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For the rest of the session, I promise to lock away this part of myself, stow it down deep, and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Otherwise, I’ll snap.
But as she climbs onto the machine and adjusts her footing – causing another irresistible jiggle of those perfect tits – I’m not sure I have the willpower.
Chapter Six
Rosie
“So how was it?” Sadie asks on speakerphone, as I sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic and drum my fingers against the steering wheel.
I’ve been doing that ever since I got in the car, drum-drum-drum, as though the physical repetition can distract me from what happened in the gym.
After the exercise bike, Ryker became sterner, more businesslike. And yet there were times when I was sure I noticed him watching me, his eyes glued to my chest or my ass, the thought making my panties grow wet, causing my heart to pound ruthlessly in my chest.
“Rosie?”
“Yeah, fine. It went fine.”
Finally, there’s a break in traffic and I inch the car forward, struggling to focus on the road when I think about those stolen moments, the way his eyes felt like they were burning into me, branding me, marking me as his.
“Just fine?”
“Well, I didn’t melt in embarrassment. Or collapse from exhaustion, though that last one was a close call. So yeah, I’d say it went just fine.”
She laughs. “So, is he a good kisser?”
I laugh along with her, shaking my head even if she can’t see me in the car. And yet even if it’s a joke, my lips tingle at the word kiss.
Both of my lips tingle, a shiver running between my legs and a phantom sensation brushing over my mouth.
“Yeah, can you imagine?” I say, laughing again. But it sounds forced, even to me. “But no, we didn’t kiss. We didn’t get close to kissing. It was all business.”
“There’s always next week,” Sadie jokes. “It’s the same time next week, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So… Do you think you can go a whole week without seeing him?”
I can hear the jest in her voice, the light teasing note. She thinks I have a crush on him, nothing more, and that’s what led me to enter the raffle.
She doesn’t know about these confusing-as-heck feelings striking me, little projectiles of insanity firing across my being.
She doesn’t know the way my womb pulsed deep inside of me when I felt his eyes searing into me. She doesn’t know how badly I wanted to spin and leap on him, grind down his body, and not just for the physical release.
So he could drive deep, explode inside of me, and gift me – us – with a family, a future, a future I never even knew I wanted before I met him.
“A whole week might be difficult,” I say.
I try to match her bantering tone, but the declaration comes out dead serious because it is.
I’m really not sure how the heck I’m going to survive a whole freaking week without spending time with him, without letting his musky manly scent wrap around me, without feeling his eyes on my body.
But his eyes were never on my body, I scream in my mind, trying to convince myself.
Sadie sighs softly.
“What?” I say.
“What?” she echoes, and I can hear she’s smiling.
“You only sigh like that when you’ve got something to say but you don’t want to say it. Now, if you want me to ask, say it. So come on, sis. Out with it.”
“I just think you might really like this Ryker Ridge person. I think it might go beyond a crush. Am I being crazy here?”
I almost blurt yes, yes you are. It would be easier than trying to tell her the whole messy truth, the confusion gripping me tighter and tighter each moment.
“You’ve always been crazy,” I say, dodging the issue instead. “So I’d say that’s pretty much certain. Anyway, I need to go. I’ve got another call.”
I hang up quickly and sit in the quiet of the car, the radio off, only my thoughts for company. A little stab of guilt twists in my belly when I think about hanging up on Sadie, but I can’t bring myself to lie to her.
But neither can I bring myself to tell her the truth.
I sit in my bedroom, alone, staring at my easel with my paintbrush held in my hand. But the brush refuses to move. I remember when I first came to this house, a scared little girl with no idea where life was going to take me after what happened to dad.
Josephine spoke to me so patiently, with such gentle care in her voice, softly asking me if there was anything she could do to help, to make me feel more at ease. She went through a bunch of stuff – TV, books, a hot water bottle – and then eventually she settled on painting.
The moment she said it, I perked up, the word penetrating the heartache which had wrapped itself around me ever since the tragedy. She smiled in that sweet knowing way of hers and then went to collect her supplies.
