by Mae Wood
“Yes,” he bit out. “Yes. Fuck, Kenzie. Fuck,” he roared. And I smiled, triumphant, as he spilled onto his stomach and I collapsed on top of him. His fingers trailed up and down my back.
A cool evening breeze fanned away the heat that had built and then exploded between us. I rested my head on his chest, listening to his heart’s gallop return to a steady, slow rhythm.
His fingers continued to trace my spine, petting me into a lull as the world continued to darken around us.
“Kenzie,” he said, pressing a kiss to the crown of my head and shifting beneath me.
The light was gone from the sky. “I don’t want to,” I answered, turning my face into his chest. His arms wrapped around me and held me tight, surrounding me in warmth. I wanted to linger in this moment forever, suspended here with him.
“I don’t want to either. But it’s either now or in the morning and—”
“I get it,” I said, squeezing my eyes to savor what we had for one more minute. “Cover of darkness it is.”
I stood and pulled myself back together as best I could. A strap of my dress was torn, but I wiggled back into it. Running my fingers through the mess that was my hair, I pulled out leaves and bits of vine that had fallen to the ground during pruning. And then there was the dirt. I brushed my hands across my knees in a fruitless attempt to clean them.
“Here,” Ryan said. He held out his suit jacket for me and wrapped me in the muddy, wrinkled mess.
“Thanks,” I said as his arms folded around me.
“What’s the plan?” he whispered in my ear, holding me tight against him. “Wait until it’s late night and then sneak to the parking lot? I’m staying in town, so we can get cleaned up, have dinner—”
“Follow me,” I said, taking his hand in mine and tugging him through the vines.
Ryan
“I think it goes without saying,” she said, “but I’ll say it anyway. Let’s not broadcast this.”
My heart sank, even though I knew she was making complete sense.
“I mean, at the winery, I’m gossip enough already—”
“I’m not leaving,” I said, cutting her off. I was surprised by my insistence that I somehow wasn’t leaving this woman I’d met twice.
Her reply was a squeeze of my hand and a quiet “I know.”
In comfortable silence, we reached the end of the row and stepped onto the gravel drive that looped through the property, the one I’d walked with her this afternoon, our feet crunching against the small stones.
“Why are you gossip already?” I asked, looking at her face in the pale moonlight, the lights from the cluster of buildings ahead of us reflected in her eyes.
“I grew up here,” she said, her head swiveling to see if we were going to be spotted. I looked as well.
I didn’t want us to be caught like this either and I wasn’t a local. The coast seemed clear. “So,” I breathed, standing on the edge of the darkness and still not having a grasp on the situation or the plan to move forward, but knowing that the end of whatever path would be this. Me and her. Together.
“So,” she said. “We’ll get cleaned up.” She stepped forward with our hands still clasped, and we skirted the edges of the buildings. “Your chariot,” she said with a smile, pointing to an old red Jeep parked by the side of a building. “Hop in.”
“I’ve got my car here,” I said as the reality of what we’d just done began to press into the sides of this bubble the two of us were in.
“In the parking lot, right? Past the dining room, past the tasting room? Past all of those people? And there are always a few drunks who leave their cars on weekend nights. Your car here isn’t a problem,” she said.
We’d made it this far without being spotted and I didn’t want to press our luck or maybe I just didn’t want to step away from her. I climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep and watched her fish around under the floor mat before finding a key and cranking the engine.
“Where are you staying?”
I gave her the hotel name. As she drove, I kept watching her, this woman in a filthy, wrinkled suit jacket, the sleeves pushed back so she could steer and shift the manual transmission. The lights of town raced over her as we passed through, momentarily catching her honey-colored hair that was flying all around her head. I placed my hand on her thigh and she gave me a happy smile. Before we knew it, we were in the parking lot of my hotel.
“Okay, so good news is that I don’t frequent hotels here, but let’s just not linger in the lobby anyway. Cool?”
“Cool,” I answered with a nod.
Her red rubber boots squeaked on the polished wood floor—heads turning to place the sharp sound.
“Faster,” I urged, tugging her toward a hallway. Even though the squeak disappeared the second she stepped on the carpet, I didn’t slow my speed.
Safely in my hotel room, we were greeted by a reflection of ourselves in a massive full-length mirror. Holy hell. There was no doubt what we’d been up to. I was a mess, but Kenzie’s dress was caked in dirt. It was like I’d taken handfuls of dirt and rubbed them into the top of her dress while I was trying to free her boobs. Which, in all honesty, was pretty much what I’d done.
In stunned silence, we said nothing. Then I noticed her lips started quivering. She was going to cry. She was going to cry, and it was going to look like I’d just done awful things to her in a goddamned field.
And then the most amazing thing happened. She began to laugh.
Chapter Seven
Kenzie
I couldn’t stop laughing. Huge gales of hysterical laughter that made my chest clutch and my cheeks ache.
We looked ridiculous, and I blinked away the tears so I could see our reflection in the mirror again. Like we’d fallen off the back of a truck. My hair was in knots. Giant, dirty handprints were all over my boobs. And Ryan hadn’t made out much better—his shirt was ruined.
When I was about eight, my cousin and I had been playing outside and when we came home for lunch, her mother made us strip down on the front porch and hosed us off before we were allowed inside. I’d never played outside like this before, but we both needed to be hosed off.
“We need a picture,” I wheezed through the tears, pawing at the pockets of his jacket, which I was still wearing, until I found his phone. I held it out for him. “Unlock it,” I said, and Ryan did.
He was staring straight ahead at the image we made, not making a sound, but the joy on his face was unmistakable. That hungry, crooked smile that I’d wanted from him? It was mine and I wanted to keep it.
“Say cheese,” I said, and his wide smile grew bolder, his eyes crinkled up, and his arms wrapped around me in a hug.
I snapped a few shots of us in the mirror and texted the pictures to myself. “You’ve got my number now,” I said.
“You’ve got mine,” he said, dropping a kiss on the top of my messy head. “You’re being cool about this.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? I mean, this is all crazy, isn’t it?”
“Crazy, yeah,” he agreed, turning serious, staring at us in the mirror, taking us in and pulling a mustard leaf from the rats’ nest that was my hair. He showed it to me, pinched between his index and middle fingers, before letting it fall to the floor. “Go on,” he said, with a half pat, half slap to my ass that made me grin even wider. “Clean up. I’ll order something to eat.”
My dress wasn’t salvageable. My panties were shreds. I tossed them both into the trash can with glee. They were things and I wouldn’t miss them.
After a quick but thorough scrub, I slipped back into my bra to keep the girls up and tied a fluffy hotel robe around my waist, then made sure there was enough cleavage on display for him to get that hungry look back in his eyes. I wiped steam from the bathroom mirror and finger-combed my hair. I glowed. I’d heard about afterglow before, but I’d never seen it on me. Not in this way. My eyes were bright. My cheeks were flushed, and I just looked happy.
Ryan knocked on the door and I
opened it.
“Hey,” he said, leaning against the frame with his forearm extended over his head. His black boxer briefs hung low on his hips. He was delicious and I wanted more.
“Hey yourself.” I popped up on my toes to give him a quick kiss on the lips.
“Food should be here in a minute,” he said, leaning over me for a deep kiss.
“Cool,” I said after we broke, and I went back to fighting with the tangles in my hair.
“Kenzie?” he said, catching my gaze in the bathroom mirror.
“Yeah?” I paused my work, my fingers woven through my long hair.
“You’re something else.”
I raised an eyebrow at him and a hand went to my hip. “If you think you’re the first person to say that—”
He turned the water on, dropped his boxers, and stepped into the shower. That ass. I wanted to knead my fingers into that ass as he pounded into me. I heard a knock on the door and invited the server, who I did not know—thank fuck—to roll the room service table into the room. I snagged the bottle of wine and slipped back into the bathroom.
“You ordered sparkling?” I said, pulling back the shower curtain. He was standing under the shower, his head dipped forward, and my gaze slid down his body to his proud dick and I smiled.
“Yeah,” he said, lifting his head and I looked up at him. Those hungry eyes. That wolfish smile.
“I feel drunk already, but okay if I open it?”
“Be my guest,” he answered, turning off the water and snagging a towel.
“My cousin is going to drop off some clean clothes for me in the morning,” I said as I untwisted the wire cage on the bottle and began to rock the cork free. He was watching me work, watching my hands twist and nudge the cork while my bathrobe gaped open to give him more than a peek at my cleavage. I liked the way he looked at me. It was that simple.
“I was going to offer to go out and find you something to wear.”
“This is easier.” The cork popped, and I poured some of the straw-colored wine into a glass taken from the bathroom counter. I passed it to him before untying the robe from my waist.
Turned out that the hotel minibar didn’t just have booze. The so-called “personal necessities” kit included a condom. Just one. And we worked to make it last.
By the time we ate dinner, it was late and the room service was cold. I didn’t care. A few bites of a pretty filet mignon with a cabernet sauce and truffled potatoes and I was in his arms. Naked and at peace with the universe.
A knock on the hotel room door woke me up, sunlight bright along the edges of the heavy curtains.
“It’s probably my cousin. Clothes,” I reminded him, getting my bearings in the strange room. “And my phone and my wallet.” I rolled out of bed, slipped on a robe and cracked the door.
“Kenz,” Drennan drawled, a wicked smile on her face as she shoved a backpack at me. “Do I even want to know?”
“Tell you later. Let’s leave late afternoon, okay?” I said. I didn’t wait for an answer. I closed the door in her face.
Drennan and I were pretty much sisters. I was the older one, so I lived to tease her. Especially about guys. Drennan was gorgeous, a California girl from the movies. My hair was a few shades darker and she was a few inches taller. She was the beautiful one, and I was the bold one.
Since high school, I’d been spinning tales about wild sexploits. Last summer, I’d even had her convinced that part of sorority hazing involved being tied up and spanked at a secret sex club run by one of the fraternities on campus. It was all bullshit, and she bought it until she’d started school and found out that the frat’s prominently displayed paddles were for their pledges, not girls they wanted to get into bed with. This time I wouldn’t have to make anything up, but it would take me ages to explain.
“Got what you need?” asked Ryan. He was sitting up in bed, reclined against the tufted headboard, a white sheet rumpled across his lap. That sheet was not my friend.
I dropped my bag on the chest of drawers and rooted around in it. Jeans. Shirt. Undies. Bra. Socks and sneakers. Hairbrush and my favorite lip balm. And when I found it, I smiled. My reputation had some benefits.
“Yes. Catch,” I said to Ryan as I tossed him a box of condoms.
Later, out of the shower for a second time, I dressed in the clothes Drennan had dropped off.
“I don’t have to be back today. I can stay another night,” Ryan said, tying on some trendy, striped, leather sneakers.
I liked him in his suit from the day before. He seemed polished and professional and, I’ll admit, some of the thrill of getting so dirty with him was getting to mess him up. But now in jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers, he looked more like someone I’d actually spend time with, and I wanted to spend the day with him.
“I don’t know what you’ve got going on or if you have to work, but how about we do some tastings and dinner?”
“That would be awesome. Truly,” I said, my face pulling a frown as I stuffed my yesterday bra into my bag. “But I have to go back to Davis this afternoon. Lunch?”
“Hell yes to lunch. You teach?”
“No,” I said with a laugh at the ridiculous idea of me giving a lecture in a huge hall full of students. “Absolutely not.”
“Grad work?”
I heard the hesitancy in his voice and it lodged in my chest, cleaving it open. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure he’d guessed the right answer. I carefully tied my own sneakers, taking time before the oh-shit bomb exploded.
The laces double-knotted, I cast my glance up at him, readying myself for whatever reaction he had. “Try undergrad work,” I said.
His mouth slid open, his eyes grew as round as when he came, and he froze with his arms halfway into his jacket.
Chapter Eight
Ryan
I felt the blood drain out of my face and my stomach clenched. She has got to be shitting me, right? She’s in undergrad? I thought she was younger, but like twenty-five years old. Undergrad, for fuck’s sake. So, what, twenty-one? Fuck. Twenty-one. I closed my eyes and prayed for twenty-one. Please say she’s at least twenty.
Oh, and fuck—Marlena was going to fire me for real over this. This wasn’t a bottle of von Eck wine. Or fucking a client. This was fucking a client’s daughter—a client’s daughter who had been sitting on my face an hour ago. Please say she’s at least twenty. Twenty is so much better than nineteen. What the hell had I just done?
Triage, triage.
I forced myself to focus.
I forced myself to think.
I needed to buy time.
I needed to try to be normal for one goddamn minute.
I pulled my jacket on and zipped it halfway up, forcing myself to look at my hands rather than her.
Big breath in.
Big breath out.
I was getting control when a new wave of panic swept over me.
“McKenzie,” I growled, placing my hands on my hips and setting my eyes firmly on hers. “How old are you?”
She looked at me square in the face, her arms folding across her chest. “Old enough.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I yelled in frustration, my arms shooting out from my sides as I lost my cool. “How old are you?”
Her eyes lit up at my outburst. She wasn’t scared at all. She didn’t look insulted. She looked damn proud. “It means that you need to back off. I’m twenty-two, if you have to know, which apparently you do,” she said, unfurling her arms and twiddling her fingers at me.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, my knees buckling in relief that she wasn’t a freshman. That I hadn’t just spent the past twelve hours doing dirty things with someone under the age of twenty. I scrubbed my hands over my face.
“I’m thirty,” I mumbled into the palm of my hand as I looked for her reaction.
“So?” came her exasperated reply. Her arms were again crossed over her chest, propping up her breasts against a thin pink T-s
hirt.
“So, everything!” I snapped, jumping to my feet. “Number one, you’re in undergrad. Number two, you’re a client. Number three, you’re a client’s daughter. Number four—”
“What’s freaking you out? We haven’t done anything wrong. I’m not freaking out.”
“I’m sure as shit freaking out. It may not matter to you, but as a real adult, I have a real job and a mortgage, and I have to be responsible. I have to be professional. This,” I gestured to the messy bed, “isn’t professional.”
“I don’t care.”
“I do!” I shot, my voice raised in disappointment at myself, at how I was in a hotel room with a woman I had no business ever being in a hotel room with, the rumpled bed we’d been screwing in right there, reminding me of what we’d done, reminding me that I’d liked it, and that she liked it, too. And knowing that I should never, ever have it again. At my outburst, her gaze dropped to the floor and she shifted her weight back and forth on bright pink sneakers. Who wears pink sneakers? A twenty-two-year-old client’s daughter, that’s who.
Goddamn.
Kenzie
Didn’t guys like younger women? I thought he’d get off on me being in undergrad. But that was not how it went down. His hands balled into fists on his hips and he began pacing. I half expected him to throw something, but he just kept methodically pacing, back and forth between the windows and the door.
I remained quiet and sat on the bed, watching him carefully and wondering what he’d do next. Half-smiling to myself as his feet carved out a steady beat that my head turned to music. But the half-smiles were all mine. He was like a caged lion, his gaze on me. Hot stares swept up and down my body, took in my face, fixed on my eyes.