An Accidental Gentleman

by M. Q. Barber

  She pushed back as if the tire had nearly clipped her, too. Her shoulders dropped, smoothing taut muscles. Under drawn brows, she studied him. “You don’t?”

  “I was doing the same damn thing, living the same day over and over. Keeping my distance so I couldn’t be betrayed.” He’d always known he’d never be the star athlete like Matt. He’d worked hard to be the one who made women laugh and relax. Pleasant, fun, and fuck-worthy. And he never, ever, wanted more from them than they wanted from him. Until Katherine. What a sorry pair they were. “Then I saw you and I didn’t want to do that shit anymore. I wanted to move forward instead of running in place.”

  She squinted with the gorgeous pixie squinch she used at her worktable, her nose wrinkling and her lip disappearing between her teeth.

  Waiting for his pulse to return ached, but a clean restart depended on her. “I want us to move forward together.”

  “But why me?” Loose fists falling open, she implored him with her palms spread wide. “I don’t understand what changed for you. I’m not some glamorous woman who mesmerizes men, Brian.” Waving at herself, she flicked auburn strands from her forehead. “When smudges land on my face, they’re machine grease, not mascara. I fuck when I want to, who I want to, and I’m comfortable with that.”

  Bullshit she was. Her words and actions didn’t line up in the comfort column. But what had changed for him, well—“You liked me.”

  “Of course I like you, that’s—”

  “No, I mean the day we met.” His thoughts jumbled and unfocused like the pixels in a low-res satellite image zoomed into incomprehensibility. He dove deeper, hunting for the words to make him transparent to her. “I was so far off my game, knocked on my ass and impressed by you, playing fetch-and-carry for you—and you still liked me. You didn’t look at me like Brian the fuck-up, or Brian the class clown. You saw me, and I saw you. Changing that tire together, I felt comfortable, Katherine. I finally understood what the hell Sherwood rambles on about, because I could’ve spent hours kneeling on the damn roadside just to be next to you.”

  He had been testing her, except not the way she thought, and not from some all-knowing plan. Making her wait for the sex—making himself wait—he’d been testing the friendship, not the romance. A did-she-care-about-him test.

  She did. She fucking did, or she wouldn’t keep breaking her own rules to spend time with him, whether they labeled them dates or not.

  “Yeah, and I felt comfortable up against a wall with your fingers inside me.” With her shrug, she shed his love the way she did whenever their talks veered too close to real depth. “That was a good time. Uncomplicated. More than that is messy.” Sweeping the room with her gaze, she rambled in all directions but his. “We fight every time we try for this ‘more’ that you want. What’s comfortable about that?”

  Everything. Every goddamn thing, because they weren’t fighting against each other. They were fighting for each other. If he had the least chance of showing her their truth, he’d fight to the last breath in his body. “I dare you.”

  She tipped her head, as sweetly confused as if she’d cracked open a radio and found a toaster’s guts inside. Beautiful, kissable confusion in her pursed lips. “What?”

  “I dare you to step out of your comfort zone and take a fucking chance on me.” His heart pounded. A sign of success for sure, because she had to be squeezing it in her hands, bringing him back to life the way she did a dying motor. God, if only his love would do the same for her. “You think you’re some kind of rebel, but you’re a coward, Katherine.”

  * * * *

  Fuck him. Fuck him and his fake nice-guy act and his judgment. His Prince Charming romantic dinner with his ridiculous tie-dyed shorts under his formal jacket. With his upfront confession about the takeout and his so-obviously-a-pillowcase tablecloth. Fuck.

  “I like sex, Brian.” She’d ruined the fabric. The split-open tomato stained the ivory linen with splashes of red. At least nothing had been real. The damage wouldn’t matter. “I’m not going to be ashamed of that.”

  Laughing through his nose and shaking his head, he knocked his knuckles against the table. “Do you hear yourself? If you aren’t ashamed, then why do you hide your sex life from your family?”

  Jesus God, his eyes. He begged for an explanation with a sad smile and pale green tendrils of new life rising from once-frozen earth. He piled his hopes in her inadequate hands, as if she knew the difference between the seeds to nourish for strong roots and healthy growth and the spoilers to pluck out before invasive weeds choked their dreams. Her hands didn’t know nurturing. They knew hex wrenches and offset gears. Percussive maintenance, rough and dirty.

  Clean-shaven Brian, smooth-cheeked and pristine, would forever be too good for her.

  He spread his fingers wide, one palm up and inviting. “Why no dates? Why treat guys like an ugly secret you can’t take home?”

  She would ruin him. Her sister’s bitterness had soaked into her soil. Those first two years of terror, when she’d been unable to imagine dating anyone in high school because love landed you on suicide watch in a hospital bed, your cheeks drawn and your voice thin when you spoke at all. When the big sister who’d once let her stay up late and watch scary movies together, and soothed her nightmares after, no longer lived behind those hollow eyes. When two little girls crying for their mother had to make do with their sixteen-year-old aunt instead. Love did that.

  “Maybe I am a coward.” She abandoned dinner. Brian’s stuffed tiger with its ragged ear stump watched her from the coffee table. She’d have to pass the silent guardian to reach the door.

  Brian had shown her his tender underbelly tonight. The boy who’d grown up to be the man at the table now. Not a stranger, not blank and faceless the way she imagined the men she fucked, because who they were never mattered so long as they gave her the escape she sought for an hour or two.

  Needing the sex didn’t make her ashamed. But wanting more, tangling lust with the wires of love and loss and regret dead-set on strangling her when he walked away—she shivered.

  “Maybe I am.” No maybe about it. “But I still want to fuck you. I would’ve fucked you weeks ago if you’d let me.” And dropped him before he became a real person, one with feelings and desires she’d have to consider. Jesus, she should be ashamed. “You think I move too fast. That I’m a disgusting—”

  “No. Fuck, Katherine, no, that’s not what I’m saying.” Brian launched himself up. His chair tipped to the rug. “I would never tell you to be ashamed of wanting sex. I don’t divide women into Sunday school virgins and lying whores. I’m trying to show you you do, or at least you act like you do.”

  The girls didn’t need to meet the men she fucked, to have their aunt’s example of how not to find love. Her parents didn’t need to see the Kit who cavalierly plucked a man from the crowd for his broad hands and his smile filled with sharp, dangerous thoughts.

  Creases lined Brian’s forehead, and behind them lay nice-guy thoughts she didn’t deserve. The man who’d nearly turned down a blowjob because he wanted to know all of her, not just the skills that made him come.

  He eased toward her, his slow steps as gentle as his voice. “You have a good-girl life around your family, and then you treat your desire like it’s something filthy you can’t take home with you.”

  More than her desire. All of her, stained, torn, and unstitched. The way she’d always be. Because Erin, fuck, she didn’t need to see the opposite—a goddamn genuine nice guy, a man who stayed when he said he would.

  Bringing a happy relationship home, she might as well hand her sister the pills all over again. “It’s just a headache from the girls crying, Kit. Would you toss me that bottle from the counter and watch them awhile? I need a nap.”

  And then not being able to wake her. The frantic calls and the begging. The lights and sirens competing with the girls’ wailing. Her fault for missing the signs.

  For so many years, she’d pu
t everyone else’s needs first. Pinned herself in a vise between fulfilling the bare minimum of her own needs, but only where no one would see her, and rejecting any hope of something better, because her sister’s dreams had crumbled.

  Brian twined their fingers, his right in her left, and raised her hand. “You treat yourself like something filthy. Unworthy.” Kissing the bare underside of her wrist, he locked gazes with her over the top. “It burns me up, because you are so incredibly beautiful, all of you, and you refuse to see it.”

  His soft kisses stung. He wounded her and healed her in some simultaneous impossibility, teasing away with lips and tongue the injury she’d gotten in the softball parking lot. When his crack about wedding rings had hurt more than the throbbing pain of wrenching her arm.

  Swift and sure, he stitched her up now with his mouth. The hurt fell away, leaving the happy memory of them covered in mud and laughing together. The kind of fun she never allowed herself with the guys she fucked. She lusted and she took, but they weren’t men she liked. They weren’t men she wanted to talk with. Laugh with. Love with.

  Clasping her bare shoulders, he rubbed the wide straps of her borrowed dress with his thumbs. Under his steady gaze, he inhaled and exhaled with unhurried calm. “I want you to be one woman, whole and complete, not just for me but for you. Because you should love yourself.”

  His lips, pale pink, called to her. Her favorite piece of him, because he delivered so much kindness with them, even in his cruel challenges to be more. To be better. To be his Katherine and allow him to be her Brian.

  “I’m—I want—” Throat closing, she choked on nothing. What he wanted for her, she wanted for him. Whole and complete. The risky love, the one where you had to love yourself first or the rest wouldn’t fall into clockwork rhythm. Real love. Fuck, so much bliss should be joyful and together, not damn scary. “I’m afraid you’ll break my heart.”

  His exhale skipped into a shaky smile. “I’m afraid you’ll break mine. That you’ll let fear hold you back.”

  He cradled her cheeks with the delicacy of a man holding an irreplaceable part. Without her, unbroken and ready to work, the machine would never run. And their awkward contraption might turn with grace and precision if she found the courage to let it.

  He swiped beneath her eyes. God. When had she started crying?

  “I don’t know how to make the scariness disappear all at once. I would if I could.” Pushing tears into her hairline, he trembled. Braver than her. He stood with his innermost pieces exposed and vulnerable. “I think maybe the fear fades over time. Until someday you realize you haven’t worried in years, because we’ve been showing each other day in and day out by still being here. I love you, Katherine.”

  Warmth flooded her, warmth and urgency to move with him as a unified whole. To taste his mouth and the promises on his tongue. He nestled his heart in her hands. A trust she hadn’t known she’d needed until she felt the comforting weight. Whatever tinkering she did would have to be her best work. A new challenge, a new dare, but one they would solve together.

  Bowing his head, he clenched his jaw and nodded half sideways. “If you can’t believe the words yet, if you can’t hear them, then tell me how I can make them real for you.”

  “I hear you, Brian.” She gained strength in each whispered syllable, driving through the thick wash of fear remnants. “Show me. The things you’ve wanted to tell me all these weeks and I haven’t let you say. Show me, Brian. Talk to me in a way I can understand.”

  She sought his mouth, to finally kiss the lips she’d watched from the day they’d met. No more denying herself. No more cutting herself in two and leaving half to starve. From now on, she would be one woman who feasted with the man who loved her.

  * * * *

  She kissed the way he’d imagined, pressing with the force of her whole body. Aggressive and bold, yeah, but in rising and ebbing waves. Giving him space to claim her in return as the currents carried them together.

  While their tongues tumbled against each other and she clutched his back, he stroked her neck. He followed her smooth, graceful curves out toward her shoulders, again and again. From the pointed tips of her pixie cut past the open vee on her dress. Christ Jesus, she’d worn a dress for him.

  And not only the dress. Sweet little heels and cock-hardening black stockings his hands had been begging to touch for the last two hours.

  Withholding sex from her now would make him the coward. In the language she understood, he’d be telling her he lacked faith in her. Didn’t trust her to keep trying, to give their fragile relationship a chance to grow once the clothes had come off.

  Her being here tonight represented a victory—an overture of peace. Compromise. And if what she needed in return was to feel desired? Well fuck. He’d held that piece in reserve from their first meeting.

  He slipped free of her hungry mouth. “Katherine.”

  Kiss-swollen and pink-cheeked, she gazed at him with pupils dark and irises sparkling. “Are we stopping now?”

  Her shoulders sagged beneath his clasping hands. From her falling lips to her shifting feet, her body confirmed she expected him to say yes. To reject her need for physical proof and bid her goodnight, as if their relationship lived or died by his rules.

  “I have dessert in the fridge. Some cake thing.” Damned if the name would pop in his head now. He poured the last of his confidence into his voice. God only knew whether the move would be the right one. “But what I really want to taste is you.”

  She gasped. “I don’t—” Shaking her head, she tugged her lower lip behind her teeth.

  Icy, heart-stopping plunge. He fumbled for a quip, a take-back, anything to reverse course and unwiden her eyes. Before he got the breath, she covered his mouth with her palm. Soft skin he yearned to kiss.

  Her hand shaking, she traced his lips. “Yes. Because it’s you.”

  Warmth spread from her gentle touch.

  He caressed her past the swell of her breasts and down her sides, molding her dress to her flesh. The inward tuck of her waist. The sexy fucking flare of her hips. “Because it’s me?”

  Nuzzling alongside his nose, she brushed their mouths together. “Were you thinking of my thighs when you shaved? Because I don’t think your fuzzy wanna-be beard would’ve been nearly enough to scratch me.”

  In his curled fingers, he shortened her dress an inch at a time. If she intended to distract him, she’d have to find a stronger diversion than a half-hearted jest about his facial hair. The edge of her dress folded into his palms and left him grazing bare skin. “I’m always thinking of you. Tell me what you meant.”

  She stiffened. He could’ve softened the demand with a please, but she deserved to know he’d seen the evasion. Understood how her mind worked and would chase her anyway. That he’d risk losing the surface Kit to have the real Katherine.

  “I don’t let them.” She drew back, and the fire in her eyes flashed. “I’ve never wanted that from them.”

  The men she took to her bed. No—the men she fucked. Katherine slept alone. Maybe she would leave him, tonight, without nestling in the sheets he’d bought for them to share. And that would have to be all right. He’d damn well better reconcile himself to her skittishness before he soured them with regret. Because someday she would stay. Neither of them had caught this wave before. They’d have to learn it together.

  “But you want that with me?” He ached to savor her on his tongue. To flood his senses with her from the source and not rely on her sweet musk clinging to his fingers like that first night. But he had to be certain she wanted his love, his translation from words to action.

  “I’ve always hated”—she licked her lips and blew out a hard breath—“making myself vulnerable. The sex I wanted wasn’t about that. The power belonged to me, you understand?”

  “I know.” He’d felt her power when she’d led him into the back room and set the rules. Whatever kernel he’d claimed for himself existed because
she hadn’t objected. “And that was fine. For them.”

  She nodded. “For them. Intimacy was never currency in that exchange. But with us…”

  He waited. With her bare thighs swaying against his fingertips, a sign her stockings stopped before her panties started. He’d know if he glanced down, but watching her face mattered more, despite the opinion of his stiff cock.

  “Intimacy is the language we have to practice.” She smiled, finally, a cheeky grin. “I guess you’ll get to take the first lesson. Better aim for high marks.”

  Hell yes. He edged his fingers higher. “So, your dress?”

  Her face turned feral, her bared teeth a teasing threat and her eyes a blazing command. “Lose it.”

  He sluiced the whole thing over her head and dropped it to the carpet. With her trembling fingers clasped in his hands, he stepped back to the edge of their reach and let himself look.

  He’d meant to worship her slowly. Every inch of her kissed and cradled, a lesson in the sexiness of gentleness, so when she came on his tongue she’d have no doubts about how deep his love ran.

  “Fucking—fuck.” His cock jerked. “Katherine, you—”

  Staring at his beautiful lover, Christ himself would revise his game plan. She wrapped femininity around strength. The slim muscles he’d felt beneath her skin at the shop transformed her into a goddess here, bare and defiant, challenging him to be worthy. Black fabric, modest half-cups, lifted her breasts for his mouth. Freckles dotted her creamy stomach, falling in an arc toward the black panties with their iridescent sheen and picking up again beneath, in the space before matching stockings snuggled her thighs.

  “Fuck, I don’t have the words.” Their arms bridged the gap between them. He could keep staring, forever, as he crushed her fingers because he couldn’t stop needing to hold her tighter and remind her he’d never let go, or he could map the landscape she offered him. His Katherine, whole and complete under his tongue.