Dan, but at least he didn’t force his sibling’s life to revolve around his whims. “How did she turn out so different from you?”

  He gave her the moment she needed to decide where the story began. “Someone counted on her being quiet.”

  His eyes closed under the weight of the confession. The six words she chose guarded her sister’s privacy yet suggested enough to crush his soul at the same time.

  Barely perceptible muscle contractions cycling through every limb marked her struggle about whether to continue. The warring factions compromised with hushed words he might have missed if he hadn’t been holding his breath. “No one helped her until she screamed and destroyed things, so she learned being problematic was the only way to get the attention she needed. When people become numb to her level of drama and start ignoring her, she escalates to get the spotlight back on her.”

  Using her children to manipulate her sister wasn’t a simple plea for attention. It was cruel, to the kids and to Ivy, and that made it difficult to extend sympathy for her sister to the present day. “That’s not what she wants from you.”

  “She wants our scorecards to be even. Well. That’s some
thing years of therapy never dragged to the surface.” She patted his chest. “Aren’t you lucky?”

  He covered the hand resting on his chest with his own. If giving her a safe place to vent helped her, he was lucky to be able to offer it. “Even in what way?”

  “She thought I was lying about not remembering anything before the day Mom packed up the car and took us away, and she hated me for not backing up her story. When it became clear I can’t lie about anything more serious than my status as a duchess without crying until I puke, she hated me for being able to forget what she couldn’t.”

  He pressed his nose to the top of her head and just breathed her in. Gaps were a blessing when the memory hurt, a curse when someone else told a story that couldn’t be refuted. Her sister could tell her anything, and Ivy had to live with the horrifying ramifications — after her young mind decided whatever trauma she had experienced was better forgotten. “And you’ve been trying to make amends ever since for nothing that is any fault of yours.”

  “There were other factors.”

  He didn’t want to hear her make another excuse for someone who treated her badly. “How old were you?”

  “Four, but—”

  “How old is Lily?” he interrupted ruthlessly.

  “Four,” she whispered.

  He’d guessed well. “Would you for one second entertain the suggestion that Lily, at the age of four, should bear the weight of any responsibility heavier than eating her vegetables?”

  “No.”

  Years of therapy should have dragged that garbage to the surface and burned it to ash long ago — and might have without her sister continuing to use her as a landfill. “How much therapy did Holly get?”

  “Enough to learn what to say to be discharged from treatment.”

  Time off for manipulative behavior while Ivy stayed behind to learn coping skills to deal with the fallout as best she could.

  Skill number one: be perfect so the Miller girls’ average behavior came out at the national mean.

  Her fingers walked down his ribs. “What’s this scar from?”