I edged the white cotton down my body, exposing my breasts and those too-pink nipples to hungry eyes. Callan’s groan was strangled, and his big hand clamped into a tight fist around his cock. I shot the towel back up and stared at him, mortified.
“Erin.” My name came out of him in a pained growl.
Please don’t tell me you’re not attracted to me. “W-why did you stop?”Please don’t say that.
“I was about to come.”
My eyes rounded. “Because…”
“You know why.”
“Can you say it anyway?”
He jerked his chin down in a nod. “Those breasts… Heaven. You’ve got one hell of a gorgeous body on you.”
“And you’ve seen a few?”
“Yeah, a few.”
“When was the last time?”
“Four years ago.”
My eyes got even bigger. Fouryears? “Why did you wait so long?”
“Because that’s when I admitted to myself I was in love with you. There wasn’t anyone else for me after that.”
The towel slipped from my fingers and pooled on the floor. My whole body was on display. Callan’s eyes slitted, hungry on their path over my breasts, my little belly bump, to the patch of hair between my legs. It didn’t take many strokes of his cock before a rough male groan echoed off the tiles, and he came in thick milky bursts all over the bathroom floor.
His chest heaving, his shoulder slumped against the wall as he fought to catch his breath. “Fuck.”
That one word filled the hollow in my chest until I burst with a smile. He found me sexy. I turned him on. Helovedme. Well, he probably didn’t mean “love” like “I love you,” but hewantedme.
Slowly, I slid back into the tub, covering myself with bubbles and enjoying the swish of the warm water between my fingers as Callan busied himself tidying up the glorious mess he’d made of the tiles. The rustle of cotton, the clunk of a buckle, and the swish of the towel over the floor—I heard it all as I smiled at the ceiling.
Callan leaned over the tub. “Don’t take too long in here,” he murmured, capturing me in a sweet, lingering kiss. “I’m still taking you to dinner tonight.”
19
That Conflicted Feeling in Spring
Callan
One of the bestviews of the farm was from the packing shed.
I walked outside, and the heat hit me like a wall. A flick of my wrist and the sweat was off my brow, but I waited for the breeze to cool the rest of me as I scanned the valley.
The farm stretched to the hazy boundary where a barbed wire fence still separated my world from the vineyard where Erin grew up. Hats bobbed up and down between endless rows of green. Workers crowded the land during the summer. It was busier, the days were so much longer, but I’d never complain. I lived for these months.
Boots approached me with an uneven lumber.
Dad avoided talking to me most days. He’d rarely walked the fields after Cole left. He stopped beside me. The smell of whisky was heavy. I guess he’d been searching for his apology again.
A turn of his head surveyed the fields below. “A decent harvest this year,” he said.
Insecurity—that familiar burn of middle child inferiority—was too hard to rise above sometimes. “The last three years have been good,” I added.
“I suppose they have.”
