Chapter Ten
A couple of weeks later, on a quiet Saturday afternoon, Bree sprawled in the corner of the love seat, which was the closest she could come to a sofa in her tiny apartment. All was right with her world. Her notes were on the ottoman at her side, her laptop was propped across her legs, and the chapter in progress was flowing for once. Better yet, she’d heard back from her editor on the portions she had sent in for review, and the word was that she was doing exactly what her editor wished. The sun was shining through the window, the mid-March temperature was well above freezing, her apartment was clean, and Spence was going to come over soon, which was a very good prospect, indeed.
Except the anticipation was playing hell with her focus.
Try as she might, Bree couldn’t stop thinking about him, and them, and the night ahead. Probably because she didn’t want to stop. Given the choice between discussing how a rock star’s—ahem—unusual fondness for animals had led to his daughter’s arrest for public exposure, or staring out the window and debating whether the love seat was big enough for what she had in mind for the evening—well—who could blame her? She and Spence were still finding their rhythms, but so far, things had progressed at what any scientist would describe as a promising rate. A little more practice, some further research, and Bree would have to start wearing three pairs of socks at a time, because Spence was likely to blow hers completely off her feet.
She wasn’t complaining. Not by any means. Yet, this inability to compartmentalize kind of bothered her.
Bree had figured out, somewhere around the time Rob first reappeared, that strong fences made for more than good neighbors. They also made for an easier life. Life was too full, too deep, and that was good, but it made it so very easy to be swamped when needs piled on top of needs.
Her answer lay in boxes. Mental boxes, which in her mind looked a lot like the physical ones she used to contain household clutter. Some had little bows on the front and some were a bit ratty from being used for so many years, but they served their purpose. They made it possible for her to deal with one problem, one issue, at a time. Once, back in Bree’s first undergrad year, Jenna had even caught her drawing boxes on a calendar and scheduling the times when she would worry about the results of her exams. Jenna had laughed until Bree pointed out that if she had a designated time to freak out, it made it easier to forget about it the rest of the time.
Spence, though . . . he was part of too many boxes. He was in her past, and he was in her volunteer work, and he was tied with her father. Now when she reviewed the transcript of an interview with someone whose mother had gotten pregnant by her high school student/lover, she remembered Spence at seventeen. When she checked her e-mail and saw a note about the next task force agenda, she thought of Spence discussing fruit trees and berry bushes. When she returned to her work and read about Rob and the way he had bilked taxpayers out of their money, she remembered Spence in his kitchen telling her that his father’s pride was all that had been left of him.
The damned man was everywhere she turned. And every time she thought of him, her head fell back against the cushions and she remembered how it felt when he finger-walked a path up her thigh, stopping for some strategic side explorations on the way, and she stared out the window and grinned like an idiot until she caught sight of her reflection glowing in the glass.
And then she scowled. Because what had happened to the old Bree, the one who liked guys and liked sex but who had never before had trouble closing the bedroom door when it came time to work?
“Focus,” she ordered herself, and grabbed a fresh pen for making notes. She could do this, damn it. She hadn’t got this far by letting herself be distracted from—
Her phone beeped an incoming text. She pulled herself off the love seat and scrabbled to grab it from the bookcase she’d set it on, away from reach to ensure she wouldn’t be tempted to peek at it while she was supposed to be working.
Girls’ night, read the message from Annie. Everyone is available and Paige can Skype and Mom wants us all to have dinner and a sleepover as an early birthday present to her. Super last minute, but can you make it?
She could say no. She was justified. As Annie said, it was super last minute.
But it was for Neenee.
And maybe her mother would let slip some of the details of her interactions with their father.
But she would have to cancel on Spence. Which bothered her a lot more than she would have believed.
She had an apologetic text all set and ready to send to Spence when she realized that this was probably better done with a call. She scowled at the phone. Why the heck had she ever listened to Neenee’s lessons on politeness and consideration?
Hoping that she would get his voice mail, she placed the call. But her earlier time of being one with the universe seemed to have ended, because he picked up on the second ring.
“Hey.” He sounded slightly breathless, as if he had raced for the phone. Or as if she’d interrupted him in the middle of a workout. Or—yeah—the way he had sounded right after he collapsed on top of her and pulled her sideways and gasped out something about having mercy on him.
A lovely memory, indeed, but not helpful given how her plans had been derailed.
“Hi, Spence. Listen. I’m sorry if I’m interrupting something, and this is horribly last minute, but I have to back out of tonight.”
Silence.
She rushed to fill the void. “I’m really sorry, but my mother wants us all to come for a birthday sleepover, and I—”
“A what?”
“Oh. Sorry. Her birthday is next week, but everyone is in town tonight—well, except Paige—and she asked if we could all come for an impromptu girls’ night.” She stared out the window. “If it wasn’t her birthday, I’d say I have plans, but . . .”
“What if I tied you to the bed so you couldn’t escape?”
For someone who had never had a bondage fantasy, Bree found the sudden mental images conjured up by his words highly erotic.
“Sorry. They would come hunting for me, and trust me, you would not want to be on the receiving end of Aunt Margie’s wrath if she caught you.”
“What if you were tied up in my bed?” His voice dropped. “It would take them a long time to find you, I think. Time we’d have to fill.”
Oh hell. She was tingling in all the right places. Well, all the wrong places, considering she wasn’t going to see him, but still . . .
“And how would you fill those hours, Spence?”
Whoa. Had she really said that?
His short laugh told her he was almost as surprised by her words as she was.
“With a feather,” he said, and she remembered that he had amazing powers of recovery.
“A feather?”
“Yeah. One of those big quills like they used to use for writing letters. I’d start at your feet. You know you’d be naked, right? So, yeah. I’d start at your feet and just drag that feather all over one foot.”
“Sounds ticklish,” she said blandly, though her reaction was anything but.
“Oh, I think I could manage this so it would go beyond tickling. Especially when I pull it up the back of your leg. Might have to stop at the knee for a bit. Lots of bumps there. They each need attention. And then I would move it up the inside of your thigh, soft and steady, maybe going forward an inch or so and then backing away, because you don’t want to hurry these things.”
This was absurd. She was getting ridiculously turned on and she was going to have to deny her mother’s birthday request and see Spence after all, and even though as the oldest child she was supposed to be the good girl, Bree had never felt so motivated toward disobedience as she had now.
“You feeling that feather yet, Bree? It’s right up at the top of your thigh. Right where there’s some folds that might need to be explored.”
Oh yeah. She felt it.
She closed her eyes and dropped deeper into the love seat, letting his voice wash over her.
“I’d take that feather and slide it back and forth, right in that spot where your leg meets your body.”
“The groin,” she corrected automatically.
“You call it that if you want. Me, I call it so close it hurts.”
Hurt? That wasn’t the word she would use right now. Aching, yes. Throbbing, even. But there was nothing hurtful about it.
“And then I’m going to slide that feather up and around, making this circle between your legs. Up and across, then down and back up, one circle after another, and every one of them is getting smaller and tighter, like a bull’s-eye. And you know where that feather would go next?”
She didn’t know. But she had some damned fine suggestions.
“It’s going over to your other thigh. Because your other leg deserves some attention, too. This time I would start at the top, little swishes back and forth, and then—”
“Enough. I surrender. Spence, I . . .” I have no idea what to say. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. I can’t think, and all you’ve done is talk to me.
She was in serious trouble.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she began, but he jumped in.
“Maybe I stop lifting weights and come over there right now.”
She glanced at her notes, her laptop, her outline. Her conscience twitched.
She should say no. She was skating on the edge of falling behind as it was, and if tonight went as most gatherings with her family, she would lose most of tomorrow as well. But when it came to Spence, she was . . . well . . . not powerless. That wasn’t the word. But neither was she as totally in control as she preferred.
Funny. It didn’t bother her nearly as much as she would have thought.
The hell with it. It wasn’t as if she was going to be able to focus right now anyway.
“Take the long way past Porter Street,” she said.
His chuckle was pure fire. “Why? So you have time to clean the place?”
“No. Because there’s a craft store in that little strip mall, and they sell lots of wedding supplies.” And to think she had protested when Jenna dragged her there. “Including pens with long quills attached for writing in guest books.”
Again, dead silence. Then—
“I’m on my way.”
Best words she had heard all day.
* * *
Two hours later, Spence tightened his arms around Bree, shifted sideways to accommodate her sleepy movements, and winced as he made contact with the nib of the feathered pen. He fumbled behind him, pulled it out from beneath his back, and drew it in a long, light line down Bree’s arm.
“Mmmmm,” she said, then opened her eyes and smiled. “I am never going to look at a bird the same way again.”
“You think this was from a real bird?”
“Doesn’t matter. The association will still be there. I’ll be like Pavlov’s dogs. Every time a bird lands near me, I’m going to shiver.”
“Lucky you. I’ll have to avoid the little buggers, or I’ll end up embarrassing myself in public.”
“Good thing it’s still cool enough for coats. We have time to desensitize you.”
He kissed her nose, pulling up another of those smiles that got him right in the gut. “What’s that?”
“Desensitizing? It’s when you expose someone to something that elicits an ingrained association, but you do it in small bits, increasing the time and the frequency, so the item loses its power. Usually it’s done with phobias. You know, like someone is afraid of flying, so you take them to an airport and just sit outside and watch planes, then you walk inside the terminal and just wander around, and so on.”
“All the way through until they’re flying a stunt plane, upside down?”
“Maybe not to that extreme.”
He pushed her hair back from her face. “What if I say that the potential embarrassment is worth it?”
“Then I would say you have an excellent grip on the situation and no further intervention is needed.” Her lips twitched. “Unless, of course, you want to strengthen the association.”
“Any stronger, and I’ll spend every migration season needing to come up with a new form of duck and cover.”
She laughed softly, rose up on one elbow, and groaned. He knew what that meant.
“You have to get going.”
She sighed. “I do. I have to shower, and I don’t dare be late. Not for this.”
He ran one finger down the hollow between her breasts. “Not that I’m trying to convince you to ignore your mother, because I’m not. But out of curiosity, what would happen if you didn’t show?”
He was expecting something flip, something along the lines of her family storming her apartment and dragging him out of the bed and setting fire to his internal organs. So he wasn’t at all prepared for her answer.
“She’d be hurt,” Bree said in a tight voice. “I couldn’t do that to her.”
“You mean you never did anything to hurt your mother?”
“Of course I did. I’m no saint. But to deliberately do something that I know would hurt her? No way.” She pushed the blankets back, swung her legs around to the side, and stretched. “She’s been through enough in her life. I could never be the one to make it worse.”
He watched her muscles ripple as she reached overhead, stretching from side to side, and understood what she was saying in a way he hadn’t before.
“Family means a lot to you, doesn’t it?”
“Duh.” She peeked over her shoulder, her eyes wide with surprise. “It’s everything. Why would you think otherwise?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I knew you spent a lot of time with each other, but I guess I thought, maybe, with everything that had happened, you might have been together by necessity, not choice. Each person looking after herself.”
“Is that what happened with your family?”
“God, no. Why would you—” The words were out of his mouth before he realized the underlying message. “Oh. Got it.”
“It wasn’t a totally ridiculous assumption.” She reached back and patted his thigh. “Your family was threatened by an external force. For mine, it was an inside job. Those could lead to very different dynamics.”
“But you guys—you and your sister and your mother—you just got closer.”
“We’d lost enough already. We couldn’t lose anything else.”
There might be a hell of a lot he didn’t understand about Bree Elias, but family, he got.
“You busy tomorrow?” he asked fast, pushing the words past the flare of surprise in his gut. Because seriously—two days in a row?
She tied the belt of her robe. “I have to work. I’m behind on the book, and I have a stack of tests that aren’t going to grade themselves.” She tipped her head slightly, seeming to debate for a second before saying, almost shyly, “But you know, I have the stuff for dinner already, if you would like—”
“What if I helped grade the tests?”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
This was ridiculous. He shouldn’t be making offers like that.
Yet here he was, sitting up, fumbling for solutions that would make it possible for her to spend time with him. “I mean, dinner. Absolutely. But I thought, maybe . . . Are the tests multiple choice, or something I could help with? Because it’s supposed to be mild out, and I thought it might be fun to, you know. Go for a walk.” Possibilities tumbled through his mind, falling together in a way that had him talking faster. “Most places are still muddy, but if we walked, say, around the village. Stick to the sidewalks. There’s that path around the lake, the one that’s paved to make it wheelchair accessible. I’ve been meaning to check it out. You want to join me?”
“Oh. That does so
und like fun.”
Score.
“But I can’t let you help with the tests. They’re short answer. I have to do that myself.”
It was silly to be disappointed. She had still said they could do dinner, which, from the way she had blushed a little, meant that his favorite dessert was definitely on the menu. But he wanted to do more than eat and sleep with her. He wanted to talk to her. Know more about her. Get a peek behind the tightly pulled curtain that was Bree.
“So there’s no way you can sneak off for an afternoon?
She nibbled on her bottom lip, her fingers twisting the belt of her robe, and he knew she was debating. “Well . . . usually I go for a run on Sundays, but I don’t think it’ll happen now. But I do need some exercise. So if we make it a really brisk walk . . .”
“I don’t know how much snow has melted there, so I don’t want to promise anything.” He rose from the bed and pulled her close. “But I can guarantee a vigorous workout at some point in the day.”
She ducked her head and nuzzled his chest, setting off a bunch of sparks he was amazed he had the strength to produce.
“I would like to go.”
There was something uncertain about the words. Like she needed him to say something else. There was only one thing he could imagine she might be waiting for.
He tipped her chin. “If you want to just go for a walk and then come home and work, I’d be okay with that, too, you know.”
The flash of appreciation in her eyes told him he’d nailed it. “That sounds good. It gives me, you know. Options.”
Options. Yeah. It also gave her the message that he wasn’t hanging around simply for sex. He didn’t think someone as together as Bree would need that kind of reassurance, but he’d been wrong about her before.
“Okay. How about if I pick you up around two?”
“Better make it three.”
Earlier would be better, but the sun was setting later these days, so they would still have a decent amount of daylight. And if an hour later in the afternoon meant she could indulge in an extra hour at night, hey. He might not be here just for sex, but that didn’t mean he was going to turn down the chance.
Romancing the Rival Page 17