“I know, sorry. I’m home. Everything’s fine.”
“What took you so long? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” Then Amber remembered her car. “Actually, there is something. My car is dead.”
“Dead? What do you mean ‘dead’?”
“That big oak tree fell on it.”
“You just paid it off!”
“I know. It stinks.”
“You should’ve called your father to come and look at it.”
“No, Mom, it’s really dead. I’m going to have to get it towed.”
“So how did you get back here?”
“Tony gave me a ride.”
A long pause. Amber could practically hear the wheels whirring in her mother’s mind. The construction worker. The basement. All those unanswered rings. Then a faint metallic scrape in the background as the curtain rings slid along the bar and her mother looked out the front window of her apartment. “He drives a blue truck,” she said.
Oh, the disapproval in those words.
Amber knew she was supposed to be feeling something. Shame. Dismay. A twinge of what-have-you-done-young-lady? She’d just had sex with a man whose house she’d never seen, whose parents and siblings she’d never met. Bad, bad Amber.
She felt marvelous.
“He sure does,” she said.
“You invited him up?”
The bathroom door opened, and Tony came out, buck naked and completely unconcerned.
It didn’t look so much like a cudgel when it wasn’t standing at attention. It looked almost domesticated in its nest of black curls. Lovable.
Or maybe that was just Tony.
“Yep,” she said cheerfully. “I invited him up.”
“Amber, you need to be more careful. A man like that … those Mazzaras aren’t the best family, and—”
“Bye, Mom.”
She hung up
the phone, knelt down, and extracted the cord from the wall.
When she turned around, he was grinning at her in that way he had, and her heart somersaulted backward off a cliff.
Too late to be careful, she thought. Way too late.
She stepped into his body and wrapped her arms around him. He kissed her, and then he kissed her some more, and then she kissed him back and he grunted, and his … his cock rose where it pressed against her hip.
He would go. Later tonight, or in the morning, he would go, and he might not ever come back.
But he wasn’t gone yet.