by LJ Vickery
“Well, sure. One more than in my family growing up. I think that’s a sound plan.”
Solina fell over on the couch, convulsing with laughter. “Seriously, Wiley? Seriously? I spill my guts about an obsessive disorder, and the next thing I know, we’re having eight kids? Are you crazy?”
“Maybe.” He grinned. In truth, he’d never felt happier. Beauty hadn’t turned him down. And he wasn’t going to give her time to do it. “So, tell me how buying this place brought your hoarding under control?”
She sat up again, reaching for a pillow and clutching it to her midsection. Her humor lingered around the edges, but she wasn’t laughing anymore. “The first step was the hardest, but thanks to my therapist, who’d made me house hunt, the thought of moving in here superseded my fear of emptying out my old house.”
He pictured Beauty in pain, which he didn’t like. But he was also glad she’d come out healthier on the other side.
“With the infinite help and patience of my ex-roommate and a professional organizer my therapist found, we went through everything. About seventy-five percent of it ended up either in the trash or donated.”
Wiley didn’t ask what she’d given up. Instead, he focused on the positive. “And what did you bring with you?”
She brightened. “My furniture.” She gestured around the room. “All my dishes and cooking stuff, the quilt on my bed…and I got to pick six collections from among the mess.”
“What did you pick?” Wiley had never met a hoarder before, although if he thought about it, his elisi might be considered one. The only difference being all the things his grandmother kept were useful. But she’d probably still had every screw, nail and piece of string she’d ever come across. She would sympathize with Solina, no doubt loving her on sight.
“I brought my books.”
He scoffed. “Books can’t be considered hoarding.” He still had every book he ever owned since elementary school boxed up and waiting to be shipped.
“No,” she agreed. “Not by themselves. But added to the chaos, they weren’t exactly in good order.”
Wiley slid closer and splayed his hand on her leg, urging her to continue.
“Then there are the toys.” Her lips tipped up. “In case you haven’t noticed, I have a soft spot for them.”
Which was understandable, considering her parents had jettisoned her entire childhood during their myriad of travels.
“I also like small tools,” she admitted. “Especially ones with old wooden handles where I can almost feel the previous owners in the grain.”
“I know what you mean.” Wiley thought about the building projects he’d helped with on his parents’ ranch. The tools in the barn he used had passed through many generations, and their worn bits fit his hand perfectly, as if he’d been made in their age-old mold.
“Then there’s jewelry and small, miscellaneous things like keys or hatpins,” she told him. “Although I have to be careful not to overbuy in that non-specific category.”
Wiley still thought the place looked too clean for someone who’d been living here and buying for a year. Shouldn’t there be toys on toys and stacks of books? “So, if you keep buying things, why is everything in order?”
“Ahh. Here’s where my antique store comes in.” She grinned, proving that she’d reached solid footing. “I put in as many shelves as allowed under local fire ordinances, along with leaving plenty of space on the walls for art. After I moved in here, I was allowed to go a little crazy, filling the shop. But once I reached capacity, I had to dial things back.”
“And now?” he prompted.
“Now I can only buy an equal amount of items as what I sell each week. If I really like a new purchase, it takes a place of honor in my house, but I swap it for something already here, and that item goes to the shop.”
“Brilliant,” Wiley marveled. “You still get to buy treasures, but there’s a parity to the whole thing.”
“Exactly.” Solina sat back and tossed the pillow into the air, looking giddy with relief. “And you don’t hate me for it.”
He caught the pillow on the way back down and threw it to the floor. He leaned his large body toward her, urging her down onto the sofa cushions. He placed a hand on either side of her head and brought their noses close together. “And you don’t hate me for being a lightweight in the digestive department.”
“Not even close,” she told him with all seriousness.
“And you won’t change your mind?” Wiley probed. “Even after my guys tell you their favorite story about when I actually threw up on a woman while, uh, making out?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Gross, Wiley, but no. Because,” she said with all the sass he’d come to adore, “if we’re going to have eight kids, there’s bound to be a lot of puke.”
Chapter Fifteen
Solina yawned, shifting in bed, her hands turning the small wooden puzzle box over and over, still looking for its secret. Not that her mind was really on the box. Almost every molecule in her body still focused on Wiley, even―she glanced at the clock―at one in the morning, two hours since he’d left…after their teasing discussion on the couch.
And after some pretty hot kisses, his long, hard body nestled up against hers. But he’d kept the rest of their forays G-rated. Okay. Maybe PG. However, nothing below the waist had been attempted again, and nothing above the waist got accomplished, except a whole lot of lip action…on the mouth. She squirmed, thinking about all the things he could have done with his luscious tongue and those large, strong hands if he’d strayed south one more time. But he hadn’t.
Solina remained frustrated. Why did Wiley have such high ideals? And why did she enjoy the hell out of him, even without more physical perks?
She had to admit, her initial idea to have Wiley deflower her―and what a funny word that was. Georgia O’Keefe would approve of its use―had morphed into wanting more from him. He’d been smug, but she couldn’t fault him. She certainly couldn’t resist him. She, who’d resisted men for years. Of course, none of them had left her aching the way Wiley did. And not one of them had made her count the hours until she saw them again.
She glanced at the clock once more. One fifteen. Solina sighed. Seventeen hours and forty-five minutes until their next date. She threw an arm over her head. Gah! He was a sickness. One that refused to be cured. Perhaps she needed a special “inoculation” from him. Maybe that would assuage her gut-wrenching need for the guy. Yeah, right. She had a feeling that a thousand such treatments wouldn’t purge away the illness that was Wiley. Most likely, it would just make her condition permanent.
She replayed the remainder of their evening in her head―the part after her orgasm―so that perhaps she might get her body into a restful enough state to sleep…
“So tell me what countries you’ve lived in?” Wiley probed as he hovered above her, giving their lips a break.
“A ridiculous amount,” Solina snorted.
“I have time,” he dropped to his side and rolled, settling back on the couch with Solina on top of him, mashed up against every solid muscle in his torso. She couldn’t stop her hand from playing with the smooth skin where his neck met his t-shirt.
“Well, we started in India, then quickly moved to Thimphu in Bhutan.” She easily recited, as she’d done for friends so many times before. “Then there was Phnom Penh, Jakarta, and Kabul, followed by Beijing. My favorite place was Tokyo…until we came to Washington, D.C. Between those was Bogota, Columbia.” She wrinkled her nose. “Not a place I’d go back to.” She shivered.
Wiley nodded. “I was stationed in Columbia for a while, so I get it. The National Liberation Army with their terrorist attacks. Even in Bogota, you probably weren’t allowed to go out much.”
“Actually, not at all,” she concurred. “Too many malls and public eating areas were bombed while we were there. So I couldn’t partake of the wonderful flea markets, or see the historic churches or the Gold Museum…” She swiftly moved on to better memories. “Bu
t when I got to D.C.… Oh, my god.” She gave him a big smile. “I knew I’d found the place I wanted to stay.”
Wiley grinned back. “I’ve never been there,” he admitted. “I’ve always wanted to, but never had the time. Maybe we can go together and you can show me around.”
“I’d love to,” Solina gushed, and she really meant it. Taking a vacation with Wiley would be so much fun, and she hadn’t been back to Washington in a couple years.
“Did you go to school there?” Wiley asked.
“I wanted to.” Her face fell. “Georgetown was my first pick, but my parents insisted on an Ivy League school.”
“Don’t tell me.” Wiley gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Harvard.”
“No, but close,” she allowed. “Harvard was my parents’ goal, but I won out in the end, choosing Brown.”
“In Rhode Island, right?”
“Yeah. And I actually loved it.”
It was Wiley’s turn to snort. “You probably would have loved any place you went, as long as it got you out from under your parents’ control.”
“True, but Brown offered a great Art History program with the bonus of studying architecture. It was a good fit for me.”
“So you stayed in Rhode Island. Where did your parents go while you were at college?”
“Well, they spent a few more months in Washington, but before the end of my first semester, they headed to Reykjavik.”
“And you joined them there over your first summer?”
“I did. It was a lovely place. Very safe, and now that I was a worldly college student, I had a lot of freedom. No more ‘drivers’ following me around. I really enjoyed the museums, and the architecture there is incredible, so it all played to my education.”
“Where are they now? Your parents, I mean.”
“Amazingly, the same place they’ve been for a couple years. They’re getting older, and changing locations so often finally lost its appeal. They’ve settled at an embassy in Ottawa, Canada.”
“That’s a great city. Even colder than New England, but worth it. And how often do they visit you?”
Here was a tricky subject. The answer was easy. Never. But lines had blurred and Solina no longer knew if the fault lay with her or her parents. At first, when she’d won the lottery, they were angry that she stopped being obedient, continually attempting coercion to which Solina wouldn’t bend. How many times had she heard, We’ve groomed you to be the wife of a diplomat. We’ve invested too much time and money for you to abandon a worthy lifestyle. Or the best one… You can’t possibly be happy settling for such a proletarian life.
Nothing had swayed Solina to return to their version of her future, and it had taken a couple years for them to get over their disappointment. By that time, she’d finished school and purchased her first house, which had started to become a hoarder’s nightmare. She couldn’t let her parents see that.
“They don’t,” Solina finally answered. “When they finally accepted my independence and decided I might not be a lost cause, I’d begun to hoard.” It was so easy for her to talk to Wiley about all this. The only other person she’d ever trusted with everything had been her psychologist.
“I get it,” Wiley nodded, his cheek rubbing against hers in the process. His chest rumbled with…annoyance maybe? “If they’d seen what you were doing, they probably would have had you declared incompetent and you would have been back under their rule faster than you could spit.”
While Solina hadn’t quite brought it to that conclusion, she had to admit he had a point. “Perhaps,” she said. “Although, by that time, I’d also enrolled at Harvard part-time, taking finance courses in order to make sure I could take care of my money. They approved of that.”
“So you haven’t seen them since the summer between freshman and sophomore year?”
“No. I have. I visit them. I actually went to Canada last spring.”
“But they’re still not welcome here?”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “I’ve thought about it lately. They’ve mellowed, and although they still lament my life choices, they are curious about where I live.” She brightened. “And I talk to them on the phone once every few weeks. Our conversations are, well…quite pleasant, actually.”
“Not the word I use when my parents call,” Wiley chided.
“So…” She snuggled deeper into his armpit. “What word would you use?”
He shifted subtly.
Huh. Wiley? Ticklish?
“I’d say…joyful?” A contemplative tip of his head told her he looked for the right word. “Bittersweet that we love each other so much, yet are so far away? It’s tough to say, although I’ll tell you one thing.” His mouth twitched impishly. “They always want to know if there’s a special someone in my life.”
She drew back and narrowed her eyes at him. “You will not tell them about me until we’ve at least gotten to know each other well enough to have sex.”
He barked out a loud laugh. “Oh, that will go over big. ‘Mom, Dad, I can’t tell you about the chick I’m seeing because I haven’t banged her yet.’”
She smacked him on the chest. “You know what I mean.”
“I do, but it still might be fun to tease them. For a while, I had them almost believing I had an interest in one of the guys on the team so they’d stop asking about females. But my sister called bullshit on that one. I’d been too much of a stallion in school for her to give an ounce of credence to it.”
“A stallion, huh?” Solina scoffed. “As in a stud?”
He raised an eyebrow. “And what do you know about studs?”
“Well…,” she fake drawled. “I know a soldier/cowboy who wants my land in order to start a stud farm.”
He flipped her quicker than she could blink, trapping her beneath him again. “Not a cowboy, ma’am. An Indian. And don’t think you can rile the natives,” he growled softly against the soft skin of her neck, just below her ear. “This native has a lot of patience to wait for what he wants.”
Solina shivered. “Well, this non-native Indian doesn’t,” she groaned, arching against him, but he pushed up and leaped to his feet.
“Uh-uh. No. Not happening.” He brushed his hands over his clothes, straightening himself.
Solina grinned. It sounded like he tried to convince himself, not her. “You sure are one stubborn man,” she taunted.
“I’m just trying to be more stubborn than some of my body parts,” he grimaced. She curiously watched him shift the hefty bulge in his pants. “And you, Beauty, are not helping.”
“Not true.” She wiggled her hips. “I attempted to help, but you wouldn’t let me.”
“That’s not the kind of help I’m looking for,” he rumbled back. “And just to let you know, when the time comes, I won’t need any help.”
“Oh?” She raised her eyebrows. “You’re going to do it all by yourself? Doesn’t that kind of…defeat the purpose?”
Wiley gave an enormous sigh. “Okay. I give.” He held up both hands. “I can’t banter when my entire available blood supply has left my head.”
Solina took pity on him. He was so fun to tease, but if she tormented him too much, he might bend to her agenda and end up hating himself for it. Not a good way to start a relationship.
Wait. What?
Wiley had said the “R” word before, but this was the first time Solina had given in to it without a fight. A definite epiphany. Should she say it out loud and put Wiley out of at least a modicum of his misery? She should. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t negotiate.
“So, if I agree to a relationship, like normal people, how long before we can have sex?”
Wiley coughed and sputtered. “Now you want a relationship and a timetable?”
Solina crossed her arms over her chest. “Yes.”
He recovered quickly, a grin splitting his face. “Okay.” He rubbed his hands together. “Here’s how it will go. We’ll have a dry date tomorrow night, then we’ll talk every night w
hile I’m in Oklahoma. When I get back in a week, we can attend the party Prez is having for New Year’s Eve.”
“But still no sex?” Solina asked with a decided pout.
“Not yet,” he confirmed. “But if I feel you’re serious after that, not just feeding me a line so you can sample my fine body, we’ll make a timeline from there. I made a mistake, taking us too far tonight, but it won’t happen again…off schedule.”
She knew he was joking, but she let him continue.
“First, some light petting will take place, no skin-on-skin contact, for an indeterminate amount of time.” He waggled his eyebrows. “After that, there will be a week of heavy petting, no clothing, but only above the waist.”
Solina played along. “So I’ll be engaging your nipples then, correct?”
Wiley growled. “Not the nipples I was thinking about, but whatever.”
“Right.” Solina nodded. “And when do we get to the good part?”
“Patience, Beauty. Such a greedy girl. I haven’t even gotten to below the waist yet.”
“Nor will you if you don’t hurry things along.” She shimmied her body on the couch, resting one hand at the junction of her thighs. “I might have to take care of below the waist myself.” Solina tried to interest him again.
His eyes fixated on her barely moving palm, but he wasn’t swayed. He swallowed. “Just to let you know, things might speed up. I find I have very little willpower where you’re concerned. Eventually, my tongue will be very busy, along with my fingers, until I think you’re ready. Then…” He trailed off.
“Then you’ll let me have your cock.”
Solina might be a virgin, but during college, she had heard male anatomy referred to by dozens of names and had always been partial to the word cock.
If possible, the cock in question swelled to even greater proportions behind his zipper.
“You really are going to kill me, aren’t you?” Wiley moaned
She gave an evil smirk. “Nope. That’s not the plan.”
As much as she pleaded and cajoled with him after that, Wiley refused to touch her again. He even declined the use of her closet-sized guest bedroom, sighting his need to be in his office early the next morning.