Her Shirtless Gentleman

by M. Q. Barber

  “To everything, there is a season.”

  If Rob felt the same, they’d see them all together.

  * * * *

  She hadn’t come back.

  He’d noticed the minute she left the bed. Impossible to sleep through his woman slipping out of his arms. The creak of the bathroom door, the flush of the toilet, and the sink running alerted him to her purpose. But she had yet to return.

  God forbid she gave in to doubts and fears. His Nora, standing in the bathroom, regretting their night together. Crying or worrying how she’d leave without her car here.

  He rolled to his feet at the speed of the adrenaline coursing through him. Panic subsided in a puddle of blue silk. He fell back on training. Assessed the environment for what the clues told him.

  His Nora, comfortable wandering naked in his house. Staking her claim. Starting her tour without him.

  Palming a condom from the nightstand, he began his hunt. Past the empty bathroom, avoiding creaky boards with the ease of long practice, he hugged the wall down the stairs. Her panties greeted him at the bottom. Definitely naked.

  No blood left for panic, what with the full volume converging on his cock. He slipped through the living and dining rooms. Stopped.

  Moonlight streaming in the kitchen window washed her nude beauty in ghostly white. He’d stood on the same spot the night they’d met. Speckled that window with his own brand of whitewash. Then he’d had his hand and his imagination. Tonight, she stood before him, a vision of soft, warm flesh, the woman he loved tender and needy or wild and greedy.

  Crossing the floor, he hummed so as not to startle her. She tipped her head but didn’t turn from the window. He settled behind her, relaxation and arousal mingling when she allowed him to wrap his arms across her shoulders and chest. Pinned her in tight. His woman.

  She gripped his forearms. Her man. A silent agreement taking him to full hardness. The corners of the condom packet dug into his palm.

  “Thinking good thoughts?” He kept his voice low in a fervent hope for truth.

  She bumped his chin with her nod. “You’ve got a strong oak out there.” Her fingers fluttered against his arm. “It should have a tree house.”

  Thank God for bringing this woman to him. Thank him for her ex’s stupidity and Lucas’s inability to hold his drink. For all his years of searching and not settling for less than perfection.

  He kissed the side of her head. “House like that needs children to play in it.”

  “Three or four, I think,” she whispered, sweet and wistful.

  “I think so too. They say practice makes perfect.” He dotted her neck with kisses, light and playful, circling the tiny bruises his mouth had left earlier. Those made his cock twitch. Mine.

  “Mm-hmm. We’ll get the most benefit—”

  She gasped and shivered. Sensitive spot half an inch below her right ear.

  “—from two-a-days.”

  Three or four, I think.

  He pressed into her, aching relief as the soft skin of her backside caressed his cock. “Whatever the lady wants.”

  “Upstairs?” A touch of uncertainty. A hint of disappointment, maybe.

  “You said you wanted to try other rooms.” He unfurled his fingers and presented the condom packet.

  “I did say that.” She plucked the wrapper free and tore the corner. “And I’ve never…”

  “Not in the kitchen?” Taking the latex circle from her fingers, he nipped her ear. “That’s a shame, Nora.” An ain’t-he-a-lucky-bastard shame. A make-her-first-time-memorable shame. “We’ll fix that right now.”

  He rolled on the condom and roused her with stroking fingers and wandering kisses. Teased his tip inside and groaned at her suction. Pressed her hands to the counter and entwined their fingers.

  They’d fix the rest day by day. All the time in the world.

  Epilogue

  Rain dogged them the whole way south, flying in sheets under the old truck’s tires. Steam rose from cattle clustered in the muddy fields more akin to spring than December twenty-third. Temps hovered in the upper 40s, but the news folk warned a cold snap was like to swoop down from Canada any day now.

  Though the truck heater kept the damp at bay, Nora snuggled alongside him on the bench seat anyhow. Inched outta her seat in the first hour and never gone back. Her head rested light on his shoulder. They sat denim to denim.

  Rob dropped his hand off the wheel and squeezed her knee. Driving home for Christmas alone didn’t hold a quarter the joy of her at his side. Their five-and-a-half-hour drive crested seven with the bad weather, the holiday traffic, and the tractor-trailers throwing up road tsunamis. The hours slipped by to the tune of the radio’s Christmas music marathon under an unbroken dome of dull gray clouds.

  He swung through his hometown to show her the main street all gussied up in holiday finery. The garlands and wreaths slung under the store awnings stayed safe and festive even if the bright red bows on the streetlights hung limp and waterlogged. A left at Carson’s Crafts and Collectibles—boasting eBay services in the front window now—would take them out past the high school. Near dark going on five o’clock, though. Mama would have supper waiting on them if he towed Nora all over the county and back of beyond just to show her his childhood haunts.

  He’d have a next time, a whole stretch of years, to share his memories with her. The game when he’d hit the home run clear across the outfield and busted a bus window in the parking lot. The Nesleys’ sledding hill the year they’d gotten the whopper of a storm. Hell, he and Marcus hauled Daddy’s old smooth-bottomed toboggan again and again while Jilly and Sara clapped and cheered, ’til all their fingers froze in their mittens. They piled through the front door, stomping snow off their boots, and Mama appeared with mugs of hot cocoa and fresh-baked gingerbread men.

  Pressing her legs together, Nora grew squirmy as an inchworm in the seat. “How much further?”

  “Ain’t but ten minutes now.” He hung a right, the turnoff one he’d made a hundred times before, but never with his woman at his side. “You want me to stop in town, or you wanna hold it?”

  “Huh?” She blinked twice, pure deer-in-headlights, and shook her head. “I don’t need a bathroom break.”

  “You sure?” Hell if she didn’t. Her knee jounced as if the truck bumped along washboard ruts instead of smooth pavement.

  “Mm-hmm. No pee-jitters. Just the ordinary kind.” She spread her fingers in front of the heat vent. Pale fingers, slim and bare, they offered no hint a wedding band had ever circled one. “What did your parents say when you told them you were bringing me to Christmas?”

  “That they can’t wait to meet you.” A reassurance he’d repeated half a dozen times in the last two weeks. Not strong enough, seemed like. He eased onto the shoulder, threw the truck in park, and unsnapped her seatbelt.

  “Rob, what—”

  He hauled her into his lap and kissed her. Tight fit, his arm wedged between her back and the steering wheel, but Christ she belonged just so. “You planning to call my daddy a hayseed hack who can’t plow a straight line to save his life? Tell my mama she’s fat and ugly and her cooking tastes like the back end of a cow?”

  “Good God, no, of course I’m not.” An adorable divot perched between her eyebrows.

  He kissed her frown line for good measure. “Then here’s what’s gonna happen.”

  A familiar red truck coming from the other direction slowed, the driver’s window dropping, and Rob punched the button to lower his own.

  The vehicle rolled to a stop alongside his, a lane-width away. “You folks all right?” A man’s hand emerged from the window. The driver gripped the roofline in the growing dusk and peered out from under an old-school plaid hunter’s cap, earflaps and all. “Outta gas? Got a flat?”

  “All good, Mr. Nesley.” He leaned into the drizzle and raised his voice. His folks’ oldest neighbor had to be nearing eighty these days. “It’s Rob, Rob Vanderhoff.”

  “Oh, Rick’s younger
boy, sure enough. You’ve grown some. Not so big as your brother, mind. The wife’s sending me to the store.” With arthritic fingers thick and curving, Mr. Nesley patted his chest. “Got my marching orders tucked away. You in town for the holidays, son?”

  “Yessir. Taking my girl here”—he tipped her backward, and Nora obliged with a wave out the window—“home for Christmas, and she’s caught a touch of nerves.” Her light slap at his shoulder came expected and went undodged. “’Preciate you stopping, though.”

  “Ah, yeah, that’ll do ya. First time my girl and my mother got in the same room, hoo boy, fireworks flew. Singed me something good. Sixty-one, no, sixty-two years now, and those burns still smart.” He smacked the roof twice. “Give ’em hell, girlie. Rob, you thank your mama for the cookies she sent over. All that bending and stooping at the oven’s gotten to be too much for my Louise. Merry Christmas!”

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Nesley.” He tossed the words over the rising crank window. Same truck the Nesleys’d had since his boyhood, well cared-for and purring quiet and steady as a cat on the hearth. The red truck slipped away just as smoothly. “Now where was I?”

  Nora nestled against his shoulder and wormed her arms around his back. “Calmly reassuring your anxious girlfriend her fears are a pyramid scheme cooked up by her overactive imagination.”

  He sent his own window skyward, cutting the chill and the mist swirling in. “Right—so Daddy’ll yank you into a hug and tell you to keep me in line, and Mama’ll drag you straight to the kitchen and shove a stirring spoon in your hand and a cookie in your mouth. You watch.”

  Lifting her chin, she sent a honey-brown wave of hair tumbling across his arm. “Is that where you get your habit of shoveling food in my mouth?”

  He swiped his thumb across her lower lip, soft and full and a tad reddened from his kiss. “Best hope not. I don’t want my mama knowing the thoughts I think when you open your mouth for me.”

  “I like your thoughts.” She captured his thumb and sucked hard, teasing with her tongue. “They all seem to end with me relaxed and sleepy.”

  Merciful Christ. “Only when I’m getting ’em right, honey girl.”

  He slipped her off his lap in an attempt to stop his cock from gaining more altitude against her warm, cozy backside. Too late to prevent takeoff. He buckled her in and rejoined the sparse traffic headed northwest.

  Little subdivisions, clusters of five to ten houses, squatted across the road from family farms now, creeping deeper into the rolling hills and prairie grass. Thick as deer mice. His faming neighbors up in Iowa probably thought the same of him. Five years he’d had his modest acreage, and he’d yet to plant a thing. A big kitchen garden would start things off nicely come spring if he had a pair of feminine hands to play in the dirt with.

  Once her ex had backed off his threats over the house, and her boss—good man—had refused to play ball with the asshole’s harassing complaints about her moral suitability for bank work, Nora’d talked some about selling her place. In the spring, when the market rebounded. When new growth started.

  She spent half her nights in his bed already. But damn if he didn’t need her the other half, too. A good night text held little appeal compared to her cuddled up alongside him with her soft skin, her sweet scent, and her round curves. Space to be independent though. She needed some, and railroading her along wouldn’t gain him any ground. He’d had eighteen years of adult bachelorhood. She’d had a fair bit less, and her boldness grew with every discovery, every step toward being the woman her first marriage had stunted.

  Coming up on six months, their relationship. They’d done Thanksgiving at his place with Brian and a handful of other buddies from work, a real casual friends affair. But Christmas, Christmas called for family, and not once had he considered Nora anything less. The proof lay snug in a tiny satin bag in his pocket. The slim circle of white gold alternated channel-set garnets and diamonds for their birth months.

  Thirty-four days he’d carried the darn thing, since the week before Thanksgiving, and he hadn’t worked up the gumption to ask her. Not the nerves so much as the how. Every fool with a notion in his head and a ring in his pocket these days laid out some elaborate scheme and recorded the whole shebang, posted his bragging cleverness online for the world to praise. Not his style.

  But Nora deserved praise. If a fancy proposal showed a woman her worth, a man ought to slap on his thinking cap and get the job done right.

  “It’s so green here.” Nora leaned to and fro, spilling her hungry blue-gray gaze through the windows as evenly as the sky covered the fields. “I thought it’d be all broken gold.”

  “Winter wheat. You’re used to corn stubble.” He pointed across his grip on the wheel. “Those up there are ours.” The south field ran thick with rows of short, splotchy green wheat spreading tendrils. The day’s soaking would do them good if the rain hadn’t come too fast and hard and driven off the nutrients in the soil. “Must be staying too warm to go dormant yet—ask my daddy about his wheat, and he’ll talk your ear off.”

  Daddy would love her forever, because once Nora asked, she’d dig herself right into the conversation of percentages and yields and temperatures and rainfall. A hatful of numbers made for a common language even with this being her first visit to a working farm.

  He took the turnoff for the house and headed up the slope into the last rays of sunlight. The rain registered little more than the odd sprinkle now, but he pulled up alongside the front porch anyhow. The tieback curtains framed the Christmas tree in the parlor window. Same curtains, fresh tree. Mama insisted on the real thing, and Daddy obliged her on all house matters.

  A step or two’d have Nora under the roofline with no cause to worry about impersonating a bedraggled mouse fleeing an unexpected flood. He cut the engine, and the low pings of raindrops played a scattershot medley. Their seatbelts, unsnapping, added a deeper click-and-zip. “Ready?”

  Turned toward the house and fumbling behind herself, Nora squeezed his thigh. “Nope. Not even close.” She scooted across the seat and out, leaving the door hanging wide. His bold girl took the porch stair in two quick hops.

  The screen door whined open as if it’d been waiting all day on the chance.

  “Come in, come in”—Mama shooed her in the house—“you must be Nora. Robin sends such nice photos in the email. Of course the printer won’t do them right, I—”

  The screen door snapped shut, and him still warming the driver’s seat with his lazy ass. His mama, alone with Nora, already talking photos. The family albums sat in the dining room hutch on a direct line between the front door and the kitchen where it’d be only proper to offer a guest a drink.

  Baby bathtimes. Childhood Halloween costumes. That school play—Christ.

  He hustled around the truck and snatched the bags from under the slate gray tonneau cover on the bed. One for him, one for Nora, since his folks were like to bunk them in odd corners of the house unsuitable for sharing. His siblings and their spouses got the doubles. He beat feet through the front door.

  “Robin, don’t you forget”—Mama hollered from the kitchen before the closing snap—“to leave your shoes on the rug.”

  He rocked at the edge. A raindrop made the wise decision to slide off his boot and onto the braided oval instead of the hardwood.

  “I’m finished cleaning the floors”—well of course, wasn’t nothing Mama couldn’t get done early and perfect the first time—“and you’ll have the mop handle in your grip quicker than a hawk scoops a mouse if you track mud all over. God bless this awful rain. Take your bags on upstairs, please.”

  “Where to?” Stooping with the bags slung over his back, he wrestled his shoes clear of his feet and promptly stepped, sock-footed, in a wet spot. Yech. “You putting Nora in the front on the right?”

  Too small to be a true bedroom, Mama’s sewing room got good eastern light and served fine as a guest room in a pinch. The cozy corner chair unfolded into a narrow twin.

  “Don�
�t be silly, Robin. You’ll share your old room.”

  His foot skidded off the first step. His shin banged the riser. Sonuva—

  “Beef stew’s waiting on you. You haven’t fed this girl since Des Moines? I’m surprised her stomach isn’t rumbling a hole clear through on both sides.”

  “She’s a survivor, Mama, strong and resilient. I’m lucky enough she’s”—not blind, nothing hidden from his honey girl except the ring in his pocket, and she’d have it soon as he settled on the best damn way to show her his love—“kind to my faults.”

  He attacked the steps with more care, Nora’s easy laughter from the kitchen a welcome balm. If his shin bruised, she might offer a kiss or two to speed the healing along.

  The first room on the left at the top of the stairs had changed. The bunk beds he and Marcus had shared for more than a decade, long after the novelty had worn off and the irritating lack of privacy for teen-hormone-fueled masturbation had begun to grate, no longer stood against the far wall. A double bed had taken up residence. Odd as hell pairing for the old dressers cluttered with athletic trophies whose owners had moved out. Though Marcus hadn’t gone far, just up the road a ways. Maybe his big brother dropped by nightly to kiss his old awards for luck.

  He lowered the bags whisper-quiet beside the foot of the bed. The. One. A parent-provided bed blessing his relationship with Nora. And Mama hadn’t said a word, sly woman.

  “Not how you left it?” Daddy leaned on the doorframe. “Wrestled that up here not two days after you asked your mama about bringing your young lady down for Christmas. ‘It’s time,’ says she.”

  They exchanged a backslapping hug, the proud post-game clinch, and the heat of his folks’ approval chased away the last of the damp clinging to his thoughts. “Well and past time. I didn’t figure I’d ever get the bedroom back. Thought you’d put Nora in the sewing room and me in a sleeping bag guarding the tree from Santa-peepers.”

  “Corralling the rugrats up here makes getting the presents under the tree easier, but we’ll manage with them camping down in the family room. Shut the parlor while they nod off.”