by Maisey Yates
Including joy.
Even in the middle of her grief, looking at Amelia’s face had brought her joy.
So as far as she was concerned, Tammy Dalton didn’t have anything to answer for.
“We’re probably just going to go home, Tammy,” she said softly.
“Is everything okay?”
The other woman was more a mother to Ellie than her own had ever been.
And that had been a difficult thing for her to sort out. For all the same reasons she was so resolute in her understanding of Tammy, and in her sympathy for her, she felt more distant from her mother than ever after the birth of Amelia.
If Ellie had been able to care for her daughter after her husband had died, surely her own mother could have done more.
Though since then, in moments of quiet guilt, she had been afraid that she understood the things her mom had done.
“Everything’s fine,” Ellie said, lying.
It wasn’t fine. She needed to get away from Caleb as quickly as possible, because he had just issued an ultimatum in a space where she could do nothing about it, and she needed to get away from him and think.
“Mommy!” Amelia closed the space between them and wrapped her arms around Ellie’s legs. She embraced her daughter, that true, simple love erasing some of the confusion rocking around inside her. For a moment.
Caleb walked into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, crossing his muscular arms over his broad chest, his blue eyes level with hers.
“Come on,” she said, patting Amelia’s back. “We should go. We’ll get burgers from Mustard Seed.”
“Yay!” Amelia dashed off to gather her things and Tammy looked between Ellie and Caleb.
“I just need to go to the powder room,” she said, far too astute. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ellie.”
Ellie stood there, regarding Caleb closely. The moment seemed to stretch between them like an elastic band. Tight. Impossible to breathe through.
But then Amelia returned, her arms full of coloring pages. The tension didn’t break, but neither of them could stand there and indulge in it, either.
“Okay, let’s go,” she said.
She passed by Caleb, who didn’t move, in the doorway.
And then she stopped, unable to help herself. Her breath froze in her chest like a ball, her heart fluttering like a trapped bird.
“Let’s talk later tonight,” she whispered, the words getting stopped up in her throat.
She lingered near him for one breath.
Two.
Then she put her hand on his bicep, dragging her fingertips down the deep valley in his muscular forearm.
His blue eyes collided with hers, his nostrils flaring like an angry bull.
But he said nothing. And neither did she.
But she touched him.
And with that touch she’d made a promise to them both.
It wasn’t until she got in the car that she started to question what the hell she’d done.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE QUESTION THEN became whether or not he would come.
She thought about that all through the dinner she didn’t eat, and all through reading Amelia her bedtime story.
She didn’t know if she should change into her pajamas...change into a dress?
Change into sexy underwear?
That thought froze her for a whole minute, standing in the center of her bedroom.
What kind of underwear did Caleb like?
It was weird. It was weird to think about. What would Caleb want to see her in? What would he want to see her out of? What did he like?
She had been thinking about this from such a one-sided point of view, and that was really why the whole thing had freaked her out so badly. Because he had made it clear that this wasn’t something she could think of only in terms of herself. This would be about him, too. About his...his pleasure.
She was very new to thinking of Caleb in those terms.
But if they... If they...
She had put her hand on him before she’d walked out of the house. And he had said that if she touched him again...
She had done it. She had made the choice. She had made the choice because somehow the idea of going back seemed impossible.
Because something about that kiss had thrilled her as much as it had terrified her.
But maybe he wouldn’t come. Maybe she had abused his friendship way too much in the past few days for it to...
She didn’t know if she wanted him to come or not.
And now that sounded dirty. She had thought enough times that she could only think of it in terms of... sexually coming.
She would really like to come.
Did she want to come with him?
Yes.
The answer hit her decisively. She did. She wanted him. And that was terrible, because he was the last person that it should be in many ways, and also the only person that it could be. And what a terrible tangle to be caught in. That sort of two-edged nightmare where she would be cut either way.
But strangely, she didn’t worry so much about it ruining their friendship. If she had, she never would have asked him for it in the first place. Really, her asking him at all... That was the thing that she worried might ruin their friendship. But if they got on the other side of it, if they actually did have sex... Everything would be fine.
She wasn’t sure why she wasn’t afraid it would ruin them.
They’d had one hiccup, and she’d never discovered what it was about. But when she’d needed him it had all been forgotten.
He’d been the one to tell her. He’d come to her door, tears in his eyes. He’d folded her into his arms. He’d wiped away her tears and somehow...somehow she knew he’d helped her shoulder that grief and that without him she’d be crushed by it.
Their friendship had been forged in something worse than fire.
It had been in grief and loss. She had been broken, and she was in the process of being remade. And he had been an integral part of that process so far.
More than that, he had shared her grief with her.
He had loved Clint like a brother, and they had wept together. He’d been the one to tell her she was a widow. The one to let her cling to him in the aftermath of that. He hadn’t left her side that whole horrible day. He’d slept on her floor in the living room after she’d fallen asleep on the couch. And in the morning he’d held on to her again while she’d cried more.
He’d been the man who held her hand and wiped the sweat and tears from her face as she’d brought her daughter into the world.
He’d seen her in pain. The deepest emotional pain. The sharpest physical pain. He’d been through it all.
Maybe that was why this felt right.
She had fallen apart with him in the worst of ways. Why not this way?
It was right.
But weird. Frightening.
And maybe he wouldn’t show up.
If he didn’t, they could forget it ever happened, and she would go on this part of the journey by herself. She would find somebody else, and they could go back to their expected roles with each other.
Except, it would be different anyway, because he was moving. Because Christmas tree farms.
That was the root of this in the first place.
If there was an evolution happening, then she wanted to make one, too.
And it felt like it wasn’t wrong for there to be a slight evolution in their relationship. And then when it was time for it to be over, it just would be, naturally. Because they had shifted and bent and broken and filled spaces in each other’s lives for years now, and in many ways she just felt confident that they would keep on doing it.
While she was standing there pondering these things, her doorbell rang.
Caleb always showed up.
She never should have doubted.
She cursed, and she didn’t know if it was terror or relief that brought the word to her lips. But she was out of time to debate the finer points of her innerwear or outerwear.
She took a breath and scampered out the door, down the stairs. Then she slowed her pace so that he wouldn’t hear frantic footsteps and opened the door as casually as possible.
“Next time, maybe send a text,” she said slowly. “So that Amelia doesn’t wake up.”
“Right.” He made his way into her living room and looked around. “You have firewood?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It’s stacked around back. Did you...?”
He walked past her and went through toward the back door. She heard the screen door swing open and shut, and she just stood there, watching the space where he had been a moment before.
She wasn’t sure what he was doing. He came back in a moment later with an arm full of wood and kindling. Then he went into the living room and knelt down by the fireplace.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at her, those blue eyes boring into her. She shivered.
“That’s number four on your list,” he said. “You want to make out by the fire.”
Ellie blinked. “I thought we were going to talk.”
He looked up at her. “And I told you that if you touched me there wasn’t going to be anything to talk about.”
And she had done it. She had.
But she didn’t know what to do with this man. This utterly different version of her friend.
This man wasn’t holding her and soothing her. He wasn’t offering her a safe space to land.
He was pushing her. A challenge lit his blue eyes as if he expected her to back down. As if he expected her to run away again.
And part of her expected she might run, too. But what if she didn’t?
He pushed the couch back, dropping her little throw pillows onto the floor, the items looking absurdly feminine and small in his large hands. Then he took the throw off the back of the couch and put it down over the rug before returning to his task of starting the fire.
“I... To be honest, I thought we would just skip to the sex,” she said.
For some reason, the idea of kissing him—just kissing him—made her feel uncomfortable.
More intimate.
She wanted to skip to darkness, and bed and nakedness. Hands skimming over each other’s bodies and the rush of release.
She didn’t want to be down here, with the lights on.
“You have a list,” he pointed out.
“I know. But that was when everything was very hypothetical. And this is not very hypothetical. Plus, we know each other. I thought it might be...you know, a guy I didn’t know. Or maybe more than one guy or...”
Something about the sharpness in his blue eyes cut her words right off.
His movements were efficient and he had the fire started quickly, much more quickly than she could ever manage.
He had done this for her many times. Because she didn’t know how, and she had loved the fact that her little farmhouse had a fireplace, but she didn’t know how to actually light a fire when she had first moved in. And even now that she did know, thanks to Caleb, she wasn’t very good at it. Certainly not as quick as he was.
But all the times he’d done it before it had been a caregiving-type gesture.
This was different.
“I’m not going to make this quick and easy for you,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a Band-Aid you can rip off, Ellie. I already told you. You have to decide what scares you less. A man who doesn’t know you, who’s going to take you to bed and not care about your pleasure, because he’s just out to hook up. Or a man who knows you. Who knows what you like. Knows what you want. A man who will make it his mission to make it feel as good as possible because God knows if he doesn’t it’ll be awkward later when he sees you at work.”
It all sounded scary, quite frankly. Though, to be perfectly honest, the idea of being with a stranger suddenly sounded easier.
It all seemed so simple when she thought of it in terms of trust. But now she was thinking it in the way that meant her friend was going to actually see her entire body. Touch her body. Kiss her body.
And she would do the same to his.
Yeah, everything seemed so simple in theory.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you quit thinking? You made the list. And the minute you asked me to be the one to help you fulfill it, you put me in charge of that list.”
“I did?”
“Haven’t I always taken care of you?”
“You told me it wasn’t going to be easy.”
“I did. But I didn’t say I wasn’t going to take care of you. But I’m going to give you what you need. It just may not be what you are thinking.”
His words sent a shiver through her body.
“Caleb...”
But her words were cut off as he grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward him, lowered his head and kissed her, deeper, harder, more ferociously, than he’d done at the ranch.
But then he slowed it down, every taste, every pass of his tongue, becoming more leisurely as if he was on a long, slow walk, savoring the journey rather than trying to reach a destination.
Heat rushed through her, making her limbs feel tingly, like they were on fire, making her whole body feel like it was.
His hands were large and heavy where they rested, on her lower back, on her face. He folded her against his body, his chest hard and muscular, his thighs against hers, his...
He was hard. Hard for her. She could feel it.
She rolled her hips forward, gasping as she confirmed that, yes, that was his cock.
He was hard already, just from a kiss.
And she was wet.
For him.
Her breasts felt heavy, her stomach hollowed out.
She wanted Caleb, and she wanted to weep with the relief of that. Because part of her had been afraid.
So afraid that she didn’t know how to want a man other than Clint. That missing sex was just about missing him, and if she finally was able to find a man to sleep with, she would only picture her husband the whole time.
But she wanted Caleb.
She was clinging to Caleb. And she knew that she was. He slid his hands down, over her butt, down to her thighs, and he lifted her up off the floor, wrapping her legs around his waist.
Maybe he would just carry her to bed, after all.
But instead, he lowered her down to the floor, onto that blanket on the pillows that he had left there, in front of that fire.
She was restless. Each and every kiss drove her arousal up higher and higher, and created an ache in her chest that started to build, matching the one between her legs.
He settled between her legs, kissing her deeper, harder, and she arched against him, gasping as his hardness made contact with the most intimate part of her.
Even through their jeans, it was intense. And it was glorious. She cupped his face with her hands, loving the feel of his rough whiskers against her palms, and her eyes met his and held. He rolled his hips forward, a spasm of need rocking through her. And he didn’t kiss her. Instead, he just pressed his forehead to hers and rocked his hips back and forth.
She clung to his shoulders, biting her lip as he ratcheted up that desire inside her.
He just needed to finish it. To answer this ache that had built inside her. To do something to quiet the insanity that was making her behave this way.
If she could just take the edge off, then maybe it wouldn’t feel like so much. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so desperate.
Maybe she would be able to get to nice, and safe.
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br /> Maybe she would be able to laugh. But that was the problem; none of this felt fun or funny. There was something dark to it, something intense and wild that terrified her. And they still had their clothes on. But the sex couldn’t be quite so intense, could it? It couldn’t live up to this promise. It was just prolonging it.
She pulled at his shirt, and he grabbed hold of her hands, caging her wrists and pulling her arms up over her head. “We’re just making out, Ellie. Don’t get excited.”
She was breathing hard, and she barely recognized her voice as her own. “We are not, you jerk. Let’s just...”
“I,” he said, nipping her lower lip, “am not,” he continued, licking her, soothing away the sting, “something that you can just get over with.”
He pinned her there, to the floor, his chest pressed firmly to her breasts, his hard, flat stomach against her much softer one, his powerful thighs holding her down. And then he kissed her again, kissed her until she was trembling.
Her hands were restless, and she didn’t know what to do with them.
So she ran them down his arms, felt the heat and muscle there, down his back and, eventually, to his butt. She parted her thighs wider, grabbing him and holding him firmly as she sought to soothe the need between her legs with her own movements.
He separated himself from her, wrapped his arm around her hips and pulled her to the left so that the hard ridge of his desire was no longer right there where she wanted it. She wiggled, but he had her right where he wanted her, and there was no fighting it.
He pushed his fingertips beneath the hem of her shirt, those calluses so shocking and rough against her skin. The heat of his touch so much more than she had even imagined it could be.
Suddenly, tears prickled her eyes, and it was so unexpected she could hardly breathe through the shock.
It just felt so wonderful to be touched.
Like she was beautiful.
Like she was a woman.
And what she had underrated while she had been thinking of Caleb touching her, while she had been thinking of the trust between them, of the way that he was so careful with her, was that he had held her while she was grieving. But he had not held her because he desired her. And now...
Right now he was caressing her like a man did when he wanted a woman, and she had needed that.