by Amelia Wilde
“I don’t think they’ll be back,” says Ellie. “They’ve got to be up bright and early tomorrow.”
“To plan how they’re going to bring down my business?”
“To be at mine,” she says, needling me. She lets the towel slip down an inch and my breath catches in my throat. “You know...” She looks down at her feet, then back up at me. “We could get in some real trouble.”
I laugh out loud. “How?”
“By consorting with each other.”
“Consorting—” I can’t stop. “Ellie, that is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would they care if we’re sleeping together?”
“We’re not,” she says. “Not yet.”
She insists on cleaning up the kitchen first, wearing a pair of my boxers and one of my t-shirts. “We can’t leave it,” she says, going past the kitchen to the laundry nook off the entryway. “That’s going from great to terrible.”
“What?”
“You and me together?” She puts in detergent, tips the clothes in after it, and lets the top down gently. “That would be great. And then to come out and clean up spilled sauce? Terrible. Terrible. We can’t.”
I open my mouth to argue, but she has a point. So instead I get the mop.
Her stomach growls loudly mid-scrub. “You didn’t eat before you came, did you?”
“No.” She wipes down the front of the cabinets.
“You have to be starving.”
“Look, I don’t like to complain,” Ellie laughs. “But yeah, I am.”
“I have enough to start over.”
She dismisses me out of hand. “You don’t have to do that. That would be insane. You already spent enough time cooking this, and look what happened.”
I lean the mop against the countertop and cross the distance between us.
It’s one step.
Then I wrap an arm around her waist and pull her in close. “Listen carefully,” I say, and her body relaxes in my arms. “I have enough to start over. It’s not a long process. In half an hour I can have a delicious sauce. The noodles only take half that long.” I let my fingers play over the curve of her hip. “I won’t spill the sauce this time. I promise.”
“Challenge accepted,” Ellie whispers.
We both dissolve into laughter.
I start with the half green pepper and half onion from before, dicing them as fast as I can and getting them to sizzle in the pan. Ellie scrubs the counters, straightening up the already straight stacks of mail I have left to deal with. When she’s exhausted herself, she leans against the counter and watches me.
“You have good cooking hands,” she says, after a minute.
I flex and lift the spatula I’m using to break up the rest of the meat in the pan. “What about my arms?”
“Those are multi-talented.”
“Oh, and my hands aren’t?”
“I would never say that.”
It’s so easy standing here with her. It reminds me of working behind the counter at Medium Roast. We danced around each other then. I never had a moment’s worry that she’d spill hot coffee on me, even though we were in tight quarters.
It never felt this easy with Serena.
Then again, I never really knew Serena.
You don’t really know Ellie, either.
There is no way I’m going to entertain that thought right now. Not when I’m cooking her my second batch of spaghetti today and she’s standing there in my clothes.
Say something. I’ve got to say something.
“Did you grow up in Lakewood?”
“In a way.” She shifts her weight from one foot to the other. “We lived in the city when I was a kid, but we moved here after I finished middle school.” Ellie scoffs a little. “My mom wanted me to live in a safer environment.”
There’s something different in her tone. “It isn’t safer here?”
“Oh, it is,” Ellie says, and she sounds almost wistful. “It’s a hell of a lot safer here than most places. You don’t have to worry about...” she trails off for a moment. “People care about each other here. Not so much in the city.”
“I didn’t mind it.” I put the spatula down and switch it out for a heavy-duty plastic spoon.
“I didn’t mind it either. At least not when I was in college.”
I steal a glance over at Ellie. She’s looking out the window to the dark of the backyard. The moon shines over the lake, its reflection scattered in the ripples on the surface. “What happened?”
She doesn’t say anything.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
Ellie shakes her head slowly. She doesn’t speak until I’m looking into her eyes. “Are you sure you want to go this far?”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I don’t hesitate for a single moment. “Yes.” I put the spoon down on the spoon rest, freshly cleaned, and turn to face her.
“You have to promise me something.” She crosses her arms over her chest.
“I promise.”
That makes her crack a smile. “You haven’t heard what it is yet.”
“I still do.”
Ellie takes a deep breath, gathering her damp hair in both hands. “Promise you won’t think I’m fucking pathetic afterward.”
27
Ellery
I want to tell him.
I don’t know why.
I do know why. It’s because whenever I’m in his arms, I feel like nothing could ever happen to me again. I feel like I could pick up a camera and go about my life and it wouldn’t be attracting a disaster.
Never mind that he is a disaster—for Medium Roast, anyway. But his face is open and kind, and for God’s sake, he’s gone back to stirring the pan of spaghetti sauce right now. All because I said I was hungry.
I’m fucking starving. For the spaghetti...and for him.
“I went to school for photography.” I start there because I don’t know where else to start. It’s all so hazy. If I go too far back, it’ll take all night, so I can’t start with the time I picked up my dad’s old film camera from his office and loved the weight of it in my hands. Or the four years I spent in photography club. The award I won for the portrait of Honey. Honey, the wild adventuress who’s off in Europe somewhere at this very moment.
Dash nods. “You said something about that at the sandwich place.”
“I didn’t say much.”
“No.” He frowns at the spaghetti sauce.
“This is why.” I take another deep breath in. “My last semester at college I got an internship for one of the smaller papers. The pay was for shit, but I thought, I’ll get a few credits, I’ll get some experience. Work my way up.”
“That’s a good plan,” says Dash.
“It was a great plan.” I loved working for that little paper. I got a summer at that paper before things fell apart. I don’t want to go back to that day, but it’s already happening in my mind. “Then I got this one assignment.”
My editor had called me into his office, which was a larger version of a regular corporate cube, and told me that he wanted an event covered. It was a local event, but anything with more than one person was a step up from what I’d been doing. I was so fucking excited. I didn’t care that he had coffee breath.
“What kind of assignment?”
“A festival they were holding in one of the neighborhoods. It had the dumbest name: Summer Slam Jam Fest. They had all kinds of local bands. They sucked.” Dash laughs. I can still feel the sun on my shoulders. I can still see the frozen daiquiri Sol had in a plastic cup, the ice melting away in the heat while I stood at the corner of the stage and tried to get the perfect shot of every band. I had frame after frame of the people in the crowd. “I was in the zone that day. I had so many good photos. One of them was going to end up on the front page. I knew it.”
Dash puts the spoon down again and turns the heat down to a simmer. “This doesn’t sound like—”
“It wasn’t until afterwa
rd,” I tell him. I can’t linger in this memory for much longer. It makes my heart beat fast. It makes my palms sweat. I hate it. I hate it. “We were walking back from the festival. The neighborhood was a little rough, but I was taking some last shots. The light…” The light had been incredible, that strange time between afternoon and evening, and everything looked like magic on the screen of my digital camera. “My boyfriend was walking next to me on the sidewalk. I had the camera up to my face to take a photo.” I mimic the motion with my hands. “That’s when the woman came out onto the street.” My breath comes out shallow like there’s not enough air in the room. It is not pleasant. “She was screaming for help.”
“Jesus,” Dash says under his breath.
“It all happened fast. Too fast. My body went on autopilot. I took another photo. That’s what we were supposed to do, you know? I wanted to do this as a career. I saw what happened on the viewfinder. Her boyfriend—it must have been her boyfriend, or her husband—ran out behind her.” I swallow the panic rising in my throat. “He shot her in the back.”
Dash steps up to me and puts his hands on the side of my face. “Tell me he didn’t hurt you,” he says, and his voice is rough, tense.
“I don’t know if he ever saw me.” I feel myself sink into his touch. “He ran away and left her on the sidewalk. My boyfriend ran in the opposite direction. I stayed. I called 9-1-1. I think someone else did too because it didn’t take very long for the ambulance to get there.”
“What a fucking coward,” Dash spits.
“Maybe he’s not,” I say, a knot in the pit of my gut releasing. “At least, he’s not more of a coward than me. I quit my job after that. I was going to be a big-time photojournalist and go where the real stories were. I thought I could handle it.”
“Ellie.” Dash moves his thumb over my cheek, and when he pulls it back, it’s wet with tears. My tears.
“I couldn’t handle it,” I say. “I finished up my degree, but I hated being in the city after that. Aunt Lisa and Uncle Fred asked me to come run the shop in the spring. I took the easy way out.”
“That’s not the easy way out. Jesus, Ellie, anybody would be shaken by that—”
“I threw all of it away.” I force the words out. “They paid for me to go to college, Dash. They bailed me out. My dad—god, this is so stupid. He quit his job to buy a farm and work on that, and it blew my college fund. I owe them so much. I only got to go because they wanted me to follow my stupid dream.” I wipe furiously at the tears on my cheeks. I don’t want to be crying over this. Not now. Not here. “I want to forget about all of it and go back. I miss taking photos. It’s the one thing I’m good at.”
“False,” Dash says, his face inches from mine. Hot damn, he is intoxicating, even in the midst of this emotional outburst. “There’s another thing.”
“What?”
“This.”
He leans in and kisses me. It’s long. It’s deep.
It doesn’t end there.
28
Dash
I’m so horrified by the image of Ellie standing there, a witness to something so soul-shattering, that I’m at a loss for what to do.
All I know is that I need to be touching her. I need to be kissing her.
She melts under my touch, her body relaxing into mine. It’s a kiss that starts out so sweet that the feeling is a pure sugar rush from my chest to my fingertips. Then Ellie arches, my clothes loose around her curves, her breasts pressing against my chest, and it becomes something else entirely.
Her fists curl around my shirt and she yanks it forward, pulling me in as close as she can get. Ellie breaks the kiss, pulling back. Her eyes are reddened from the tears, making the gray look that much more vivid, and her face is a picture of pain and lust and need. “I want to forget, Dash. I want to forget that shit. Make me forget.”
I’m already thrumming with the ache to protect her, to go into the past and throw myself between that man and Ellie Collins, even if the asshole was running away. I put a hand on the back of her head, strong and fierce, and push my face into hers. I can match her intensity. I can do anything.
The grin that spreads across my face is all heat. “Make you forget?” She takes in a short, sharp breath. “Now you’ve begged me twice.”
I forget about the spaghetti sauce.
For all I care, the spaghetti sauce can cook down into burnt embers. It makes no difference to me, as long as the house doesn’t catch on fire. Because Ellie? She’s blazing.
She wraps her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and kisses me so hard I’m sure she’s drawn blood.
There is no time to get to the bedroom. This is the Ellie who dropped it low in the coffee shop, totally uninhibited, totally herself. She’s a fucking tigress, clawing at my clothes, my skin.
I strip my shirt off first, then hers. She has nothing on underneath and her breasts are full and gorgeous. The air against her nipples makes them hard. My thumbs against them makes them harder. She wriggles out of her shorts when I drop mine and then she’s completely naked and folding herself back into my arms.
I lift her in one motion, perching her ass on the immaculate countertop. Ellie throws her head back, her wet hair hanging behind her, an invitation that I fully accept. I swirl my tongue around one of her nipples, then the other, and spread her knees open with one of mine.
She’s wet and waiting and sheer perfection. No hesitation this time. She’s as consumed by this moment as I am, and part of me wishes it would last forever.
I think you can guess which part.
“Yes. Yes,” Ellie hisses when I stroke between her legs, two fingers sliding through the juices already collected there. She spreads a little wider, her hips rising off the countertop, and I plunge two fingers into her. She tenses around them and that tightening shatters the rest of my restraint.
A low growl comes from the animal part of me, and shit starts happening fast. Ellie wraps her legs around me and I hold on hard, her hips in my hands, aligning the head of my cock with her opening. She freezes, staring down at it, and when she looks up, there’s a flicker of doubt in her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” I promise her. “You can take it.”
She gives me a wicked grin. “I know.” Then she edges forward, impaling herself on the tip with a sigh and a shudder that turns into the first inch sinking inside of her, then the second.
Ellie is so tight that with half my length inside of her I force myself to stop.
“Ellie.”
Her hips tilt back and forth in my hands, begging silently for more, her hands playing at the back of my neck. “What?” she whispers, eyes closed, cheeks pink. I won’t forget her face this way for as long as I live.
“You’d tell me, right?”
Her gray eyes fly open, a smile flitting across her lips. “Tell you what?”
“If this was your first time.”
Her mouth drops open and she goes still. “You think this is my first time?”
It’s taking every bit of self-control I have not to bury myself in her. The pressure is intense. “You’re so tight.” It’s all I can manage.
Ellie tips her head back again, engaging all her muscles to squeeze me even tighter. I am dying. I am dead. This is the best fucking feeling on the planet. She starts rocking her hips side to side, her smooth skin against my palms, drawing me in another inch, then two. “This is not my first time.” Again her eyes meet mine. “Fuck me, Dash. I’m begging you.”
“As long as you’re begging.”
“Longer than that, I hope,” she says, and my entire body bursts into flames. That’s it. I turn her laugh into a cry, taking all of her at once, keeping her steady in my hands.
It’s an explosive, raw rhythm, and Ellie is barely on the countertop. She’s wrapped around me so tightly that I feel it when she starts to come, the trembling starting down low in her hips and bursting out in all directions. She bends her head forward and muffles her cries in my skin.
But
I’m not finished with her yet.
“You owe me,” I growl into her ear. “Come on my cock again.”
“I can’t,” she breathes.
“It’s not a request.” In and out, harder and harder. “Reach down between those pretty legs and touch yourself until you come.”
She braces one hand on my shoulder and reaches down, her fingers searching out her clit. I feel every pulse of desire between her legs and pick up the pace.
It’s another small earthquake a minute later, and she shakes under the weight of it, coming hard, my name on every breath.
I follow her all the way to the end.
29
Ellery
Dash catches me by the arm as I’m throwing one of his sweatshirts over last night’s sex-date clothes, freshly washed and dried after what I’m going to forever call the Spaghetti Mob Incident. He mumbles something into his pillow.
“What?”
His house is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. It makes my soul shudder to think about going outside into the dark to my car, but today is a coffee shop day, and even last night’s mind-blowing encounter can’t change that.
“Does it have to be this early?”
“They’re already waiting for me.” That’s probably not quite true. I set an alarm on my phone that would give me plenty of time to race to my house, change my clothes, and race to the shop. The regulars won’t be prowling the streets for another fifteen minutes at least.
He rolls over. His eyes are the bright spots in the gray light coming through the window. “Don’t go.”
“No choice.”
Dash reaches up and pulls me down to him. The first touch of our lips is a spark. The second is an inferno. “There’s always a choice.”
God, do I want to crawl back into bed with him. I want that more than anything. I have a full-on fantasy vision of what it would be like to throw off these clothes and dive under the covers, next to his solid warmth, and sleep until the sun is fully up. “I have to go.”