by Amelia Wilde
I yank open the inner door, turning my back on Ryder in the process and drawing myself up to my full height. Out the corner of my eye, I see Ryder bend to reach for something on the floor and shove it into his pocket.
My panties.
Jesus.
“Hello?” The word comes out sharply, and I immediately regret it. The guy standing in the alley next to the restaurant can’t be more than twenty. You’re at work, Valentine. Act like it. I clear my throat and try again. “Hi. How can I help you?”
He’s wearing a red shirt with a red baseball cap. All of it looks company issued. Oh, shit. The meat delivery.
I’ve just been interrupted mid-coitus by a truck full of meat.
“I’m from Pinehill Farms,” the guy says, recovering. “I’ve got a shipment—”
“Great.” I want this conversation to be over so I can go back to doing...Ryder. “You can bring the crates in and put them in the walk-in—”
“—of sausages,” he finishes, and I hear Ryder try to stifle a laugh behind me. “I’m going to need you to double-check that the order is correct, though.” He lifts a clipboard and looks down. “Extra-long sausage links,” he says, without batting an eye. Then his face brightens. “Thick, too.”
26
Ryder
It’s more of a process than you’d think, confirming the girth and length of a shipment of sausages. This delivery kid is thorough, asking Valentine to look at every single one of the wrapped packages in the crates along with him. “Yes,” she says, again and again. “This matches with the original order. I’m sure Gerald will be very pleased.”
“The nice thing is,” he says, “when the sausages are thick like this, they really fill out a breakfast plate. It’s not some kind of—” He looks to the ceiling like he’s searching for the right words. “There’s not a big empty hole between the pancakes and the eggs. Know what I mean?”
Valentine stares at him, open-mouthed. “I mean,” she says, and the kid looks up from the crates, the expression on his face on the verge of being super worried that something is fucked up with these sausages. “You can’t possibly...” her voice trails off, and I see it on her face, the moment she realizes that this delivery guy is sincere in his desire to make sure every one of these thick sausages is up to snuff. “You know what? These are great.” Valentine’s voice leaves no room for argument.
“Are you sure?” He gestures to the last two crates. “There are two more that we could—”
“No.” She raises a hand, the universal sign to shut the fuck up and get out of the restaurant. I’m in total agreement. I want to be done with the sausages, hilarious as they are, and get back to the sexy spicy summer fling portion of the evening. “This delivery is absolutely perfect—” She squints her eyes, reading his nametag. “Nick. You are free to go.”
“Okay,” he says, hesitating. “But I just need to make sure that—”
“Nick.” Valentine is breathing in a very very calculated manner now, like she might explode if Nick doesn’t get the hell out of the Short Stack and leave us alone. “Everything is fine. You will not be in trouble if one of these sausages is...damaged, somehow.” Even through her need to get him out of here, she can’t quite contain her laughter when she says the word sausages. It’s too much, really. “I will take full responsibility for all of the sausages.”
Nick glances toward the door. He probably has somewhere to be, a nice guy like Nick. Some sweet girlfriend who doesn’t mind that he delivers truckloads of sausages for a living. He’ll probably turn out to be an investment banker or some shit, later in life. He has that kind of face. No, I’m wrong. He’s way too earnest to be an investment banker. But the sweet girlfriend? I’ll be damned if I’m wrong about that.
“Okay,” Nick says again, and this time he adjusts his cap, puts his clipboard down at his side, and moves toward the door at a fucking snail’s pace.
Valentine can’t stand it.
She steps in front of him, yanking the door open, and puts her hand on his shoulders.
“Whoa,” says Nick, but Valentine doesn’t let up. She guides him out the door. “Let me know if anything isn’t satisfactory. You can contact me at—”
Valentine slams the door, leaving Nick reciting his email for nobody.
She turns back to me, eyes blazing with heat.
“I’m done with this shit,” she says, and in one fluid motion strips her shirt over her head.
I can’t help but let out a laugh. “Don’t you think that this is a sign of—”
“I don’t believe in signs,” Valentine spits, and then she pounces.
She literally comes at me through the air, and it’s only by the grace of the entire fucking universe that I manage to brace myself for her weight at the last second. Still, the force of it sends us toward the floor. On the way down, out of habit, I stick my hand out. The way we were standing, just next to the prep area, means that I catch a bag of flour with my fingertips.
A bag of flour. What the hell is that doing there?
I’m still considering it when the bag falls one second after we do, hitting the ground and exploding.
Flour flies up and out in every single direction like a bomb, and for a second my stomach twists at the sight of it. But I’m still focused on taking the impact of the floor away from Valentine. I’m so focused on it that it takes me a few extra moments to realize that we’ve already landed, that the flour flying through the air is the only thing that hasn’t settled on the tile floors yet.
Valentine is in my arms, her mouth a perfect O, her hair white with flour. Everything is covered. I swallow the last of my panic, the last of the nightmare, and let the laughter take over.
Valentine isn’t laughing. She presses her lips into a thin line and then pushes up into a sitting position, straddling my hips. Only she’s fucking covered in flour. So am I. There’s absolutely no way we’re turning this into a sexy interlude anymore.
She tilts her head back, looking toward the sky, then raises two fists.
“No!” she cries, shaking them at the sky, the floor, the demolished bag of flour. “Damn it! I was so close!”
Valentine steps out of my shower, raising the towel to her hair and rubbing the excess water out of it. Then she examines the ends. “I think it’s all out. Ugh.”
I come over and assess the situation. “I think it’s all out, too.”
It’s a quiet, peaceful moment, a haven in the midst of exploding bags of flour and sausage deliveries. The bathroom is hot and humid, but there was no way in hell I was going to let Valentine step out of that shower by herself.
We don’t need any more slips and falls.
She wraps a second towel around her waist and looks up at me, her hair falling in a wet sheet over her shoulders. “Okay,” she says finally. “I think I’m ready to move on.”
My gut plummets to the floor. Move on from what? Our fling? It’s barely started yet.
“I don’t want to talk any more about what happened at the restaurant tonight,” she continues, looking me straight in the eye. “I don’t want to hear any more about how being too into a person can cause accidents.”
I nod solemnly, a warmth blooming in my chest at her serious tone. “No more jokes.”
“No more jokes,” Valentine echoes. “I’m done with all the jokes. I’m done with running away.” She straightens her back. “If we’re going to have a fling so hot it can burn my mouth off, then I want to do that. I want to actually do it.”
I move toward her, finding the edge of the towel, and unwrap it. It hits the floor with a muted whisper. “Right now?”
“Right now,” says Valentine.
I scoop her up into my arms and head for the bedroom.
27
Valentine
Ryder closes the door behind us, and in the hush of his bedroom, something shifts.
It’s late. It took forever to clean up the flour in the kitchen, sweeping it all into one of the oversized trash bins in the back. B
y the time we were done, Ryder had to pick up his daughter, Minnie, at daycare.
I went with him.
Maybe it was stepping over some line, but I couldn’t bring myself to let him out of my sight. The few moments we’d had on that table in the Short Stack had felt so good that my body is still humming with them, even though we were rudely interrupted by my damn job. It was too good of a moment to let slip through my fingers, so I went to pick up Minnie at Norma’s.
Norma’s face lit up when she answered the door. “Valentine!” she’d said, and my heart sank. Norma’s been in the childcare circuit so long that she was my after-school babysitter growing up. “How are you, Norma?”
Her eyes had gone from me to Ryder, a wide smile spreading over her face. “Wonderful. Just wonderful.” She’d opened her mouth to say more, but Minnie had run up behind her then, jumping up and down at the sight of her dad.
It warmed my heart. It really did. And then it broke, just a little, because something about that little voice made me want to stay in Lakewood.
I dismissed the thought, though. It wasn’t the time to think of Lakewood. It was time to get Minnie home for a final snack and then into her bedroom.
Once she was asleep, Ryder led me into the bathroom by the hand and helped me strip off all my clothes. Slowly. Thoughtfully. Like he wanted to savor the moment.
Then we’d spent a romantic hour getting all that godforsaken flour out of our hair.
But now we’re clean, the mistakes of the day washed away, and something about the quiet in the room makes me feel...
At home.
I take it all in: the queen-sized bed with a plain blue comforter. The low dresser. That’s it. That’s all the furniture there is. It’s obvious that Ryder spends no time decorating.
It’s also obvious that I don’t care.
I turn back to him, to where he’s standing by the doorway, watching me look at his stuff. The only thing worth looking at in this entire room is his unbelievable body. Ripped abs, every muscle toned to perfection. I want him, and I don’t want a single interruption. How about that, universe? Not a single interruption.
The moment is stretched so tight that I can hardly stand it. My heart is about to beat out of my chest. I’m surprised it hasn’t flown right out of my ribs. Because even though we’ve been in his shower, naked, the sight of a shorts-clad Ryder makes it feel like there’s no air in the room. Or maybe too much air. Hard to tell.
I tighten my grip on the towel I have around me, suddenly feeling a little bit shy. I don’t know why. He’s seen everything there is to see, and then some. He’s seen me running the hell away from him, back into my own front yard. He’s seen me with a mouthful of hot sauce at the Mexican restaurant. What could possibly embarrass me now?
None of that matters. Not in this moment. It doesn’t even matter that we started fucking back at the Short Stack. This is a thousand times more intimate. I’m standing right in his personal space, and I don’t want to leave.
“Is that—” The words stick in my throat, and I have to clear it. “Is that locked?”
He gives me a grin that makes all of me go hot and melty. I can feel myself getting wet. If I had panties on, they’d be soaked.
The last thing I want right now is to have panties on.
“Yes, Sweet Valentine,” he says, “it’s locked.”
He started calling me Sweet Valentine on the way to his place. Apparently, giving the sausage delivery guy the time of day is enough to make a person sweet. When he said it in the car the first time, I snorted.
But now, standing here in the lamplight, it has a different ring to it.
“Nobody’s going to interrupt us?” I ask the question even though there’s no way he can guarantee anything. He can’t even know the answer.
“You and I both know,” he says, his hands going to my waist, “that I can’t promise you that.”
His lips on the side of my neck, running down in a trail of heat, make me forget what I was worried about. “I don’t—” I suck in a breath when he works his way down to my collarbone. “I don’t know what I was saying.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” Ryder puts one hand on mine and gently loosens my grip on the towel until it falls to the floor. He bites his lip, looking down at me.
“Do you like what you see?” I don’t know why I’m asking, only that there’s a strange ache in my chest. It’s been a long time since anyone looked at me like this.
His answer is to take my hand and put it on the front of his shorts.
He’s hard as a rock.
“You should take those off,” I whisper, and he does. I’ve never seen a man drop a pair of shorts so quickly, but then there he is, in all his glory.
And fuck, he is glorious.
My throat goes tight, like I’m going to cry, which isn’t the kind of reaction I expected from myself. This isn’t supposed to be some emotional lovemaking. It’s just a summer fling. It’s just a summer fling, while we’re both here. Time’s limited.
I give my head the tiniest shake, banishing the thoughts. Those thoughts can go to hell. It’s not worth considering, anyway. Ryder might not be the kind of man who will turn around and betray the fuck out of me like Conrad was...but then again, I haven’t known him long enough to be sure of that. I knew Conrad for seven years before he turned on me. I’ve known Ryder—well, not long enough.
“Who needs it?” I whisper as Ryder steps closer, and he pulls back. No, no, no. I don’t want him to pull back.
“What?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Trust me.”
Then he’s kissing me, his lips moving powerfully against mine, and I don’t care about any of that shit anymore. I might as well be back at the Short Stack, spread open for him on the prep table—I’m that hot, that ready.
When he lifts me in his arms and moves us to the bed, it’s all over.
28
Ryder
I take my sweet time with Valentine because I can’t force myself to rush this.
I can’t force myself to fuck her like I’d fuck any of the other nameless, faceless women I’ve been with in moments of desperation. Angie consumed most of my time once I got back from Afghanistan, but before that, it was just a series of one-night stands.
I’ve got nothing against the hot fuck. I could have spent hours with her in the Short Stack. But something about the way she looks right now, her hair still damp from my shower, makes my chest ache.
I want to see Valentine like this every day. Every day in the fall, every day in the winter, every day in the spring. One summer with her isn’t enough.
My head swims with how fucking perfect she is, how her skin is so creamy and smooth, how her curves are so delicious that I want to lick every inch of her.
Instead, I settle for spots that I hope will drive her wild.
I start at her collarbone, swirling my tongue along those ridges there, and get a low sound of appreciation from her throat. Then I work my way down. When my tongue meets her nipples, the moan gets a little louder, a little more involved.
“I like the sound of that,” I murmur into her ear. Valentine curls against me, her body pressing against mine in a way that makes my chest feel strange and tight, before spreading herself out again on the comforter.
“I like the sound of you,” she says.
“Are you flirting with me?”
“No,” she says, opening her eyes to grin at me. “I don’t have to do that. We have an agreement.”
It’s true—it’s fucking true that we agreed on the length of this little fling—but hearing about it right now sends a bolt of pain through my heart. It takes me by surprise. Valentine is instantly worried.
“What did I say?”
No. I am not going to let the truth derail the pleasure I’ve been waiting to give her since... since the moment I saw her, at least. If I’m being honest.
I give her my biggest, most roguish grin, and her face immediately echoes it back. “I just re
membered something boring I have to do later.”
“What’s that?”
“Not fuck you.”
She throws her arms around my neck then, pulling me down to her and kissing me fiercely. It’s like fireworks, a thousand sparklers running through my nerves, and we move effortlessly into another mode. The too-hot mode. The fuck-me-now mode. And I fucking love it.
I love her.
The thought comes to me without warning, and it’s so stupid that I almost laugh out loud. If I weren’t consumed with spreading Valentine’s legs, running my hands down her thighs, teasing her with my fingertips hovering just outside her most sensitive space, I’d do it. Love her? No.
But I could. I could love this woman, this sweet, awkward, spitfire of a woman who was only afraid of me for a split second when we met. Who doesn’t see me as a dad drowning in the weight of the fucked-up past. I could love her.
Shit. I could love her.
Then the part of my brain that’s interested in dwelling on some are-we-or-aren’t-we bullshit shuts down, and I’m lost in her.
I make her come with just my fingers, even as she tries to put me first. Do I want to let her get on her knees at the foot of the bed and take me into her mouth? Yes. Hell yes. But for once in my life, I’m more interested in making sure she is satisfied beyond belief.
For once this summer, there’s nobody bursting through the door, no random foods to catch her off guard, and no sausage deliveries, for God’s sake.
I learn that Valentine likes to have her clit rubbed in a very specific way, and she likes to have it done often. The first time I make the circles with my fingertips the perfect size her whole body tenses, and then relaxes, and she sucks in a huge breath.
“This,” I whisper in her ear, making those circles in just the right rhythm. She’s almost straddling me, her face pressed close to mine, her legs held apart by my hips. Valentine trembles against me, gritting her teeth.