I pulled into her drive at five to seven, nose to tail behind the old Honda she’d named Doris and talked to at red lights.
Then I was out and up her path at something close to a jog — a grown man, thirty-four, two SEAL teams behind me, hustling up a woman’s front walk like a kid who’d heard the bell.
Willow was out on her porch next door, parked in her rocker because she ran cold on principle, and she caught me at it. “Caleb Maddox.” She aimed a finger across the yard like a verdict. “Don’t you be good, now!” And she giggled — eighty-four and giggling like a girl passing a note in church. I didn’t tell her I’d had no intention of being good.
Sophia opened the door before I knocked. And every word I owned walked off the job.
She had on a dress — pale pink, soft — and it fit her like it had been poured on and left to set: gentle across her breasts, drawn in where her waist went small, giving way over hips I’d had my hands on in the dark and never once seen like this. The hem stopped above her knee and her legs took what was left of me with them. Her hair was loose, the pink putting a glow up under her skin like she was halfway to the blush I’d spent the whole drive thinking about. I’d told her to wear something I’d think about all through dinner; she’d answered the brief with interest. There wasn’t a word big enough. What came up out of me was —
“Fuck.”
She blinked, the smart mouth landing half a beat behind the rest of her. “Is that a good fuck or a bad fuck? I’ve put forty minutes into this and there’s a real chance I’ve misjudged the brief. Give me two minutes, I own a perfectly serviceable cardigan, I can absolutely?—”
Here’s the thing. In all those weeks I’d never once heard a swear out of that clean, clever, prim-when-it-suited-her mouth — the one that calls a twelve-hour bloodbath of a shift “a bit of a day” — and she’d just said it back to me on her own porch, and I felt it drop through me like a wire to ground. I went hard so fast it should’ve come with a warning, in full view of Willow andher excellent sightlines. The babbling only wound me tighter: she thought she’d got the dress wrong. What she’d done was very nearly put me on my knees on the lawn.
As she turned, I grabbed her wrist, turning her towards me and stopping her with a kiss I’d been dreaming of all day.
Her hands came up under the open front of my shirt and found my ribs. I licked into her mouth and felt the little moan she made go straight down through me. I got her backed against the inside of her own door, one hand at her jaw, the other in her hair. A door handle dug into her hip. Neither of us moved off it.
Her mouth came off mine half an inch — just enough to breathe. She got it out wrecked, dry as a bone. “I take it you like the dress.”
“You think?” I dragged my mouth along her jaw to her ear so she’d feel it as much as hear it. “I fucking love the dress. You’re stunning.” And then I quit talking, because telling her had stopped being enough the second she opened the door, and I kissed her like a man with nothing civil left.
She made a sound I felt in my teeth and hitched her leg up over my hip, dragging herself in until there was nowhere left to hide what we wanted, her core riding the hard line of me, chasing pressure. I gave it to her — leaned the length of my cock into her heat through two thin layers of cotton and held there while she shook. My hand went down the back of her bare thigh and up under the hem, slow.
“Please.” One word. The plain, devastating one she keeps for when there’s nothing left to perform with.
My fingers found a scrap of fabric that wasn’t doing one thing it had been put there to do. A skimpy little thong, and she was soaked clean through it.
“Fuck.”
She giggled — breathless, undone, still entirely herself. “Is that our word of the evening?” And kissed me before I couldanswer, open and greedy, her tongue against mine like she’d just decided something.
I slid my fingers up under the fabric and into her, and the wet of her, the give of her, the way her whole body bowed toward my hand — it punched the air clean out of me. Her hips chased me the second I was there.
I had to taste her; there was no version of the next minute where I didn’t. I kissed my way down — her throat, the top of her chest where the dress had slipped, the soft of her stomach as I shoved the hem up — and she breathed one word down at me. “Yes.”
On my knees on her front-hall floor, the good shirt be damned, and I put my mouth on her. She cried out, one hand slapping flat to the door, the other diving into my hair. I got an arm across her hips to hold her up, because her legs had quit, and I took my time and then I didn’t — tongue and lips and the flat pressure she likes, the slick of her on my mouth, her thighs shaking against my ears. The sounds she made climbed past anything she’d allow herself thinking — and then she wasn’t thinking; I felt it break through her, and she came against my mouth, loud enough to wake the row.
I kissed my way back up her body, soft now, gentling her the whole way, until I had her mouth again. “Hi,” I said against it. She was flushed and loose and soft with it. “Hi.”
Then I watched the trauma nurse come back online and run a threat assessment on the last sixty seconds — her hand flew over her mouth and she giggled behind it, mortified and delighted at once. “Oh my God. Caleb. Willow is right there. Willow has a rocker and nothing but time?—”
“Let her enjoy it,” I said.
I braced an arm on the door by her head and brought the other hand to her face, thumb at her cheekbone. Both ofus breathing, the whole world narrowed to the eight inches between us, every braced thing in me letting go at once.
She wet her lips, and then, plain: “I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to sit across a table from you in a room full of people and share you with a waiter. Not tonight.” Her eyes came up. “Let’s eat in.”
It went through me the way the swear had. “Yeah,” I said, rough. “Yeah, beautiful. Let’s eat in.”
She took my hand — checking I was coming more than leading the way — and drew me back through the cottage to her room, and I went like it was the only direction that had ever existed.
She turned the lamp on this time. We undressed each other slow. I took the zip of the pink dress down a tooth at a time, she pushed the good shirt off my shoulders, getting each other to skin and looking the whole while.
Then I laid her down and worked up — the inside of her ankle, where she startled like nobody’d ever bothered; the back of her knee, which got me another quiet swear; the inside of her thigh just to hear the sound; her hip, the soft of her stomach, until she was saying my name in a string with no spaces in it and she’d lost every shred of the management she runs on the world.
And then she got her hands flat on my chest and pushed — not hard, but with intent — and rolled me, and I let her, and she came up over me flushed and bold and gorgeous, her hair down around us both.
