by Petrova, Em
She sighed, throwing the rest of her lunch in the garbage, and got back to her work.
Chapter Thirteen
Vanessa tried to work on revisions in between her other stuff. She hated revisions, but they were necessary. Book two was almost ready, except for the end, and Vanessa still couldn’t find it, so she was working through the rest of the manuscript, hoping for divine inspiration. She mostly tidied up after Linc and painted primer on the walls of the house. She had to admit, she liked cleaning up after him, but he didn’t leave huge messes to clean up, so that was mostly fruitless.
He had finally relented to letting her watch him, with him briefly explaining things until she got bored. By the end of the day, he would have another room plumbed or re-wired, or a piece of glass replaced, and she was thoroughly impressed with the progress he was making on her house. Vanessa had painted most of the downstairs the primer white and was getting excited to see the pretty yellow color go up on everything.
Of course, out of the corner of her eyes, she eyeballed the speedbumps down his torso, the stupid handles, and the happy trail of golden fuzz. She simply rolled her eyes at herself. Linc would catch her staring occasionally, but he only grinned at her wickedly, like he could read her mind, but neither of them said anything. To her credit, Vanessa behaved around Linc, as badly as she didn’t want to. In fact, she wanted to strut around topless, too, just to see what he would say. But she didn’t.
Although, it was hot, and by the time her own tank tops got soaked with sweat, she might as well be topless. Not that Linc noticed. If he did, he didn’t give any indication he was attracted to her.
This morning, as had become their usual, he came inside, poured himself a cup of coffee, and then joined her on the porch. They had been talking about the various jobs for the day during this time, but today, he looked her over slowly before pulling Vanessa’s book out of his back pocket.
“Why do girls like this?”
“What do you mean? Romance?”
He vaguely waved his hand. “No, I get the romance thing. I was wrong about that. But the guy in this book is an abusive stalker. What the ever-loving fuck?”
She giggled at him and realized he was partially right. “It’s not stalking if you’re not doing it to control and victimize.”
“Stalking is stalking, Vanessa. He sleeps outside her house, follows her to work, has a confrontation with her boss, sneaks into her hospital room, and forces her to have sex with him.”
“It’s an alpha male thing. Women want to be protected, even when they say they don’t. It’s an inherent thing in our psyche, generally speaking, of course. Not all women are that way, but a lot of them are. Men who are dominant are subliminally sexy. So if he hadn’t been ‘stalking’ her, her ex-boyfriend, who was abusive, would have killed her. So by him stalking her, he protected her. And she wanted the sex, she was just pissed that she wanted it, and he knew that. He didn’t force her to do anything.”
“But he’s such an asshole.”
“And he’s redeemable.”
He shuffled his feet and moaned out his next words, as if against his will. “Do you have the next book in the series? Is there another one? I want to see how he’s redeemed.” He swallowed, and Vanessa realized he’d gotten into it, in spite of himself. She smiled.
Vanessa shook her head, biting her bottom lip. “Nope. It’s not finished yet.”
“Oh, well, thanks for letting me borrow this. It’s been enlightening.” He dropped the book at her feet, edges torn, a large crease down the middle.
“Keep it. I have another one.”
“But this one’s signed.”
“I know.” She offered him a small smile, hoping he didn’t guess she was the author, which would lead to some embarrassing questions she wasn’t ready to answer.
He sighed—a heavy, tortured sound—as he scrunched the book back into his pocket and took a small sip of coffee, looking out over the yard. This was totally a conversation he didn’t want to have but felt like he needed to. Vanessa sensed it had pained him to ask for clarification about what she’d insisted he read, and she liked that he trusted her enough to do it, despite his discomfort.
Finally, he broke the awkward silence when he stood, the chair under him creaking. “Well, I’m going to start upstairs and try to get the floors in one room started. Okay?”
“Sure, I’m reading for a while, and then I’m getting to work, too. You need help?”
He offered her a small smile before shaking his head. “No, you just do your thing. I’ll holler if I need anything.”
Vanessa opened the diary in her lap, intending to read a few entries, but managed to get sucked into the world of Civil War tragedies. Anchoring herself in reality before she lost it, she paused every now and then to look around her and think about where she was.
***
Later, Vanessa was downstairs painting, when Linc called out to her. She hadn’t been imagining him upstairs, sweaty, at all. His grunts as he moved heavy pieces around hadn’t affected her in the least. So when he yelled her name, she didn’t totally run to do his bidding.
Lies.
She tried not to look too eager as she stuck her head around the door where he worked. Linc was standing there in a pair of low-slung jeans, showing off a beautiful torso that made her mouth dry. She still couldn’t get used to it.
“Can you hold this sheetrock up there while I screw it in?” He’d apparently finished the floors in this room and was moving on to the ceilings.
Unable to squeak out an answer, she nodded and went to the ladder he had set up.
“Be really still. This scaffolding isn’t real sturdy,” he cautioned as he held it while Vanessa not-so-elegantly climbed up. The sheetrock was propped up with wood pieces, so she wouldn’t have to bear the entire weight of it herself, which was probably a good thing. Vanessa got into place and reached up to hold the sheetrock flush against the ceiling, and Linc climbed up and stood behind her.
Oh. God.
His body heat against her back was intense and warmed her all over. It was like suddenly being inside of an oven as Linc was surrounding her. He put his hands over hers and adjusted the sheetrock a bit, aligning it to the corner while sparks of energy flowed from his hands up her arm, like a shock. As he reached around her with the electric screwdriver, she could smell him—his clean sweat—musky and sweet—laced with the scent of leather and aftershave. It made her lightheaded. She couldn’t stop watching his arms as the muscles undulated under the skin with effortless power. His breaths in her ear sent tingles throughout her body, and Vanessa had a hard time being still, wanting to rub her thighs together to stop the pooling moisture in her panties from running down her thighs.
Yeah. She thought she had repressed all this wanting to rub on him like a cat in heat business, but now it was back in full force. But he had been mostly professional and she wasn’t going to be the one to break the professionalism between them. So she didn’t act on her impulses.
Besides, he’d been so frustrated about the book earlier. And his bi-polar mood swings were ridiculous. Sometimes, he didn’t even look at her, and others, like now, he was all over her. And he was her employee, so she couldn’t beg him to screw her like she wanted to. It would ruin everything, right?
Even if she longed to turn around on the ladder and lick him all over.
“Good… That’s real good,” he murmured in her ear as he fastened the sheetrock to the ceiling, sending all sorts of erotic thoughts through her head before inhaling deeply behind her. Goose bumps erupted across her skin, and it took everything inside her to not whimper. The ease with which he’d screwed the panel of material to the ceiling suggested she might not be necessary in this whole process, but she wasn’t going to say so.
Resting his hand at her hip, he maneuvered her across the scaffolding, as if she were a dainty little thing. “Other end?”
“Sure,” she managed to squeak. And they did it all over again, seven more times. Vanessa wa
s a weak puddle of goo by the time they had finished. And the look Linc gave her when they’d climbed off the scaffolding was loaded. Heated. Anything but professional.
She had no fucking idea what to do with it.
So when she went downstairs to the scent of cornbread again, she could only sigh. “Okay, how do I make it?”
Something was pushing her to make a batch of cornbread, and she was willing, even if she knew better than anybody she would screw it up. But pictures appeared in her mind, and before she realized it, she had gone into the kitchen and started mixing ingredients mindlessly. Soon enough, she had a cast iron skillet in the oven—with more oil than one dish should require—sizzling away, getting hot enough for the batter.
Which actually looked like it could be right.
A soft flutter appeared out of the corner of her eye, and Vanessa suspected it was her ghost. She was getting used to the idea, and if she was the one who’d encouraged the cornbread thing, Vanessa knew it couldn’t be a bad ghost. Without thought, she grabbed her phone and snapped a picture of the kitchen beside her. What the hell, right?
She gasped when she saw the photo on her phone.
A woman wearing an old, worn, green dress covered with an apron stood next to her, smiling warmly in the photo. When Vanessa looked again, she wasn’t there, but she was clear as day in the photo.
Her eyes went from the photo to the space where she’d taken it, repeatedly, but the woman in the picture was not in her kitchen.
A cool hand brushed her brow, calming her racing heart immediately, and Vanessa let out a whoosh of air. With trembling hands, she went about finishing the cornbread, feeling a sense of satisfaction at her work. But the photo was too much. She had to tell someone.
And there was really only one person here to tell.
“Linc!” she called up the stairs. He must have sensed her excitement because he came running down them, nearly tripping over his feet.
“You okay?” he questioned, but stopped short when he got to the kitchen and sniffed the air appreciatively. “I thought you couldn’t cook?”
“I can’t. But I’m making cornbread.” She was ridiculously excited, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Come here. She helped me.” She held out her phone, and Linc looked, first wary, then as the photo sank in, his eyebrows rose, and a grin spread across his face.
“I don’t know anyone who’s gotten a picture of one. This is cool!”
“I know!”
Handing her back her phone, Linc asked, “She helped you cook?”
Vanessa nodded, biting her lip. “Cornbread.”
“I love cornbread. My mama used to make it all the time. It was some ancient recipe she learned from Dad’s grandma or something. Her secret died with her, though. Nobody makes it like Mama did.”
Pride welled in Vanessa, along with a hope her cornbread would hold a match to Linc’s mom’s, even though she knew it probably wouldn’t. Not her first time, anyway.
“I think it’s Emily, the woman who wrote the diary. Look at the picture. I know it’s not hoop skirts and stuff, like people wore during the Civil War, but how many hoop skirts do you think there were around here back then?”
Linc looked again at the blonde woman in the picture. “Yeah, she just looks like she’s wearing normal period clothes for a farmer’s wife or something. Definitely from the 1800s, though,” he mused.
“I’m going to call her Emily,” Vanessa said with finality. “We’re allowed to name them, right?”
Linc chuckled in answer.
They waited impatiently, Vanessa continuing to stare at the woman on her phone, while the cornbread finished cooking. When it was done, Linc pulled it out of the oven and carefully cut it, slathering butter all over it before taking a massive bite.
“Oh… God…” he mumbled through a mouthful, prompting Vanessa to slice herself a piece and do the same. Linc’s eyes were wide on her, as if he couldn’t believe she had made this. “This is amazing. I could kiss you. How did you make this?”
Ignoring the flush spreading across her skin at his compliment, the heat pooling in her belly at the moans he made, and the blanket desire to launch herself at him at his declaration to kiss her, she simply said, “You like it?”
“It’s fantastic.” He put the rest of the piece in his mouth, chewing happily, and pride welled up in her. She suddenly wanted to learn to cook more things, and she looked around for Emily to show her more recipes. But there wasn’t any evidence of her around.
Linc was making short work of her skillet of cornbread, so she just watched, happy she could do this for him. Even if he ran so hot and cold she couldn’t keep up sometimes.
Chapter Fourteen
Linc couldn’t stop thinking about Vanessa. Initially, it was because she was paying him to do a mammoth job, but if he was honest with himself, he knew it was more than that. She’d caught his eye in his dad’s hardware store before she’d even hired him. He wanted her then, even though he couldn’t have her. The restlessness he’d felt that day only went away when he was around her. There was no denying that. She was a part of him, his future, but he didn’t know how to make it happen. And all the shit from that book he was trying wasn’t working.
He’d waffled back and forth about stopping. As soon as she found out he was an ex-con, all bets would be off, and now that he really liked her, he knew it would be ugly.
So ugly.
But he’d gotten to know Vanessa, and he had no idea how he was going to get through this fucking job. It was months of work in her house, with her parading around barefoot with those pink fucking toenails he wanted to suck on, sweaty tank tops he wanted to peel off pulled up under her breasts hair he wanted to wrap his hands around and pull.
And her smell… Christ. Linc had no idea what had possessed him to sniff her today. Like, a dozen fucking times. It was a form of torture—smelling her like that when he was trying to get a rise out of her that hadn’t happened. At any rate, he’d done it, and he couldn’t get the smell of her hair out of his head. She smelled like a fucking piña colada, like the beach, like summertime. And underneath that, she smelled like something purely erotic. Something that made him imagine himself buried between her lush thighs, making her scream.
He knew he was in for a world of heartbreak. Because here he was, off for the night, about to go to his sister’s house during her stupid book club with the lame excuse of borrowing a pot, just so he could see Vanessa again. Even when it was clear, after everything he’d done, she didn’t want him. He was about to rip both their clothes off and bury himself inside her, and she’d been totally unaffected.
Heartbreak.
World of it.
Linc walked into Sam’s house as quietly as he could. He didn’t want Vanessa to know he was there yet, and when he made his way back to the kitchen, he was glad he’d been quiet. Vanessa was facing away from him, wearing jeans outlining her backside in a way that made Linc’s mouth dry. Sam stood next to her, pouring a glass of wine, and Kristie faced them, drinking from her glass.
As soon as Kristie caught his eye, hers got a twinkle in it, and Linc’s stomach dropped. He knew then he needed to make his presence known or suffer the consequences. Kristie could be evil, in her weird, kind-hearted way. She’d always loved to see him squirm. Before he could react—stop her—something, she spoke.
“Hey, Vanessa. You look like shit. Is Linc being an ass?” She winked and smiled, and he just knew this was for his benefit. He could clear his throat or something, but he didn’t. He wanted to hear what she’d say.
“No. Linc’s been awesome. The diary kept me awake last night, and I haven’t slept much since. It’s so sad in places. I cannot believe life for those women back then.” She took a sip of her wine, but spoke again, and Linc’s stomach dropped. “What’s his story, anyway? He doesn’t talk much unless I instigate conversation.” Vanessa shifted her feet, cocking out a curvy hip.
“It’s his to tell,” Sam interjected, God love her. The sin
king pit in his stomach swelled. Sam wouldn’t let these hens gossip about him. “But he sure could use a good woman in his life, Van. I’ll talk you up, if you want.”
He stifled his groan. The last thing he needed was his kid sister telling Linc what he needed, when he knew perfectly well he needed Vanessa.
“Nah. Why don’t you just ask him out?” Kristie was still sort of looking at Linc, and he held his breath, waiting to hear what Vanessa would say. He didn’t know what he would do if she did, but the thought held merit. Then when she found out about his past, he could always remind her who had done the asking in the first place.
Yeah, like that wouldn’t hurt any worse.
“I don’t want to…” He didn’t wait to hear more. That was really all he needed, anyway. She muttered something else that had Sam cackling like a damn hyena, but he didn’t wait around to hear what it was. He didn’t need the fucking pot. He was out of there.
***
At the pub, Linc hollered for a beer and a shot, and Nick complied, one eyebrow lifted like a total jackass.
“What crawled up your dick?” He slammed the drinks down on the bar.
“Nothing.” Throwing the shot back with a jerk, he motioned for another while drinking half the beer in one swallow.
“Right.” He poured the whiskey into the glass and slammed it into his mouth before finishing the beer. Nick poured him another beer and cradled the bottle of whiskey in his arms, holding back until Linc talked.
“Okay. I like her. There.” The admission took more than Linc realized, and the burn as the words escaped his throat was worse than the whiskey.
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” Nick smiled as he poured another shot before turning to put the bottle back on the shelf. Linc’s eyebrows slammed down at him, but Nick just shrugged. Apparently, he was done. “So what are you going to do about it?”
Linc sipped on the shot thoughtfully. He didn’t know what else there was to do. “I don’t deserve her.”
Nick chuckled, and Linc was suddenly pissed. He threw the rest of the shot in the back of his throat and turned to leave. He wasn’t going to take this shit.