by Sally Felt
He never heard the shower stop.
He woke as Isabelle did. She bumped into him as if she weren’t used to being held in her sleep. Hard to believe. She turned over in his arms, stirring up the rich scent of the two of them on the covers. He kissed her before she even opened her eyes. She made a sound of honeyed sleepiness and reached her hands over her head as a stretch rolled down the length of her body in a long, sensuous wave. It meant she was rolling those ripe curves against him. Talk about a bucket of yes. He was entirely in favor of Isabelle’s stretches.
“Do that again and you’ll never be rid of me.”
Her smile was sleepy and lazy and he loved it.
“Bring me food. Then we’ll see what happens.” Her arms settled on his shoulders. She kissed his nose.
“Bring you food?” Damn, she smelled good.
“I’m hungry.”
“I noticed,” he said, grinning. He kissed her. He remembered Charlie was in the house. “Let’s pick up something and go to my place.”
She rolled on top of him, languid and warm and easily the sexiest woman he’d ever known. “I’d rather order in,” she purred.
In Kim’s perfect world, they’d never leave her bed again, making love, laughing, talking about Austin and all the things they might do before he left. But this wasn’t Kim’s perfect world. His perfect world had no room for brothers.
“Charlie.”
“Is a grown-up,” she finished for him. She braced against his chest, sitting up on top of him. “Easy enough to ask him to go to the movies or something.”
Kim pulled the sheets up to drape around her shoulders.
She looked at his hand holding the sheet in place, snorted and slid off him in the most wonderfully distracting way to lie beside him. “So modest?” she asked. “I can’t imagine you had a lot of privacy on that office desk.”
It took him a beat to realize what she meant. Jules. He hadn’t explained—he hadn’t explained and she’d slept with him anyway. And she didn’t sound mad.
He sensed trouble, which did him no good. If he were out climbing, he’d let go now, drop and try again. If he were with a different woman, he’d let go and write it off. This was Isabelle. This mattered.
It mattered so much it scared him.
“The door was closed,” he said because if he didn’t say something soon there’d be no trying again.
She laughed.
Of course she laughed. The office door was glass. “I mean the door between the office and the storage room. She always changes in there. Wall Werx doesn’t have a dressing room—one of the many problems I’m trying to get Damon to understand.”
Isabelle tossed off the covers and walked, nude, to her dresser. Kim hardly noticed the poetry of her pale backside as she bent to pull something from a drawer. He was busy trying to figure out why his story didn’t even convince him.
Isabelle pulled on an ivory silk something that might have been either a nightgown or a slip, and as it slid into place over her body, Kim did have to pause to consider her beauty before he could focus again.
“I broke the desk,” he said. “I was trying to fix it. I had nothing to do with her bra.”
She took a dress from her armoire and stepped into it, another antique one with the zipper in the side, running from her hip up under her arm. It made a trim-fitting, sleeveless dress that would fit right in with the cast of Mad Men.
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
Okay?
Kim got out of bed and, seeing as Isabelle was dressed, went into the bathroom to retrieve his dirty t-shirt and shorts. He pulled them on and caught up with Isabelle as she was walking into the living room.
Charlie lay on the sofa, popping cheese curls as he jammed to some inaudible masterpiece of rock playing through headphones attached to the music player balanced on his stomach. He acknowledged them by waving a cheese curl in their direction.
Kim saluted in return and followed Isabelle onto the porch, which was as dark as it had been the night before, as dark as Kim’s brain function. Were they going to his place after all?
But no, Isabelle stopped on the porch. She put her arms around him and kissed him in a way that suggested she really wasn’t mad. It was hard to pay attention to his lingering sense of trouble with Isabelle in his arms.
“I should spend some time with Charlie. Is there a number where I can call you? All I have is your service.”
There were awkward moments of getting her the number before they were back on the porch and more kissing that was so right, so heated, Kim forgot everything until he slid his hand up under her dress and he remembered she wore nothing but a slip beneath. Something happened in his brain then and it wasn’t pretty. The part of him that had wanted to keep her in bed until they died of thirst was comparing the adventure quotient of doing something about it right here on the dark porch, against trying to slip her past her brother and back into the bedroom’s comfort. The part of him she’d wakened with her hats and her house and her fear of heights argued something was wrong—that he needed to stop kissing her and start thinking. Or at least take his hands out of temptation’s way. He managed that much, smoothing her dress to cover her thighs.
She became shorter without seeming to move. Her hands, once locked behind his neck, slid down over his chest. She must have been standing on her toes to kiss him.
“Mmmm,” she said, “why did we wait so long?”
Kim smiled. The wolf-crying part of his brain was being stupid. She was fine. She was wonderful. And maybe, just maybe, she was his—or could be, once he told her the score.
Which scared him.
And explained why his brain had been making such a fuss. Stupid brain.
“Because we weren’t dating,” he said.
She grinned and kissed him again.
His hand slid down her leg. She pressed against him. She was wonderful, all right. Handfuls of wonderful. A bucket of wonderful. Now he just needed to turn the conversation toward the complication looming in their future. “Thanks for changing your mind about that, by the way.”
“Oh, I haven’t,” she said, still warmly snug against his hips. “I have no intention of dating you. I just want to sleep with you.” She kissed him a final time and slid out of his arms. “I’ll call you later.”
She left him there on the dark porch.
Trouble, said his brain.
Stupid brain.
* * * * *
Isabelle pushed Charlie’s feet off the sofa and sat down next to him. He scrambled to sit up, pulling off his headphones. Outside, Kim’s truck started, then pulled away.
“Damn, Isabelle,” Charlie said, “I’ve never seen you smile like this.”
“I should have been born a man.”
Charlie laughed. “You’re too smart to be a man.”
“True.” She took a cheese curl from the bag he still held and crunched.
“So help me out, sis,” he said. “I know you had a good time in the bedroom—a really good time, by the screaming involved—but I’m guessing there’s more than great sex behind that cat-ate-the-canary smile.”
Isabelle blushed, but her smile just wouldn’t go away. “The sex was epic. I had no idea purely physical fun could be so, well, fun. I must do that again,” she said, “and often.”
Charlie laughed so hard he choked on a cheese curl. Isabelle brought him a glass of water. Walking had become an interesting sensation. The silk slip moved over her skin more softly than Kim’s fingers had, but it reminded her of him anyway. Her thighs prickled with beard burn and she felt a little swollen from Kim’s attention. Being without underwear may have happened more by accident than conscious choice, but it seemed fitting punctuation for what had been the most fully physical couple of hours of her life.
Making it, simply, the time of her life.
Amazing what had happened once she decided Kim Martin had “fling” written all over him and let herself go for it. As long as he could make her feel like this—hot, ha
ppy, hungry—she’d continue to go for it.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” Charlie said, once he’d gotten the curl under control. “Congratulations.”
“Somehow, I knew you’d approve. Dinner?”
“You’re buying,” Charlie said. “Not only am I unemployed, I’m not getting any, remember?”
Isabelle laughed and went to put on some underwear.
By time she’d eaten her salad and stolen the last slice of quesadilla from Charlie with no sign of their dinners’ arrival, Isabelle wasn’t laughing any more.
“What do you mean, do I remember Liz from the IGA?” she said. She’d been grilling Charlie about the problems between him and Gina, feeling quite sure her new, “modern” perspective would give her the added wisdom to help. Now she felt quite certain she wasn’t going to like what she learned.
Charlie shrugged.
“You didn’t,” Isabelle said.
“Purely physical fun.”
“Charlie!”
“What? You said it yourself earlier tonight—”
“Charlie Bach, you cheating bastard. I’m embarrassed to call you family.”
“What happened to ‘I want to do that again, and often’? I thought you were a convert.”
She sputtered. “I’m not the one in a relationship, here. You’ve been living with Gina for months. You told me you loved her. You said you thought it was serious.”
“I was. I did. I mean, I do.”
The waiter brought steaming platefuls of food. Hungry as she’d been, the sight of the sour cream sauce on her chicken enchiladas made Isabelle feel ill. She pushed the plate aside so she wouldn’t have to smell it. Charlie’s appetite seemed unaffected. He swarmed over his enchiladas, which only made her madder.
“Tell me how it works, Charlie. I want to know.”
“Guessing you already know—screaming, etc.?” He grinned before returning to his own enchiladas.
She smacked her palm against the Formica tabletop and Charlie jumped. Good. “Do you have different compartments in that primitive brain of yours?” she asked, all her good feelings gone. She made a box with her hands and used a Charlie voice. “Here’s where I keep Gina, who knows how to cook and who lets me keep my socks at her house. And here,” she moved her hands to make a second box, “is where I keep the bimbo from the grocery store.” She moved her hands again. “The one with great tits.” Again. “The one who likes to swing from the ceiling fan.”
“That’s amazing,” Charlie said.
She thought she might throw up.
She watched Charlie shovel in the food and wondered whether all men really were pigs or whether she just had a disproportionate number of them in her life. Maybe she attracted them. Maybe something about her said, “Hey guys, here’s one you can toy with. Watch her explode when she finds out you can’t keep it in your pants.”
Her own brother, Pig First Class.
Crap.
* * * * *
“I’ve never felt this way before,” Kim said.
“How do you feel?” Damon asked. They were in the kitchen of the house Damon shared with his boyfriend Trent. Damon was in the middle of making dinner so it’d be ready when Trent came home from his workout. He wore an apron over a fitted dress shirt and designer jeans and seemed completely content. Kim sat at the marble-topped café table and watched, anything but.
“Queasy. Pissed. Like I’ve been sucker-punched. I mean, I’m thinking how right it feels to be with her, how she makes me feel so…so…” He shook his fists in frustration, both at trying to find the right words and because he didn’t understand.
Damon closed the refrigerator door, a pint of plain yogurt in his hand. “And she says, ‘Thanks for the sex, I’ll call you later?’”
“More or less.”
Damon grinned. “Gotta love the irony.”
“It’s a rib-tickler, all right.”
“Damn, you’ve got it bad.” Damon put down the yogurt and slid into the dainty, wire-backed chair opposite Kim’s. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say—nah, it’s not possible.”
“I’m glad this amuses you. I knew you’d be a friend.” He started to stand. Damon caught his wrist.
“Sit down, slick. I’m sorry. It’s just so weird, seeing you like this.”
He sat. “Not as weird as it is being like this. What am I supposed to do?” At Damon’s pained look, he said, “Uh oh. What?”
“Are you considering a long-distance relationship?”
That stopped him. “Long—shit. What am I doing?”
“It’s a good question. What do you want to do?”
“I want her to believe me about Jules, really believe me. To want to be with me. Dating. Talking. Hanging out.” For how long? Was it possible they’d still be together when he was ready to move? It would be another new record.
“I got bad news for you,” Damon said. “You want things you can’t control. You’re going to have to decide whether you’re okay being with her on her terms.
“She is a lioness, Damon. You should have heard her yell.”
Damon raised an eyebrow.
“Not sex,” Kim chided, but he was reluctant to discuss the break-in, even to better explain. “She completely lost it, and it was amazing. She’s fearless.”
“That’s a good thing, I take it?”
“She takes my breath away.”
“Ah.”
Kim’s chest hurt. He put his head in his hands and scrubbed his fingers through his hair. He smelled Isabelle’s bath gel, a scent now on her sheets and pillows. He inhaled the far more intimate scent still clinging to his fingers. No doubt he didn’t deserve her. He certainly sucked at telling her anything important. And yet, how could he possibly let her go?
Damon got up from the table and shoved Kim’s shoulder. “Tell me about your birthday plans. You get things settled with Kerry?”
He had to hand it to Damon as the master of changing Kim’s mood. From heartache to heartburn in oh-point-three seconds. His hands fell to the table with a thud and he wasn’t surprised to see they were fists.
“C’mon, slick. He’s your brother.”
“Half. Only half.”
“It wouldn’t kill you to give the man a chance once in a while.”
Kim worked at relaxing his hands. “He’s had you conned from the minute you met, and you came cheap.”
“I am many things, but I am not cheap.” Damon posed in mock indignation, hands on his hips.
“All Kerry had to do was admire that diamond stud you got from your ex, and you were eating out of his hand.”
“Naturally, I was pleased when it appraised at twice what what’s-his-name paid for it, but that’s not the point.” He picked up the yogurt container and started spooning the contents over green lasagna noodles in a casserole dish. It wasn’t plain yogurt. He’d premixed something with herbs and a tomato-y something-or-other. He’d actually planned this meal. As poorly as he planned his business, it amazed Kim to seem him so organized domestically.
“Had a point, did you?” Kim asked.
“You’re quite unpleasant tonight, you know. I don’t blame your thang for deciding no use but for juice.”
“Her name is Isabelle.”
“Isabelle. I apologize.” He put down the spoon. “See how easy that was? Two little words, slick. You should try them some time.”
It was true. He hadn’t exactly been the picture of gratitude for crashing in here unannounced to spill his guts. “Sorry, Day Man.”
“I meant to Kerry. You have no idea what that man has gone through for you.”
“Actually, I do. And if I were ever unclear about it, Mr. I-Want-To-Control-Your-Life would be happy to remind me.” The fists were back. His jaw had clenched too. Dandy.
Damon shoved the lasagna pan in the kitchen’s enormous, top-of-the-line oven. It hit the metal rack with a clang. “You miss this birthday and you’ll not only break his heart, you’ll have wasted Jules’ time.”
&nb
sp; “Jules?”
“You’ve been wanting her to teach, so when Kerry asked my help planning for—I’ve said too much,” Damon said.
“What are you talking about? You saying Jules is teaching Kerry?”
Damon’s eyes swiveled skyward and he gave a dramatic sigh. “All of them. You’re going climbing with the whole family, assuming you can pull your head out of your plumber’s crack and talk to your brother. There. I’ve spoiled the surprise. Call him, slick.” He wiped his undoubtedly clean hands down the front of his apron with an exaggerated huff and started running water in the sink, which was Damon-speak for “Don’t talk to me”.
Climbing with Kerry’s family. Son of a bitch couldn’t let Kim enjoy his own sport without horning in on it. He even had to mess with Kim’s friends behind his back, get them to set it all up for him. Kerry loved that shit. Asking Kim’s college girlfriend to pressure him to study harder. And during Kim’s apprenticeship, calling the master plumber to ask about safety precautions. On and on.
Damon didn’t want to talk about it? Fine with him. Kim had nothing to say. He got up to leave.
“Hey,” Damon said, shutting off the water, his tone saying he was over it, that they were friends again. Kim wasn’t, but leaving meant going home to an empty loft and a long night of wishing he were still at Isabelle’s house, lost in her laugh, finding new ways to unleash her throaty purr. Truth was, he needed a friend, even one who fell for Kerry’s great-guy shtick. He certainly didn’t need to be a prick about it.
“Let it go, Damon. It’s family business.”
“I apologize.”
Funny he should choose those exact words. Kim could call him on it if he wanted a fight. He didn’t. He nodded his acceptance, suddenly tired.
Damon nodded back. “So how ‘bout filling me in on the quest for your own little piece of climbing paradise. What’s going on with Austin?”
Austin. The move.
Kim gratefully shifted gears, telling Damon about the offer on his condo and his plan to go to Austin in the morning to look at “cute houses”.