Lance’s hand jerked, moving my face closer to his, making it so my body pressed into his. His lips were inches from mine, breath hot and minty on my face. My knees wobbled with my body’s visceral reaction. As if he sensed I was about to collapse merely from his closeness, knowing that he favored minty toothpaste and that he felt something for me was a combination ruthless and beautiful enough to make me fall, his other hand fastened on my hip.
The area burned. Ached in a place to the right and south. My body wasn’t just waking up from a coma. It was being resurrected from the dead, and he hadn’t even frickin’ kissed me yet.
He was going to kiss me. I knew that, I felt it, the thickness, the sex in the air.
Lance wasn’t going to ask for permission to kiss me again. This was not a man who asked for things like this. He knew that he already owned the right to them.
Just as his lips brushed mine and my inner thighs clenched, the back door crashed open.
“I’ve got the worms!” a voice declared.
I jerked my head back and tried to scuttle away from Lance. He didn’t let me. He let go of my chin, but his hand stayed firmly on my hip, holding me in place.
I scowled at him, the best I could through the haze I’d been put under. No matter how powerful his sexual prowess was, or how intoxicating his touch was, it wasn’t going to distract me from the fact that Nathan seeing Lance and me in this position would complicate things even more.
But short of physically fighting myself away from his grip, that would likely confuse and scar Nathan even more, I couldn’t move.
Nathan, to his credit, didn’t even notice. To be fair, his attention was on the two fistfuls of dirt he was holding up at us, things squirming amidst the brown stuff that was dropping all over the carpet.
“I got worms,” he repeated, grinning.
“I see you,” Lance said, still not letting go of me even as I tried harder to move so I could stop my son from dropping dirt all over a floor that wasn’t ours.
“Good work, buddy,” I told Nathan, smiling. “Let me go,” I hissed at Lance under my breath. “He’s dropping dirt all over the floor.”
“Yeah, and I’ll clean it up,” he murmured. “Just wanted to hold you for a second longer.”
Then he leaned into me, took a long inhale, frickin’ sniffing me, and stepped away so he could retrieve a plastic container for Nathan to drop his fistfuls of dirt and worms into.
I didn’t even have it in me to be grossed out witnessing all of this, I was too shocked and turned on at the fact that Lance had full-on smelled me and then his eyes had darkened with pure sexual hunger afterward.
Then he left.
Got a container for the worms.
Cleaned up the dirt.
Took my son fishing.
And I spent the entire afternoon trying to recover from what just happened.
Spent the entire afternoon coming to the conclusion that I’d never recover from Lance.
Nathan caught a fish.
I knew this, because he brought it ‘home’ in a brown paper bag, along with the biggest grin I’d seen on my son’s face in recorded memory.
It was safe to say he liked Lance’s version of church.
I liked it too, especially when Lance ordered me to “sit my ass down and keep reading” while he cooked up the fish.
It was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.
And I only half tasted it, since I spent most of the meal sneaking glances at Lance, sensing the change in the air. In us. He was here to stay.
He was taking my son fishing and cooking us dinners.
He was here to stay.
It scared me.
Excited me.
Enough so my hands were shaking as I read Nathan his story that night.
They continued shaking as I put the book away in his new shelf full of books donated, gifted, and handed down from our family and friends.
Lance was waiting for me in the living room.
He was standing in the middle of it.
Not sitting, relaxing, with a bottle of wine open and Barry Manilow playing, ready to seduce me.
He’d already seduced me.
In a complicated, cruel and intense way.
“I’ve got to go,” he said before I could speak.
I blinked. “You’ve got to go,” I repeated.
He nodded once. “Got a job. Urgent. Wouldn’t take anything less than that. Wouldn’t leave you if it wasn’t only me that could do it. But I’ve got to.” He paused, jaw tight as he looked out the window. “Duke’s outside. He’s gonna hang out. Crash if it takes all night.”
“All night?” I repeated, obviously turning into a braindead parrot.
Another nod.
“Is it, are you…” I trailed off, trying to process. “Are you going to be in danger?”