Second Time's the Charm

Lillie nodded.

And because she’d been a little unclear the other night at his house, she added, “I’d like you to stay. To...hold me.”

“Lady, I am willing to do many things for you, pretty much anything you ask, but I do not believe I’m capable of simply holding you right now. Or anytime soon, for that matter.”

The intensity in his gaze went straight to her heart. “What if I’m not asking you to ‘simply’ hold me?”

He frowned and she rushed on. “I was hoping we could finish what we started the other night. You told me to tell you when I was ready.”

His gaze changed yet again, consuming her. “You’re ready?”

“Uh-huh.” Whether her grin was due to nerves or her surging homones, she wasn’t sure. She just knew she couldn’t stop herself from smiling up at him.

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

Glancing around them, he dropped his bucket and took her hand, pulling her into her bedroom where his son lay sleeping on her bed. Still holding her, he scooped up the sleeping toddler with his free hand, settled him on his shoulder and hauled her gently down the hall, stopping where she’d dropped her purse on the counter when she’d come in that evening.

“You’ll probably want to grab that,” he said softly, leaning away from his son’s ear.

“We’re leaving?”

“I’m not going to blow this opportunity,” he said. “And the crib where Abe is safe, the monitor that keeps him that way, the shower I desperately need and the condoms I bought are all at my place. Not to mention a bed that isn’t occupied.”

Still grinning, Lillie grabbed her purse, laced her fingers through his, locked up as they left her house and said, “I do have a spare bed, you know.”

* * *

JON’S BED HAD come with the apartment. The sheets were his own. They were his one extravagance—a gift to himself after years spent sleeping on a bare cot with only a horsehair blanket to cover him.

That night, he and Lillie marked those sheets with their wet soapy bodies because they hadn’t been able to wait until they’d finished their shower and dried off. He’d intended to be slow and deliberate with every touch. To frame each moment in his memory. But he’d no sooner shoved his drawers to the floor of his bathroom and stepped into the shower, before she was in there with him—completely naked and slick with water.

“I was too impatient to wait my turn,” she said, reaching up to stick her tongue in his mouth. “I swear to you,” she said as she licked water off his chin, “I’m not a wild woman.” Her tongue dipped to his nipple. “This thing that you do to me...”

He would have asked what thing if he could get air out of his lungs. Just because he wanted to hear her talk about it. She was traveling lower and Jon knew that it would all be over before it began if he let her dip any farther.

Grabbing the bar of soap, he rubbed her back first, and then her arms, pulling her upright and moving on to her hands, her quads and knees and calves and toes. By that time she’d finished soaping up his back and backside and was sliding around to the front.

Choking, he grabbed her hand and made a beeline to the bed, tumbling their wet bodies down. He donned the condom in record time and sank himself into her waiting warmth.

“Can you stay?” Jon asked now, holding Lillie’s body against him as the aftermath of the most exquisite moment he’d ever known slowly faded and he settled back onto wet sheets.

“I don’t have much choice, do I? Since you’re my ride home and Abe’s fast asleep.”

He didn’t even glance at the computer he’d still had the mind to set up on its pad on his nightstand, so that he could hear his son and see his room, as well.

“I could get him up. He’d never know the difference.”

“I’ll stay.”

That was all Jon had needed to hear. “Stay right here a second,” he said, sliding out from beneath her and covering her with his robe as he strode buck naked out of the room. His bathroom had come with a separate shower and tub.

The tub, while apparently standard in this part of the country, was unlike anything he’d ever had at his disposal before. Double-wide and deep, he’d never used it, preferring the more standard, shallower tub in the bathroom across the hall from Abe’s room to bathe his son.

Filling the thing now, he added a dab of shampoo to the water gushing from the faucet, tested the temperature once more and went back to the gorgeous woman who was lounging back on his pillows watching him approach.

“How about we get this dried soap off our skin?” he asked. “Then we can raid the kitchen for some lemonade or tea and see what we can do to a second set of sheets.”