Page 40 of Working for Keeps

Fourteen

Mick

The five o’clock bell is still ringing across the valley when I pull up in front of the Elm Street duplex.

Vera is waiting on the porch with a single suitcase and a cardboard box, wearing jeans and a black sweater, her hair loose and blowing wild across her face. I kill the engine, get out, and carry her bags straight to the truck bed without saying a word.

When I hold out my hand, she takes it. She doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t glance back at the door, and doesn’t ask where we’re going.

We drive up the ridge road in the last of the evening light. Her hand rests heavy on my knee, her fingers hooked in the denim. Neither of us says a word, and I’ve never been so hyper-aware of the sound of another person breathing in my life.

Inside the cabin, I go straight to the soapstone stove to get the fire up, while she stands in the middle of my living room with her arms crossed, looking up at the ceiling. I stand by the wood box, just watching her look at it.

“It creaks,” she says.

“It doesn’t creak. That’s the ridge beam settling in the cold. It’s supposed to do that.”

“It creaks.” A small, real smile breaks across her face. “Mick, your house creaks.”

“Get over here,” I say as she comes to me.

For eleven days, I’ve taken every chance the world gave me to put my hands on this woman, but every single time, I was taking her against something—a wall, a line, a laminate desk. Tonight, she’s in my house, and nothing is coming to drag her out of it.

I pull her sweater off in front of the stove. The fire clicks and pops, throwing a warm, amber glow across the smooth brown of her shoulders. When I step back to take her in, she pulls an arm across her chest, her mouth opening to say something smart, but I put my thumb over her lips.

“Don’t,” I say softly, my voice gravelly. “I looked at an empty pillow for three years. Let me look.”

A deep flush creeps up her throat, but she lowers her arm and lets me.

I know her body from a long time ago, the way I know a road I drove every day at twenty and haven’t driven since. But standing on my grandmother’s braided rug, I find out how much of it I misremembered. The scar on her knee is on the left, not the right. She’s stronger now—there’s a lean plane of muscle across her upper back that wasn’t there at nineteen. Her skin smells like cold autumn air, vanilla, and the unmistakable, intoxicating heat of her own skin.

“Are you cataloguing me?” she whispers.

“Yes.”

“I know what you’re doing⁠—”

“You catalogue everything,” I say, dropping to my knees, pressing my mouth to the soft skin of her stomach, feeling her pulse jump against my lips. “You’ve been doing it since the second you walked onto my floor. You did it to a hydraulic shear. Now hold still and let somebody do it to you.”

A breathless laugh catches in her throat, then dies away entirely as my hands slide up her thighs.

I learn her in the firelight. I make a slow, deliberate study of her, and she doesn’t hurry me. Twice, she rasps my name in a voice I’ve never heard her use—low, raw, and completely undefended. Both times, the sheer sound of it nearly finishes me right where I kneel. When my hands get too rough—when the grease-cracked knuckles and rough calluses scrape against her sensitive skin—she doesn’t pull away. She catches my hands and presses them flat against her ribs, guiding me.

“Don’t be careful,” she breathes, her chest heaving. “I don’t want the careful version of you, Mick. I want the true one.”

So I stop holding back.

My mouth trails down her thighs, tracing the soft, sensitive skin of her inner leg until I reach the dark spot where her heat concentrates. When I settle between her knees and open her with my mouth, Vera goes rigid. Her fingers instantly claw into my hair, her hips hitching off the floor as a sharp, ragged gasp tears from her throat.

She tastes slick, hot, and wildly sweet—a taste I’ve craved through three long, hollow years. I use my tongue slow and heavy, drinking in the slick friction of her, feeling the frantic, uncontrollable tremor that starts deep in her thighs and ripples all the way through her body. The smell of her skin, warm and completely aroused, fills my head until I can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but drive her higher.

Her hips arch wildly against my face, her legs shaking violently against my shoulders. I lock my forearm over her hips to hold her down, taking every helpless sound she makes straight into my mouth until her body shudders in a hard, violent release that leaves her sobbing my name into the quiet cabin.

We move to the bed at some point, though I couldn’t tell you how we got there.

Tonight, she pulls me down on top of her. She looks up at me in the dark bedroom, her hands framing my face, her thumb tracing my cheekbone.

“Stay with me,” she says, the weight of her words hitting my chest so hard I have to rest my forehead against hers just to catch my breath.