“What man doesn’t want you, darlin’?”
Huh? Oh. I mentioned that, didn’t I? But words escape me as he hovers over me.
His brawny body blocks out the sun like a thunderous cloud, and I want him to rain down on me. He lingers over me but doesn’t lower. I want to spread my legs for him, but he has them trapped between his. My body hums for a connection with him. He remains on all fours, a predator over his prey, and I’m ready to scream devour me. I’m so turned on, and he hasn’t even touched me. There’s a feral appeal to him. His nostrils flare, and he licks his lips. My heart races, and my breasts heave under the sheet hardly covering me.
“You sure about this, darlin’?” He attempts to whisper, but that rugged sleepy tone returns, and the timbre rumbles over my skin like the rush of a rainstorm.
Yes.
No.
I shouldn’t do this.
But who am I kidding? I’m Scotia Simmons. I want to do this, and I always do what I want. Despite the throbbing in my head, I hold my chin higher and answer him.
“Definitely.”
Chapter 2
Got No Game
[Chet]
March
“Uncle Chet,” seven-year-old Louie calls out in greeting as I enter the playroom, which was once a family room. The view overlooks the Smoky Mountain range and Green Valley down below. The boys gathered on the floor are building an intricate and elaborate system of roads and tunnels for their Matchbox cars.
“Where did you find these?” The plastic orange track intended to hold small metal cars seems like an antique, although I never had such toys when I was a child.
“Mrs. Pickle found them,” Dewey explains without looking up. He’s concentrating on stacking boxes under the track to raise the angle. Dewey is eleven and has a structurally creative mind. His ingenuity and vision hints that one day he’s going to design roads and build bridges that will blow the minds of what we already know. He’s also a Harry Potter look-alike with round glasses and bangs a little too long.
“Who’s Mrs. Pickle?” I ask, thinking the name sounds like a cartoon character and not one five boys would be interested in.
“Mrs. Pickle,” Louie drones as though he can’t believe I don’t know who she is. Am I supposed to know her? “She’s only the best book reader ever.” Louie peeks around me and hollers, “No offense, Maura!” I glance behind me and find Maura Hawes standing in the opening to the large sunshine-filled room.
Maura would be considered a beautiful woman to most men, but for me, it’s not about how she looks. She takes on the care of the three boys under my guardianship. I was gifted custody of the boys and considered it a huge honor under the circumstances. I had no qualms about taking them in—it’s what Harper and Davis wanted—but I quickly realized the care and structure needed to raise three boys was more than I could handle on my own. I was honestly concerned I’d screw them all up.
Louie had technically been a baby while Hugh and Dewey were still so young. Harper had been a natural at motherhood, and she’d been good for Davis. He matured a bit when they fell in love, and he embraced fatherhood. But me? It freaked me out. What did I know about being a dad? Without decent parents as role models, I didn’t think I was cut out for parenthood. I didn’t want to fuck it up with someone else’s kids. Being the fun uncle was a better fit for me.
That’s where Maura and her knowledgeable ways with kids came in. I found her when she was considering a leave from foster parenting. I needed her, and as it turns out, she needed me, too. Her beauty lies in the love she’s shown these children and the additional boys we’ve taken on in this home. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and contagious laughter, some man is missing out on her. Our relationship has never crossed that line because in a sense, I’m her boss. We keep things professional, but the work is personal to us both.
“No offense, buddy,” Maura replies, her voice sarcastic. The boys love her, so there are no hurt feelings over Louie’s praise of someone other than their caretaker reading stories.
“What makes Mrs. Pickle so great?” I ask Louie, who helps his brother build the looping track. Louie’s hair is shorter than his older brother’s as he prefers it closely cropped to his head, but his eyes are no less inquisitive about all things.
“She makes all these great voices. It’s awesome,” Louie states, enthusiastic in almost everything he says or does. I exhale, trying not to consider how much his mother would have loved this kid. Loved all her children as they grew.
“What a strange name. Mrs. Pickle,” I mock. The image of an elderly woman with gray hair curled tight like an old-fashioned perm, wearing a floral dress that looks like an antiquated housecoat and gnawing on a dill pickle comes to mind. In my head, she bites into it like she hates dick.
“She is strange,” Hunter adds. Dropped at our door when he was only a baby, he’s now six-years old. There must have been some confusion as to the purpose of this house. That’s our best guess. To this day, we don’t know who found us or why they chose us, but Maura is a licensed foster parent with foster-to-adopt status. In hindsight, Maura is relieved she never left foster parenting. One look at Hunter, and she couldn’t turn him away. With the state’s permission, Maura adopted him, and it led to the idea of Harper House—this house—becoming a group home for boys. In order to keep Maura in my service and welcome Hunter into our fold, I became a certified foster parent as well. It’s a little surprising I’m now on the other side of the system.
“What’s strange about her?” I ask, continuing a conversation I really have no interest in.
“She smells like a pickle.”
“She does not,” Louie defends of the best book reader, and Hunter glares at Louie.
“Does too,” Hunter insists.
“Alright, boys,” Maura interjects. “Ten more minutes and then clean up and supper now that Uncle Chet is here.” Maura gives me a chiding look. My morning resulted in ‘unplanned’ activities.
Although I’m not a blood relative to any of them, all the boys call me Uncle Chet. Davis was the closest thing I’d ever had to a sibling when I was young, so I’m family in name. As his three boys have always called me uncle, it’s just been easier to let any boy living here do the same.
Typically, I’m here every other weekend. Maura deserves respite, and she’s required to receive time off by the foster system. I try to help when I can on other days, but my permanent residence isn’t close, and I run several businesses in multiple locations. Today is an unscheduled stop.
With a collective groan from the group, Dewey looks up again. “We can’t pick this up. We aren’t finished.” From his serious tone and shocked expression, you’d think we just requested he commit a crime. However, the boys know Maura does not like for them to leave toys lying around. Everything has its place, and it’s the reason she’s in charge. If it were me, the entire house might look like a giant playland, and it typically does on my weekends. I have no business raising kids, so I don’t. Maura does all the hard work.
“Boys, we mind what Maura says,” I remind them, watching Dewey’s crestfallen face. “But maybe she can make an exception today since I’m here.” My visit here today was unplanned, but the past twenty-four hours have been a bit surreal and being here grounds me. This is my church as I no longer believe in God. If there was one, he wouldn’t have taken from me all that he has.
“By the way, you clean up nicely,” Maura teases, knowing I had to trim back my typically bushy beard and tame my wild hair to attend a thing. I actually allowed a haircut. I rub a hand over the space at my nape, which feels a little bald, but I don’t respond to her compliment.
“Where’s Hughie?” I ask, doing a head count of the boys in the large room. We currently house five, including Hughie, Dewey, and Louie. Hunter was adopted by Maura, and ten-year-old Campbell is a distant relation to her. The state asked her to keep the boy when his parents died a few years back as kinship placement.
Harper was a nut when she named
her three boys. Thank goodness Davis’s last name wasn’t Duck. It was Maverik.
Harper and Davis Maverik.
I swallow at the thought of them.
“Hugh,” Maura corrects behind me. The fourteen-year-old no longer wants the -e sound at the end of his name. I’m not twelve anymore, he said when he officially became a teen. He currently argues Hughie is too cute for a growing man. As an eighth grader, he’s practicing his new name before high school.
“Uncle Chet,” Hugh says in greeting as he exits the study room located at the side of the giant playroom. I turn to find a boy who looks exactly like his mother. With sandy brown hair and bright blue eyes, he’s her miniature in masculine form, and my throat clogs again.
“Where have you been, kid?” I tease him, understanding he’s starting to separate himself from the other boys as the eldest and only teenager in the house.
“Homework,” he groans. He’s a smart kid but also turning into a bit of a scrapper at school like his father had once been. His big heart is getting him into big trouble as he defends the underdogs of the schoolyard. He’s a modern-day mini-Robin Hood. A part of his aggression comes from hormones and an underlying anger he can’t define. I’d be pissed too if I’d lost such loving parents. Then again, I never knew my own.
The call for supper comes from a sweet and sultry voice in the front hall. Maura hired a kitchen assistant a year back, and Savannah is beautiful with silky smooth jet-black hair and bright blue eyes, but she’s too young for me. I’m a forty-six-year-old man who likes to keep things uncomplicated, and her youth is a complication I’m not interested in tapping. Not to mention, Maura is very selective about who enters the home, and Savannah works hard as part-time kitchen help.
“I think you might be drooling a bit,” Hugh teases me, reaching for my lip. He likes to pretend I have a crush on the cook. I think he’s projecting his own youthful desires, but he’s too young for her. I grab him by the back of the neck, giving it a squeeze. My touch is not hard, as I’d never use force on these boys. I’ve had my own experience with a firm hand, so I’d never replicate it on another.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I retort as the other boys rush around us to line up near the bathroom outside the great room to wash their hands before entering the dining room.
“Sure, you don’t,” he chides.
“One day,” I jest, knowing his fourteen-year-old self really is on the edge of being a young man with too much sex on the brain already.
“One day?” He snorts. “I’m there now.”
“Oh, yeah? Got a girlfriend,” I jest as though I’m the same age as his friends.
He shrugs. “I’m keeping my options open,” he replies, tugging free of me and joining the back of the line for the restroom.
This kid. He’s going to be a heartbreaker one day, but not too soon, I hope. I don’t want him growing up too fast, and I definitely don’t want him doing things like his father and I used to do. Random hookups stopped short the second Davis saw Harper. Me, I’m still keeping up the practice.
And that woman this morning . . .
Tell me three things, I teased her before we ever made it to her room.
You. Me. A bed.
It hadn’t seemed real.
There was just something about her when we met last night. She was sharp, snarky even, with socialite written all over her. But she was also willing and wanting. She had a vulnerability to her that made my brain disconnect and my body take over. One-night stands keep emotion out of the heart, and I’d been burned too bad in the past to let anything near mine again. Not all of us can be lucky bastards like Davis, who found the love of a good woman in Harper.
Again, I consider the woman under me this morning. Her exotic gray eyes held wisdom with a strong dose of hurt buried deep within. She looked upon me with hesitation, as if at any minute I might pull back and she might lose me even in the heated moment. She clung to me, desperate for my touch, my kiss, and my dick, and I can’t explain my response. It’s as if I wanted to give her everything and more. I wanted to assure her I had staying power if she’d ask.
But Scotia Simmons would never ask me to be with her. Not long term.
Overly confident in one breath, then slightly cautious in another, she was a puzzling contradiction until my body entered hers. Then we were on the same page. I never struggle to leave a bed, but I wasn’t eager to rush off from hers this morning. However, lingering is not my modus operandi, and there came a point when it was just time to walk away. That point was after giving her three orgasms and getting a big one of my own.
“Hi, Chet,” Savannah quietly says, catching me off guard with my thoughts on the powerful release I had this morning. I lift a hand to wave but accidentally smack Hugh in the back of the head. He turns bright red and curses under his breath. I notice he’s straightened and smoothed down his shirt. Savannah continues to the dining room with a serving plate, not noticing either of us in her mission to serve dinner. Hugh turns back to me, exaggeratedly rubbing at his hair, mortified.
“Smooth, Romeo,” he mutters to himself. Does he have a crush on Savannah? I grip the back of his neck again, gently shoving him. The momentary awkwardness breaks, and he laughs. “We need to work on your game.”
“My game?” I snort. I don’t need game. I got plenty this morning. “How do you know who Romeo is, anyway?”
“I told you, homework,” he groans. Ah, the tale of fated lovers, starry-eyed and star-crossed. It ends in doom, kid, I want to tell him, but I don’t.
I think back once more to this morning’s hotel room activities.
I want someone to belong to me.
A woman like Scotia would never be interested in me. Not if she knew the truth about me. Shoving my dick into her might have been the wrong thing to do, but she felt so good. Her fingers in my hair, tugging gently on the ends. Her mouth sucking at my neck. Her nails scraping over my hairy chest.
You like that, I teased.
I like you, she said, not holding back. Her words were a heady concoction, and I was drunk on her this morning. I wish I could have another sip, but it’s best to let things remain where they were.
A hotel. One morning. And her.
Chapter 3
Them’s Fighting Words
[Chet]
August – five months later
It’s hotter than Hades as I stand outside the Viking MMA studio late one afternoon. I’m waiting on the boys. After Hugh got in a fight at the end of the school year, I made a deal to allow him to learn to fight responsibly, and Viking offered classes for boys. Of course, all the boys wanted in, and I eventually caved. Hugh wasn’t happy about the additional attendees, and I understood he was looking for ways to distinguish himself from the other kids since he’s entering high school soon. Showing favoritism to one boy over the others is difficult, though, as I try to be fair to all. I don’t want to deny any of them any advantage I can offer.
I’m standing on the sidewalk, leaning against the minivan belonging to the house, when I hear a group of women as they tumble out of the space next door. They practically bump into me like it’s not obvious a large man is standing on the sidewalk.
“Did you see her thighs?” one says, stubbing her nose at me over her shoulder at my nearness without actually looking at me. Some people just have no boundaries.
I was here first, lady.
“I just don’t know how she can wrap those ham hocks around such a skinny pole.”
My eyes glance up at the name of the storefront next door to the MMA studio. Stripped—specializing in the art of pole dancing and more. Returning my gaze to the women who clearly aren’t professional strippers or pole dancers, I note their clothing of black stretchy pants and oversized T-shirts on most of them, not to mention a few wrinkles and some gray hairs among them. Nope, not your typical strippers.
“And the other needs to shower more frequently,” the woman states again, wrinkling her nose and exaggerating a pinch to i
t. Her head tips to the side, sensing I’m still present, but she continues. “Hoo-ey, she smells like the pigs she’s raising.”
One more head tilt, an over-the-shoulder glance, and then she’s waving her hand as though I stink, too. I might. It’s hot.
I hate hearing women put down other women. It reminds me too much of someone I used to know. And these ladies, all red-faced, sweat-laden—is that a 1980s headband on one of them?—sure aren’t anything to brag about. However, the one with her back to me, doing all the yakking, has a fine ass in her tight pants, and her racerback tank shows off a muscular back and toned arms.
“Hazel, I can’t believe you talked me into doing this,” the fine-ass woman continues.
“I can’t believe how well you did,” the woman I assume is Hazel responds. “You’re a natural.”
“Bless your heart, I hope not,” Fine-Ass admonishes. “I wouldn’t be caught dead wrapped around a pole like that in public.”
“But you just did wrap around one,” a third woman in the party reminds her, referring to the pole dancing class they must have just finished.
“Must be your years since widowhood. Are you doing something we don’t know about?” Hazel leans in as though she’s asking for a secret. “Riding poles we don’t know?”
I snort.
Fine-Ass glances over her shoulder again, looking down her nose at me. “Do you mind?” Her sugar-sweet Southern drawl rubs on me like sandpaper on rough wood.
“Not at all,” I snide, crossing my arms and spreading my legs wide to balance me better against the van. I’m not moving.
“Hay-zel,” Fine-Ass drones, turning back to her friend and lifting her fingers for her throat to grasp for pearls she isn’t wearing. “You watch your mouth.”
Love in a Pickle: A Silver Fox Small Town Romance (Green Valley Library Book 9) Page 2