“Darcy, I’m fucking close. If you don’t want me to go in your mouth, you better sit up.”
She heard him, but she didn’t move. She continued to stroke and suck him. His breathing picked up, and she heard him curse as semen suddenly filled her mouth. She continued to stroke his shaft, but she gave up what she’d been doing with her tongue to concentrate on swallowing.
When she was sure it was over, she sat back and looked up at him. His chest was still heaving, and he lay with his hands covering his face.
Oh, God, had she done something wrong? Was he embarrassed? Dozens of unpleasant scenarios rattled around her head as she stared at him.
He rubbed his hands over his face before finally looking down at her. He must have seen the uncertainty in her eyes because he reached for her immediately, pulling her up to rest beside him.
“Christ, woman,” he sighed. “Are you sure you’ve never done that before?”
Darcy nodded against his shoulder, still unsure about how he felt. She curled her naked body against his side.
“So,” she started timidly. “Did I pass the test?”
“With fucking flying colors.”
Darcy paused before adding, “Was it…I mean, compared to other…”
She couldn’t continue her question. Good thing he wasn’t facing her because the flush that crept into her cheeks burned. She had no idea how she compared to his past experiences. She really wanted to know, but she felt silly for asking. Talk about waving a bright neon flag that said: Look at me! I’m so fucking insecure!
Sean squeezed her arm. “Darcy, it was good,” he whispered into her hair. “Really good.”
Breathing a sigh of relief, she nuzzled her nose into his neck. She wanted everything about their relationship to be the best he’d ever had.
She wanted what they did together to surpass every recollection that Sean had from his past. But Darcy’s relief was short-lived when she stopped to think about what he had actually said.
It was good. Really good.
Really good wasn’t great. It wasn’t knock-your-socks-off fantastic. It wasn’t the best blow job in the history of the universe.
It was just really good.
Darcy closed her eyes and chastised herself. This was only her first time. Really good was a good start. Practice made perfect, after all.
Sean’s body started to shake, and Darcy lifted her head to see him laughing at the ceiling.
“What’s so funny?”
Sean turned his head so he was staring right at her. He glanced down at her mouth before looking into her eyes.
“Who would have imagined your wicked tongue would be so good at that?”
Chapter 24
Darcy bolted upright in bed, eyes wide open. Something had woken her and had her heart racing much faster than it should be this early in the morning. She startled when she heard the noise again.
Completely disoriented, she looked around and remembered that she was at Sean’s house. And once again, Sean, the early riser, was nowhere to be seen.
The cacophony of noises was coming from downstairs in the kitchen. She heard some more clanking and banging, followed by some rather inventive curse phrases.
She felt like she’d just gone to bed. Her body’s internal clock was telling her that it was still dark outside, but from what she could see through the blinds, it was after dawn.
It was raining and overcast, the perfect type of morning to sleep in. She rolled over to Sean’s side of the bed, which wasn’t warm anymore. His alarm clock said it was eight o’clock.
“Bloody hell,” Darcy muttered, stuffing her face into Sean’s pillow. She would have preferred to have a couple more hours of sleep, but since it wasn’t an ungodly hour, she’d better get up to see what all the commotion was about.
She slid out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. After a few minutes, she felt slightly more refreshed, thanks to brushing her teeth and a splash of cold water on her face.
She rummaged through her bag and found a pair of light jogging pants and a black half-zip fleece. After running a brush through her hair, she pulled it back into a short, stubby ponytail. She knew her efforts were futile since her hair wasn’t quite long enough to pull back completely. Her bare feet were cold on the wooden floorboards so she slipped on some fuzzy socks and headed downstairs.
Sean was standing at the stove in only a pair of light blue pajama pants. Darcy leisurely studied his smooth, bare back, and once again she momentarily forgot to breathe.
It was another of those times when she had to pinch herself.
How often had she imagined having breakfast with Sean after spending the night? And it wasn’t just a bowl of cereal, although that would have been fine too. Apparently he was cooking her breakfast.
He turned his head toward her and smiled. “Good morning, sunshine.”
She wasn’t sure if there was anything sexier than a half-naked Sean McKenna at the stove, blue eyes sparkling and his megawatt smile directed right at her.
“Morning.” She walked over to where he stood, wrapped her arm around his waist, and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“I’m making my woman breakfast. You like pancakes?”
His woman. Oh, how she loved that.
“Mmmm, yeah.”
“Good. I made a pot of coffee. Go ahead and get yourself some… if you can find a clean mug. Then sit your cute little ass down at the table and watch me work my magic.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
She couldn’t find a clean mug, so she washed one of the dirty ones in the sink. Geez, these guys were a bunch of slobs.
“Are Colin and Josh here?”
“Nope. Colin got called into work, and Josh went to the gym.”
“Sucks for Colin to have to work on a Sunday.”
“Yeah, but it’s kind of a shitty morning weather-wise so I’m sure he didn’t really care.”
Darcy fixed her coffee with two teaspoons of sugar and a healthy dose of cream. She found a place at the table and took a sip.
There was something so wonderful about coffee. Served plain, it was bitter and sharp, but with the right amount of cream and sugar it turned into a creamy cup of heaven. She’d picked up the habit in college. Her grandmother never had coffee in the house. It was tea or nothing.
“I wasn’t aware you knew how to cook.”
He smiled down at the pan. “I don’t really cook. I just woke up and was in the mood for pancakes. The weather is shit so I didn’t want to drag you out. I looked in the cupboard and saw we had a mix. It only had three steps to making it, so I figured, how hard could it be?”
“You guys had a pancake mix at home?”
“Can you believe it?” He turned to her. “It was only a year past its expiration date. That’s not too bad, right?”
Darcy raised her eyebrows. “A year?”
He laughed. “Just kidding.”
She wondered how many times Sean had made breakfast for other women. And did he refer to every one as his woman? She didn’t want to ask because she didn’t want him to give her the wrong answer.
Sean stacked pancakes onto two plates. He grabbed some butter out of the fridge and some syrup out of a cabinet and finally joined her at the table. She hadn’t realized he was wearing an apron until he started to untie it from his neck. It was white and in big, bold, black letters it said: I Turn Grills On.
She smiled. “I like your apron.”
“This old thing?” Sean smirked. “Kaylin gave it to Colin for Christmas last year. We all wear it.”
Sean pulled the apron off and draped it on the back of his chair. Darcy was sitting at the table, wearing a thick fleece, and drinking hot coffee, and she was still cold. Yet Sean was shirtless, and it didn’t seem to bother him.
“Aren’t you cold without a shirt?”
“Nope. Are my nipples distracting you? Should I go put something on?” he teased.
Darcy shrugged. “Do what you wa
nt, but don’t blame me if you catch me staring at your naked body and not your face.”
“God, Darcy. There’s more to me than just a nice pair of nipples.”
“I’m sorry, what? I wasn’t listening. I was too busy staring at your chest.”
He tipped his head back and laughed. He poured about a gallon of syrup over his pancakes and dug in. He let his eyes roll back in his head and licked his lips.
“Mmmmm. These are so good. These are the best goddamn pancakes I’ve ever had.”
Darcy took a bite of hers. They weren’t bad.
“Has anyone ever told you that modesty is one of your most endearing qualities?”
He barked out another laugh. “All the time.”
Their meal was relaxing and comfortable. They fell into old habits and talked about everything under the sun—family, work, old friends.
Sean told her about how he was dreading the holidays since his parents always made such a huge deal over Megan’s return home to Ballagh. As much as he knew it wasn’t her fault, he was hoping she stayed in Chicago for Christmas.
She told him about a new client in Providence she was meeting with the following week. It was a tea house, and the owner wanted Darcy’s help in giving it a Victorian décor.
When he was finished, Sean pushed his plate away and put his hands on his stomach.
“That was good. I haven’t had pancakes in years,” he said as Darcy got up to refill their coffee. “My mum used to make us a feast for breakfast every Sunday. We’d go to mass on Saturday night, and then we had a huge breakfast with eggs, sausage, and pancakes the next morning. It was probably a huge amount of work but she did it every week.”
Darcy sat back down in her chair. “I don’t remember my mom making me breakfast. Not once.”
Sean tilted his head to the side and frowned. “Seriously? So she was a complete deadbeat your entire childhood?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged. “She wasn’t a model parent. Neither was my dad, for that matter.”
That was the understatement of the century.
“You can tell me about them if you want,” he said softly.
Strangely enough, she wanted to tell him all about them. It was something she told very few people, but if she couldn’t tell Sean, who could she tell?
She craved a closeness with him that would cement the two of them together forever. And sitting at the dining table with him on this soggy Sunday morning, snuggled into her warmest comfortable clothes, she was ready to tell him.
“My earliest memory of my childhood was sitting in our barren living room in our dilapidated apartment in New York City and watching my mom tie a tourniquet around her bicep and shove a needle into her arm. Of course, I didn’t know what she was doing at the time, but it became such a normal occurrence in our house that I didn’t think anything of it.”
“So your mom was a heroin addict?”
“Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, speed, ecstasy, weed, alcohol. If it got you high, it was in my parents’ bloodstreams.”
“Jesus,” he whispered.
“They were starving artists, you see. It’s apparently what starving artists in New York did. Music at night and drugs and alcohol during the day. My childhood was the furthest thing from a fairy tale,” Darcy said, moving her coffee cup away from her. “But growing up I didn’t know that. I didn’t know any better. Sure, I saw other kids with their parents. They weren’t anything like my mom and dad. But my life was my life and I just existed in it. When you don’t have much and you never see the good stuff in life, you don’t even know what you’re missing.”
Sean’s blue eyes swam with disbelief.
“It wasn’t like there was some turning point in their lives that made them like that. My dad didn’t lose a swanky job at the bank, which led them to hard times. They were just two young kids who thought they had everything figured out. All they wanted to do was play music. Unfortunately, they saw me as just another mouth to feed after I was born. Half the time, my parents forgot I was even around. If it weren’t for Mrs. Able, who lived across the hall, I would have gone hungry more nights out of the week than I actually did.”
Sean shook his head in response. His mouth was set in a firm, straight line.
“Mrs. Able would check on me throughout the week. Make sure I was going to school. Make sure I had something to eat for lunch. When I was younger, she’d give me a few bucks so I could buy lunch at school. But when I told her my parents took that money from me, she started sending a sandwich with me instead.”
“So your parents were lounge musicians or something?”
Darcy shook her head. “No, they just played on street corners. When I was old enough to sing, they made me go with them every night.”
She told Sean all about her early singing career. How their nightly take would almost triple when she sang with them. How everyone would throw coins at her because she had the voice of an angel.
“Fuck, I don’t blame you for not wanting to sing now.”
She nodded. “It got to a point where it became my job. I was almost a slave to it. And this God-given talent,” she said, using her fingers to make quotation marks, “was really a curse. I promised myself when I left New York, I’d never sing again. At least not for other people.”
A muscle in Sean’s jaw twitch as he studied her face. Wow, she really knew how to kill a mood, didn’t she?
So she shrugged it off. “But luckily, that’s all in the past. I haven’t talked to or seen my parents since I was ten years old. When I moved in with Grandma Nell, my life started over.”
She smiled at him, trying to reassure him she was fine. And really she was. She was nothing like her parents, and she never would be.
Sean didn’t smile back. He stood and cleared the table. Darcy watched his wide shoulders flex as he put things away. He braced his arms on the counter and let his head hang for a moment before turning to lean against the sink. His arms were crossed over his chest.
“How did you manage to get out of there?” he asked.
“I’d wanted to buy a new pair of shoes. The kids at school made fun of me because the shoes I wore every day had holes in them. So I put on my prettiest dress and pulled my hair up in pigtails.”
She smiled, thinking back on that fateful afternoon. Her prettiest dress was a pink frock that was way too small for her. Overuse and grime had turned it a dusty rose color.
“I headed to my family’s normal street corner where we set up our little three-man-band every weekend. I hauled my soapbox and borrowed my father’s cap to collect tips. I sang my normal set of songs and pulled in enough money to buy a pair of shoes. I picked them up on the way home. I had a little left over, so I bought some dinner to share with my parents. I was so proud of myself. I’d earned those shoes fair and square.
“I found my parents the same way I left them—passed out in the living room. I waited patiently for them to wake up. When they did, and they saw the food, they asked where I got it. I told them I sang to get my shoes and had enough left over to buy three hotdogs and some chips.” She laughed and shook her head. “I was expecting gratitude and smiles. Instead my father knocked me off my chair with the back of his hand. He split my lip open, and when I fell, I knocked the side of my face against the radiator.
“He told me any money I made was theirs. They counted on me, and I’d let them down by being selfish and buying a pair of shoes. It was the first and the last time my father ever laid a hand on me. The next day, I returned the pair of shoes and used the money to buy a bus ticket to Ballagh.”
Sean’s face had turned hard. He no longer looked shocked. He looked furious.
“It was a long time ago, Sean.”
He nodded slowly. “I had no idea about any of that shit.” His low voice was carefully controlled.
“I never told you.”
He nodded again and looked at his feet.
The rain was coming down hard against the kitchen window. The sky had grown darker since s
he’d woken up. It wasn’t lost on Darcy that the gloom from outside matched the gloom hanging in the brightly lit kitchen.
Sean probably wouldn’t understand that she was happy all that terrible stuff had happened to her. She had been young and hadn’t known any better. She’d survived the years of neglect thanks to growing up too fast and the kind neighbor across the hall. And if her father had never hit her, she’d never have bought that bus ticket. And she’d never have lived with her grandmother nor known unconditional love.
And she’d never have met Sean McKenna.
He was worth all the shit she’d had to crawl through in life. And he was worth the wait too.
She looked up when she heard him sigh. He ran his hands through his hair. Eager to break the silence, she said the first thing that came to mind.
“So what are the plans for today?”
He pushed off the counter and lumbered toward the table. She thought he was coming over to where she sat. Maybe he’d kiss her or pull her up in his arms and give her a comforting hug. Instead he avoided eye contact and walked past the table toward the stairs.
Before he took the first step, he stopped and turned to her. His expression was tight, and the glow and humor that was always present in Sean’s face was absent.
“I need to head to the office. I forgot I told Michael I’d prepare some preliminary estimates for a new job we’re going after in a couple weeks.”
Darcy’s heart hollowed out. A sharp pain formed in the back of her throat, making it impossible to swallow.
She knew he didn’t have to work. Sure, he might have work to do, but she knew it wasn’t what he’d planned on doing that morning when he’d woken up.
“Oh.” Her voice shook slightly. “I’ll just get my stuff together and get going then.”
He nodded and disappeared up the stairway.
The pancakes churned in her stomach. She heard a door shut upstairs, and then after a few moments the shower turned on. The best thing she could do at that moment was to pack her bag and get the fuck out of there.
She hurried upstairs, stuffed her things into her duffle bag, slipped on her shoes, and grabbed her jacket. Sean was still in the bathroom when she went downstairs. Before leaving, she grabbed a piece of paper and left Sean a note.
Not In My Wildest Dreams (McKenna Series Book 2) Page 28