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About the same age as the guy at the party who had made me feel… what? Naughty, and special, and, I realized as I stepped out of the truck, more, too: innocent, small, feminine. The way the thought of my date tonight with an older man also made me feel, but now with the added complications of my modest dress, my training panties, and my sore bottom.
CHAPTER 16
Cal
I rang the doorbell of Jake and Shelly’s farmhouse at 5:32, with a big bunch of wildflowers, mostly black-eyed Susans and daisies, in my hand. From what I’d read about Grace, she came from the city, so I wondered whether she’d get snooty about them because she’d grown up in a place where, as far as I could tell from the videos, they had a florist on every corner. When she opened the door, though, looking so pretty it made my heart ache a little, the surprise on her face as she noticed the flowers seemed genuinely happy.
She didn’t expect kindness and courtesy, I realized suddenly. The courtship program clearly put so much emphasis on discipline and training that a girl like Grace would have felt certain her suitor wouldn’t behave like a gentleman. She had probably expected that I’d barge my way in and tell her to bend over for a paddling, just to make my authority clear.
I couldn’t deny that the thought of doing that had a rather remarkable appeal; I felt my cock stir along my thigh as I pictured it. Not really my style, though—at least on a first date.
“Grace?” I said, as if I weren’t sure. I planned on telling her at some point about everything I’d seen, and how sure it had made me that I wanted to be the man to court her, but, again, not a first date kind of thing.
She took her lower lip between her teeth in a way so fetching my heart had another of those little pangs. Man, that New Modesty algorithm had something going for it. I’d never imagined I could start falling like this the moment I saw a girl.
“Cal?” she asked. Something about the tentative sound of her voice, saying my name, told me that Jake and Shelly had said nice things about me. I couldn’t help smiling.
They ought to. I fixed the carburetor on that tractor practically for free.
I nodded. “Yup.”
We stood for a moment just looking at each other. I had an odd moment of hesitation, very strange for me, as I wondered whether she liked what she saw as much as I did. Grace Franklin, whom I’d already had the amazing privilege of seeing naked, of middle height, so she came up pretty much to my collarbone. Green eyes and red hair, and a lovely blush that maybe indicated that, yes, she did think I cleaned up well. Little, frankly delicious-looking breasts and slim hips, well outlined in the old-fashioned green dress, the whole of her silhouetted in the light from the Carpenters’ kitchen.
“Grace!” I heard Shelly say from somewhere inside. “Don’t make him stand on the doorstep, honey!”
Grace’s mouth twisted to the side, and she looked into my eyes with a hesitant expression that seemed to say, You’re on my side, right? Please?
“She’s not, Shelly,” I called past her, not taking my own eyes from her face. “We’re just saying hello!”
Grace’s tentative look turned into a radiant smile that brought a surge of warmth into my chest.
I held the flowers out.
“For you,” I said, despite it being completely obvious. I lowered my voice. “Shelly will like it if you put them right into some water.”
Grace
Yet another blush came into my cheeks—a gentler one this time, though. Not like the blazing lava feeling that had come over me when I saw Cal’s face, and his flowers, at the same moment.
No one had ever brought me flowers, obviously. The fact that they clearly came from a field—that he had picked them himself, and gathered them into something that looked almost like a professional bouquet… I pretty much couldn’t handle it.
I reached out both my hands for them, almost like a little girl about to pray. I kind of felt that way, too—as if I wanted to ask some higher power to make sure I didn’t regret the strange, pure happiness I felt at having gotten flowers from an older guy. As I took the stems into my grasp, and Cal let go of them, our fingers brushed against each other, and a little shiver traveled through my whole body as at the same time I noticed that he had just a tiny bit of grease stuck in one of his cuticles.
Time seemed to stop, because the single tiny moment, the microsecond when I shivered and noticed the grease, grew into a sort of meditation. I couldn’t tell whether I had shivered because our fingers had touched or because I had noticed the grease—or maybe just because. It made a little wrinkle on my forehead as I thought about it, even though at the same time I knew it didn’t matter at all and I should be paying attention to a zillion other things, the first among them being Cal’s incredibly handsome, bearded face.
“Damn,” he said, pulling my focus back up to that face, framed in tousled, light brown hair that seemed to set off his blue eyes in a way that should have been as illegal as my shoplifting. “I missed a spot, didn’t I?”
My lips parted, but no sound came out; too many different things fought to get said. My eyes went down again as Cal spread out his left hand in front of him to inspect the speck of grease.
“You…” I started.
Cal’s eyes rose to meet mine, as he put that hand down to his hip and rubbed the nail briskly against the faded denim of his jeans. I watched his face as he studied mine. At first his expression seemed a little guarded, and even stern—as if he wondered whether I would judge him for having the grease on his finger, and he felt perfectly prepared to teach me to respect the hard work he put in every day at his shop. Then he seemed to realize that my own reaction had nothing to do with disrespect, and the side of his mouth quirked up into a smile.
“I’m a mechanic, yeah,” he told me, his voice easy.
“Grace!” Jake called, his voice a little menacing.
“Go ahead,” Cal told me. “Put the flowers in some water.”
