I laughed into his mouth. “Kevin,” I said. “Let me go.”
“Never.” He tilted his head and did something with his tongue that raised the hairs on the back of my neck and made me weak in the knees.
I planted my hands on the sun-warmed wool blanket either side of his head, bit lightly at his lip, and lifted away.
He stared up at me.
“Kevin?”
“Yeah?”
“I think I’m ready.”
“Yeah?” He skimmed a hand down my front and tweaked my dick.
I smacked him away. “Not that.”
He grinned, and tweaked my dick again. “You sure?”
“We can do that later. But…yes, I’m sure.” I took a deep breath. “You can start renovating the garage.”
The real reason I’d put it off and stood firm against his wheedling for so long had never had anything to do with the fact that it once belonged to a psychopath.
It was because the garage was the repository of my past, and I had complicated feelings about it.
Kevin’s relaxed stillness sharpened and came into focus. His body between my thighs went tight—poised and ready for action. “Charlie,” he said, his voice rough and his brown eyes fixed on mine. “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t mess with me.”
I sat up. “I mean it. Personally, I’d be happy to leave it to fester until the end of time.” He made a disapproving sound. I smiled. “But I know you want to have a go at it, and I want to make you happy, so…” I got to my feet and held out a hand to pull him up. He took it and held it, but he stood under his own power.
“This,” he said, “is going to be epic.”
God, I hoped not.
2
My house had been built in the early 1800s, and it was a decent example of pre-Victorian nineteenth-century architecture.
My garage had been built in the 1960s. It, too, was a decent example of its era’s architectural achievements. It was a squat and blocky brick building with a mud-coloured, up-and-over canopy door for cars that faced the drive, and a cheap, hollow core door for people that opened onto the back garden.
Inside, it was a glorified, oversized junk drawer.
Before I bought the house, I’d been living in a small flat in town. As soon as I’d moved in, my parents hinted that I might like to swing by the old family home, preferably in a rented van or pickup, and collect all the boxes and various items from my childhood and early twenties that they’d been storing for me while I didn’t have the space.
I was astonished at how much crap I’d accumulated over the years. I hadn’t listened about the van or pickup, and it took multiple trips in an overloaded car to bring it all over here, just when I’d thought I was done with the endless bother of moving.
I barely had the chance to catch my breath before my parents dropped the bombshell that they’d decided to sell the business to me and my sister, Amalie, and retire to Spain.
That surprise was quickly followed by Amalie running off to travel the world, and the garage had never made it to the top of my todo list.
All in all, I wasn’t going to beat myself up for not getting around to it until today.
Things had worked out wonderfully, anyway.
Now Kevin got to do it.
He stood in front of a stack of taped-up cardboard boxes, breathing heavily, with a Stanley knife in his hand and a focused expression on his face.
I eyed him. “You’re a freak,” I said.
