No Quick Fix (Torus Intercession 1)

Olivia’s eyes lit up as she nodded enthusiastically.

We breached the room at oh-nine-hundred, but had failed to take into consideration the possibility that our enemy had also taken the time to arm themselves. The air was filled with blue Nerf bullets with orange tips. Others were green. Apparently those were the zombie ones.

April was screaming when I pretended to dive onto her bed.

“No! Brann! Don’t you dare! You’re gonna get sweat all over my Wonder Woman comforter, and that’s—Olivia!”

Emery caught his youngest, mid-leap, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and tried to kiss him.

“No, no,” he cried out, turning his head back-and-forth, “anything but that. I just woke up; I don’t want sweat all over me!”

April apparently didn’t care all that much as long as I stayed off her bed, because she stood up on it and leaped at me like a spider monkey.

“Ohmygod, you’re so heavy,” I yelled, dropping to the floor on my back. “You weigh a frickin’ ton!”

She was laughing like crazy, and Emery was there, staggering around, and I moved faster than he noticed, and the room wasn’t that big to start with, so he stepped between my knees. Instinctively, I jerked my thighs together to protect my groin, and he overbalanced to make sure he didn’t fall, which of course, made him do just that. He ended up tossing Olivia onto the bed before he came down beside me.

I meant to roll to my feet, but April bumped me out of position, which would have put Emery on my chest, but since I was more coordinated than that, I caught him and protected his head, which would have hurt if he’d knocked it on the floor, even with it being carpeted. As Olivia ran from the room, shrieking with abandon, her sister hot on her heels, shooting, I was on my hands and knees hovering over Emery.

He was gorgeous.

Face flushed, laughing, gazing up at me like I was the second coming, it took all my will-power not to drop down and pin him under me. He was ready to be kissed, he needed to be kissed, but instead of listening to my instincts, I kept still. My hands were braced on either side of his head and my knees caged his hips.

“You realize,” he said, his hands slipping around the back of my thighs, “that my girls will want to have a Nerf war every Sunday from now on.”

His hands slipped just under the cuffs of my shorts, and I shivered with the contact, the excitement rippling over my skin, causing goose bumps. But while I was there, slowly coming undone, losing control with every passing second, thread by thread, his gaze was not full of heat but instead—awe. The appreciation was rolling off of him. Like he couldn’t believe he was so lucky to have me there, with his family. He thought of me in one context only… as the nanny.

I groaned out my frustration, because all I wanted was for him to lift his legs and wrap them around my hips.

“Brann?” he said my name reverently, and I hated it. I would have preferred my name torn from his throat on an urgent moan. “What’s wrong?”

“Daddy!” April squeaked, running back into the room with Olivia right behind her.

I lifted up off him in time to catch April as she flew into my arms. Olivia practically vaulted at her father, and he got up only to sit down hard on the bed.

We were all panting and smiling.

“You know,” Emery said after a moment. “Technically Olivia only has sweat on her robe, not on anything underneath.

“Oh, yeah, huh,” April agreed with him. “She’s not gross, only Brann.”

I sighed deeply.

“Brann’s not gross either, I promise you.”

Standing, I put April down, and then walked from the room, suddenly tired, needing to eat and drink water.

“Brann, I’m making breakfast,” Emery called out to me as I reached the door to my room.

“Thank you,” I called back. “I’m just gonna take a quick shower.”

I didn’t wait to hear if he said anything more.

Under the water, I stroked myself and thought of him and came hard, spurting onto the tiled wall. When I came out, it was as though nothing ever happened. I suggested we go shopping, and both the girls made faces at me like I was nuts.

“We hafta go to church,” Olivia informed me. “You need to put on church clothes.”

I smiled at her. “Not on your life.”

April whirled around to face her father, eyes pleading, biting her bottom lip. I would have had to be blind to miss that I was in the middle of an ongoing issue.

“No,” he said firmly. “Brann is a grown-up, so he’s allowed to make his own choices about his faith. You don’t have that luxury until you’re eighteen.”

April stared piteously up at me, slipping her hand into mine.