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I turned away to give her some privacy and went into the living room, collecting my keys and things. When I made it back to the bedroom, she was dressed, and it was my turn to get ready. She disappeared into the living room while I changed, and I had to force my hardened cock into the boxers. She was just one room away, and I wanted to walk in there and ravage her again. Work be damned.
Shaking off the powerful desire, I finished getting dressed. When I got back out to the living room, she was ready to go, mud boots and all. I followed her out, and we began strolling through the vineyard back to the buildings through the vines.
“So, has this house always been here?” Danica asked as we got a few steps away from the door and she looked back at it.
“Nope. My brother Noah built it, actually. I asked for the A-frame, and he did the rest.”
“That’s so cool. Do all your brothers live on property?”
“Noah doesn’t,” I said. “He has his own place a few miles away. Otherwise, yes. We all have our own places somewhere nearby. I love it here. It’s quiet and peaceful, and I don’t need to worry about the travel to work.”
She laughed under her breath.
“Yeah, it seems pretty easy,” she said.
We were side by side, almost shoulder to shoulder as we made it through the fields.
“It’s my favorite place in the world,” I said.
“Well, I’ll have to come back and see it again after you get working on the steps I laid out in the report for fixing the soil.”
I grinned and knocked my shoulder into hers. “I’m just glad to know you’ll be back,” I said.
We had reached the end of the fields, and her car was parked just a few feet away. She turned to me and looked around a bit before looking me in the eyes.
“It’s been great,” she said.
“It has,” I said back, and she smiled, ducking into her car and turning the engine over.
I waved as she pulled away and then kicked at the ground for a second before heading back toward the building.
As I got inside, Derek was walking down the hall toward the restaurant and had a knowing grin on his face. I avoided him with a deft move into the office and shut the door behind me. Alex and Cameron would be in soon and expect to use that space, but I had a moment or two to avoid Derek. After I heard him all the way down the hall, I opened the door again and ducked my head out, right into Noah’s line of sight.
“Hey, brother,” he said jovially. “Have a good night’s rest?”
Dammit.
I nodded, a stupid grin on my face as I left the office and headed toward the dungeon. If I could make it there without anyone else bugging me and I could get to work, maybe I could avoid them altogether for the day.
It wasn’t that I was embarrassed or anything. In fact, I kind of wanted to brag. But I also didn’t want to hear the teasing or the warnings about dating someone I worked with. Not that Noah had anything to say about that specific topic, and I had zero problem bringing it up. But they would all jump to conclusions based on dinner last night, and I didn’t want to deal with what they would insinuate had happened.
Even if it had.
I made it to the dungeon and shut the door to my lab, locking it and throwing myself into little jobs I had been meaning to finish for weeks and hadn’t gotten around to. One of them knocked on my door once during the day, but I ignored him, my music playing just loud enough that I had plausible deniability that I was just deep into work and didn’t hear it.
My thoughts kept returning to Danica though, and not just the way she looked in my T-shirt that morning. I thought about how much I enjoyed talking to her, spending time with her. How much part of me wished she had stayed longer and worked with me more closely.
On the other hand, maybe it was a good thing she left early. I wasn’t the type of person to have a clingy need to have a partner around all the time, preferring to be in my own brain most of the time. If she was around too much right at the beginning of a potential relationship, maybe it would spoil it before it really even got going. Maybe that had been a problem in my previous relationships, such as they were.
Yet, I found that I was missing her. I could handle a little bit of distance, and if we had a relationship that started slower, seeing each other less frequently, then maybe this could be more than a one-time thing.
