The Ground Beneath (You and Me Book 1)

by Stephanie Vercier

“We’ll have to speak to his mother and the administration, but yes, if that’s what they want, then we’ll be on the lookout for potential treatments not currently covered.”

  “Thank you,” I say, reaching out and shaking his hand.

  And it doesn’t matter what Dr. Winston says about there being no guarantees. Just the idea that I might be able to help Logan increase his chance of survival by a few percentage points is enough to make me want to spend every dime I’ve got.

  “I was afraid you’d be asleep,” I tell Alli. She’s sitting up in my bed reading a book, and I bend down to give her a kiss.

  I’d had the locks changed a while back since Theresa never returned her key, and I was glad to give Alli the new one. She still had her room at Sheila’s, but I wanted her here as much as possible, and coming home to her is the best feeling.

  “Five more minutes, and I’d have been out.” She tries, but fails, to stifle a yawn before she sets her book on the bedside table. “How did everything go with Logan?”

  “Good,” I say, unbuttoning my shirt and then unbuckling my belt. “I waited with him for his test results, and after that I stuck around to meet his mom.”

  “That must have been a surprise for her,” she says, watching me as I shrug out of my shirt and peel my jeans off.

  I laugh. “You could say that. She did a few double takes before she’d believe it was actually me. Logan told her to chill, that I was just a guy and not some sports god.”

  “Leave it to Logan to bring things back down to earth.”

  “Yeah. I really like that kid.” Once I’m down to my boxers, I join her in bed, sliding under the covers, my back against the headboard.

  “So, what was the consensus on the scans?” she asks, looking up at me.

  “His doctor said his cancer hasn’t spread, that there was even a trace amount of improvement.” Scooting closer to her, I put an arm around her shoulders so that she leans into me.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I guess better than the alternative, but it doesn’t seem like enough to me. I offered to pay for whatever treatment he might need, whatever isn’t getting paid for by other means. That kid deserves to live a full life.”

  She puts a hand on my chest. “That’s so incredibly generous of you, Hunter. It really is.”

  “I know it doesn’t mean his cancer will go away,” I say before she can remind me of the same thing Dr. Winston did. “But I’ve got to give him the best chance he can get.”

  “And you’re doing that. You’re amazing, Hunter.”

  I kiss her then, feeling like I’m home whenever I’m with her, like all the shit that goes on in the world around us can be shut away.

  We talk a little more about Logan, then about how the rest of her day went at work. She’s light on details, says she doesn’t want to have to think about work until tomorrow, and I can respect that, even if I’m curious as to what, if anything, Theresa might have tried pulling today. She yawns again, something dainty and adorable, and I say, “Ah, too tired for any extracurricular activity tonight I see.”

  “Who said I was too tired for that?” she replies, gently elbowing me.

  “Yawns don’t lie, do they?”

  She looks at me, her sweet smile all kinds of serious when she says, “I don’t ever want to be too tired for you, Hunter. And I’m not tonight—I promise.”

  There’d been so much else on my mind today, but right now it’s all about Alli, and I harden at her invitation to do now what I pretty much always want to do with her.

  I lift her chin and bring her lips to mine, kissing her, her mouth opening to me. Our bodies end up sliding down as we touch and explore, both of us now on our sides, her back to me, but her body wrapped up close to mine. Rock hard, I’m poking into her rear and wanting to slip between her legs.

  “This position okay for you?” I whisper, nudging at the thighs I’ll have to push between, well aware we’ve only had a couple of weeks of practice at this, that sex is still very new to her.

  “Let’s try it and see,” she says, her smooth feminine voice turning me on as much as her willingness to explore.

  She moves her thigh just enough to let me in. With great relief, I push my cock through her tight slit and love the small, sweet gasp she lets out. She feels so fucking good, even better when I bring my arm around her and lay my hand on her stomach, holding her against me as I thrust into her warmth. My lips are on her shoulders and her neck and any part of her nakedness I can get to, my fingers moving southward and sliding over her engorged clit. Sweet cries of pleasure spill out of her, and I don’t hold back my gratified moans as I anchor into this beautiful girl.

  I go into a completely different place when I’m with her, this primal part of me that wants to own her, wants to be the only man she’ll ever be with in this way. This doesn’t just feel like sex, but so much more, with so much feeling behind it that, even in the throngs of pleasure, I’m terrified of losing it.

  “You feel so good,” she purrs before she takes in a long, trembling breath and comes so hard that it makes us both shake.

  “Oh, Alli…” I buck into her until I’m coming too, releasing myself deep inside, a feeling like one day doing this will mean children and a family and an entire lifetime with her.

  When we settle, when we’ve caught our breath and our bodies are relaxed, I start thinking of how I’m going to make that feeling a reality, how I’m going to make Alli my wife.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ALLISON

  Three weeks seems like a long enough time to plan an event of the magnitude Theresa Carmichael asked us for, and it probably would be for a professional party planner, someone who does this kind of thing with their eyes closed. But Theresa was insistent that Sheila and I pull this off on our own, like a test we had to pass in order to keep her and her husband on as clients.

  I’ve caught Sheila muttering under her breath more than once, about how difficult Theresa has been and how she’s only putting up with her because of the payoff that will be coming from Henry’s lucrative deals.

  “This won’t go on forever,” she assured me, but even with the extra employees we’d hired to take on some of the grunt work, I couldn’t help but foresee Theresa’s demands just increasing after the event. It was like she either had a personal vendetta against Sheila—and maybe me too—or she just enjoyed watching people jumping through hoops.

  I’d find out soon enough.

  Tonight is the black tie event, and I’ve done everything possible to make sure that it will go off without even the smallest of hitches, losing a lot of sleep along the way.

  “I’m the luckiest guy here,” Hunter says, finally joining me in the ballroom in downtown Seattle we’d paid double for to get it on such short notice.

  “Are you sure about that?” I manage to tease, though my nerves are pretty much shot. “If anything goes wrong, I feel like I’m going to completely fall apart.”

  “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” he says, putting his arm around me. “Even if it did, then I’m here for you, okay?” He lifts my chin and brings his lips to mine.

  “I love you, Hunter,” I say as our lips part and I slowly open my eyes up again. I tell him that I love him a lot, but for all the stress I’ve been under in the last few weeks, I’m not sure I’ve said it enough.

  “I love you more,” he says, sliding his bent fingers over my face. “And I’m not leaving your side tonight.”

  He’s sweet, as always, wanting to be protective and supportive. But if disaster strikes tonight, I’ll need to be capable enough to face it, deal with it, and fix it on my own. I still have to pinch myself sometimes, remembering that mere months ago I was back home in Coalton, my father’s receptionist for a small town church. Now I’m in a big city, the biggest one in the entire Pacific Northwest, and working for some equally large names in sports and under so much more pressure than I’d ever been before. I don’t want to mess it up or let anyone down, especially not Sheila wh
o has done so much, who has put her faith in me.

  With Hunter close, I think about something else too. It’s a strange moment for the thought to enter my mind, but perhaps it’s never really left. Ever since I’d done that digging on the accident that killed his mother and aunt, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Daniella and I have emailed back and forth a couple of times. She tells me that she’s going through whatever she can find with a fine tooth comb and that I should be doing the same thing, that I might see something that she hasn’t been able to because of my proximity to the case.

  There hasn’t been a lot of time for a thorough search on my end with all of this planning for Theresa’s party, but I’d still been thinking about possible answers as to why The Mountain Gazette had been so quiet about the tragedy. There was of course the chance it was Hunter’s family who’d asked Mr. Turner for his consideration at a time when they only wanted peace. But the thing about running a small town newspaper is that if you don’t run stories about people you know, there might not be any stories left to tell. I’d learned that the hard way with Daniella. She put her blinders on to our friendship to write articles about my tragedy, and while she went too far with it, she’d have had to write something. News is news, no matter how painful.

  Other answers came to mind, me wondering if the roadway the accident occurred on had been inherently unsafe, either by design or lack of maintenance. Did those responsible convince the sheriff and the editor of The Mountain Gazette to keep quiet about it? And did these same unsafe conditions persist, leading to more accidents? Could it have even been responsible for the crash that took my brother from me? But I’d all but dismissed this hypothesis considering I’d traveled the very same road countless times with my parents, and with Wyatt too. I’d never noticed anything out of the ordinary on those outings, no close calls or signs of concern from whomever was in the driver’s seat.

  There was another option, that instead of a wild animal, it had been a drunk or sleepy driver that had been the root cause. This unnamed person could have been close to the elder Sheriff Mitchell, someone he wanted to protect. It was a long enough shot for the first tragedy, but Clyde Mitchell had died long before Wyatt and Abe were killed. Perhaps the easiest explanation was the one that made the most sense, that a deer or an elk or some other beast had wandered into the road and taken Hunter’s mother by surprise.

  For my brother and Wyatt, a wild animal or drunk driver wasn’t necessary to explain how their vehicle could leave the road with barely a skid mark. I can still remember how tortured their faces looked the last time I saw them. They had both betrayed me, and I made sure they knew it. They were upset. They’d both been drinking. There were tears, though at the time I was glad for it, wanting for both of them to suffer as much as I was suffering. They drove off without Olivia because someone told them to cool down, to give me space, to give them space.

  I hadn’t wanted to read or watch any reports about what happened after that. It had been too much to lose a brother and a husband—even one who’d cheated on me—and then have to see the mangled remains of the vehicle or to know the details of their last moments here on Earth. Even Micah, who had the awful task of responding to the accident that killed his own brother, had shied away from offering too many details. For our sake, and maybe even for his, he told us, “I don’t think they suffered.”

  “Hey, it’s going to be okay,” Hunter says, nudging me.

  For a second, I think he’s talking about the accidents, but then I realize my mind had just taken a very long detour he’d not been privy to.

  “The party,” I say, sighing. “I promise I’ll try to stop worrying about it now, okay?”

  “That’s my girl,” he says, giving me a squeeze. “You’ve earned the right to have some fun tonight.”

  “You’re right,” I reply, deciding I’m going to attempt to do just that.

  The moments that follow are perhaps the first that I relax enough to take a decent look at what Hunter is wearing. He’s in a tux of course, a well tailored, perfectly slim fit over his tall, muscular frame. Not a hair on his head is out of place, his smile white, and the perfect dash of masculine cologne. He is clean-shaven, though even with blond hair, I can see the faint outline of hairs ready to break through his skin, skin that bears the lightest freckling from his years under the sun.

  “You’re so handsome,” I tell him, grateful that beneath all of his masculine beauty is a man with a strong, kind heart.

  “Oh, don’t even get me started on how gorgeous you are,” he says. “I’m going to have to be on guard because every guy in this room is going to see it too.”

  I playfully roll my eyes at him, but I can admit to myself that I’m glad at his approval. I’ve never had an occasion to wear a ball gown. I’d worn dresses of course to the dances at school, but the most formal I’d ever been dressed before tonight had been at my wedding, an occasion I couldn’t think about in any happy way without also thinking how it ended. And so while Sheila had encouraged me to wear a white or cream colored gown this evening to make my brown eyes and hair “pop,” I’d ended up going with a misty lavender dress that admittedly clashes with the reds, greens, whites and golds I’ve seen so far tonight.

  “You both look absolutely stunning,” Sheila says after hurrying up to us, her bare shoulders tense.

  “You look great too,” I tell her, the strapless green gown she has on something I wish Lisa were here to see her in.

  “You do clean up pretty good, Sheila,” Hunter agrees, his smile teasing.

  She raises both brows at him. “From you, I’ll take that as the highest form of compliment.” A sigh follows, and then she asks, “Have either of you seen Theresa yet? I can only imagine the grand entrance she might be planning.”

  “I talked to her a couple of hours ago,” I say, though it was more like her talking and me listening, her barking out a few last orders I had to rush to make happen. “She and Henry should be here soon.”

  I look toward Hunter, maybe just to give him a commiserating glance, and I’m a bit taken aback by the worry that seems to be etched on his face all of a sudden.

  “God, I hope so,” Sheila says. “The sooner we get this show on the road, the sooner this whole song and dance can be over and done with.”

  “Hopefully.” But what I really think is that this is just the beginning of what Theresa Carmichael has waiting for us.

  Instead of asking Hunter if everything is okay, I take his hand, and he turns to me, smiles and kisses me softly on the lips. Then he wraps his arms around me and leans his chin on my shoulder. He makes me feel loved, and yet I can’t quite shake the feeling that we’re experiencing moments of calm before a brewing storm.

  If I’m going to take a moment to enjoy our beautiful surroundings before something goes wrong, I decide to do it now. I’ve been in this ballroom several times before tonight, making sure it ticked off everything Theresa wanted before Sheila authorized me to plop down a sizable payment to secure it, but it looks different all lit up at night and filled with so many people.

  Opulent is probably the best way to describe it, something you’d see in one of those British period dramas, from a past time where ornate beauty was more treasured than it is today. In keeping with that theme, I’d have thought Theresa would want to greet all of her guests as they filed in. But the football players and their wives, local celebrities, software and aerospace executives and other members of Seattle society, are instead being welcomed and offered food and drink by the small army of service staff we’ve hired.

  As much as I’d love to lean against Hunter the entire evening, Sheila and I decide to split up to keep an eye on things, and Hunter accompanies me as we walk the periphery of the room, me trying to make sure everyone is happy and that nobody looks lost. We’re stopped every so often by someone wanting to talk to Hunter, and when the football talk gets to be too much, I’m thankful when Mallory pops up in a beautifully cut cream-colored gown.

 
“You made it!” I give her a hug, glad to see her again.

  “Finally,” she whispers, twisting her lips. “Scott decided to take his sweet time picking me up.”

  Over her shoulder, I see Scott, her date for tonight. He was on Theresa’s list, so I had to send him an invite, whether I wanted to or not. There’s a giant smirk on his face, one that makes me as sure as ever that my friend is wasting her time with him, but it’s up to her to decide if she agrees with me or not.

  “Still out of commission, huh?” Scott says to Hunter as soon as he joins Mallory. “Wish something like a bad rotator cuff would put me to pasture for a few months—I sure as hell could use a break.”

  “I’m sure an injury could be arranged,” Hunter tells Scott deadpan.

  The two men had been friendly on that flight to San Francisco, but it’s become obvious to me in the interim that Scott isn’t exactly one of Hunter’s favorite people.

  Scott laughs. “Hey, at least we aren’t fighting over the same woman. If I didn’t have Mallory here, I might have to make a real play for that beauty you’ve got by your side.”

  “I don’t think she’d be interested,” Hunter says, standing a little taller.

  “As if you having a boyfriend would stop him,” Mallory quietly says to me, just as Hunter’s friend, Josh, approaches.

  “Hey, man,” Josh says, doing that handshake and half hug with Hunter that guys do. When he steps back, he says, “You look good as always in a monkey suit, but the women… wow.” He looks at both me and Mallory, and there’s something sweet in his expression, like he isn’t actually trying to leer or be a jerk, but just doing his best to pay us a compliment.

  “They’re both taken,” Scott says, gripping his hand around Mallory’s shoulder and pulling her close in a sudden show of ownership. “So, don’t get any ideas you aren’t willing to get an arm broken for.”

  Josh puts his hands up. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he says, but I notice his eyes lingering on Mallory as one of the service staff stops by, all of us taking a glass from her silver tray.