AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His lips parted for a moment, the pink of his tongue wetting the bottom one as the two were, for the second time in an hour, speaking without words. The reason he came into her life should have sent her running in the other direction. That was how she was raised, and yet, here she was getting caught up in a greeting card moment as if her world could ever combine with his.
“I got the kids,” he said, the sarcasm and shield lowered as the man stood exposed with his rough palm accepting her head tilt and nuzzle. “Why don’t you take a break while I look for something to cook?”
“You cook?” she asked, lowering Aiden to the floor, the child taking the hand she’d found comfort in for a minute and holding tight with two of his own small ones.
“As long as there are four ingredients in there, I should be good,” he said, shifting the somber Jane, hiking the little girl up higher on his hip.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said and left, turning back to watch the young family as they made their way into the kitchen. Mumbling to herself, she tried to get back to the real world. “He’s a new dad. The last thing you want to do is be a surrogate for a temporary need, Bree. You know better.”
She turned on the shower and held her hand under the spray until the water shifted from cool to lukewarm. Stripping off the two-day-old clothes and tossing them in the hamper, she shook her head. Between the funk of the day and the fact the man had pussy on demand at the Review, it was ridiculous to think he was interested in anything more than a nanny, live-in or not. She was an engineer. While she liked kids, and honestly loved the twins, this was temporary, which meant she couldn’t trust her body and had to take stock of the way it was trying to take over her mind. After slipping off her panties and bra, she stepped into the shower, letting the tepid water beat against her neck.
A slight reflection in the glass shower door captured her attention as she feared washing herself, running the loofah between her legs, sending her back to the night before. Even now, the spray broke into lighter mist trailing down the side of her neck the way Ice’s breath had caressed the sensitive flesh. This was overload. The night was full of restless sleep, and yet the exhaustion was fought back with adrenaline she worried would either kill her or send her into her own coma state. The latter was more appealing because there was a chance she could wake and finally process the world rushing around her.
Instead she pressed her hand to the tile in front of her for balance, putting on the game face Stantons were known for. Her father’s voice had echoed around her as she stared at the letters and numbers in front of her, thinking she could learn Klingon easier than multivariable calculus. Perhaps it was those stupid general studies classes in conflict with the cut-and-dry world of her major muddying the waters, theory classes with multiple possibilities instead of the laws of physics guiding the outcome.
Ice was her political science class, where determining government held too many variables, while her heart and mind said the answer was simple. The way she was raised, the system worked. She was drawn to the writings of others, and her damn teacher assigned the students to point out the positives in each theory, then challenged them to create their own. Death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin said, were the only certainties in life. Certainties were her bread and butter. It’s why, while she loved all things related to space, that was a fantasy world. Bree was grounded and lived where the sky was blue and oxygen kept people alive. Those bikers were in a different dimension, one that slipped just enough for her to step inside, but she couldn’t live there.
The man would take the children away, and they would stop asking about her in a month or a year. She’d muse on how their life turned out, in the way she did about the kids that moved away when she was a kid. But they had a family, a life that didn’t include her, and lust was not love. Misty had ended up in a morgue, and Bree couldn’t help the irritating feeling in the back of her mind it was a fate determined by the first kiss the woman shared with Ice, a mark deeper than a tattoo that beckoned to the elements surrounding the MC as a target, one that would cut and hurt those inside, creating a slow drip eroding a house built on a hill until it collapsed into the waters below.
The sight of a shadowy figure caught her eye, and she covered her chest, calling out, “Ice?”, only to get no response as she reached for the towel she’d hung over the top of her glass shower door and turned off the spray. Her senses were on high alert as she wrapped the towel around her torso. The shape was too tall to be one of the twins and had to be her imagination. Her alarm wasn’t triggered, and she hadn’t gotten so much as a package delivered to the front door. She was panicking over nothing, and yet, her skin was raised, but not cold. It burned, and the feel of the terry cloth towel scratched like she’d rolled in poison ivy and didn’t have an inch of her untouched.
Should she open the door? It was glass. There was no hiding, even with the little bit of condensation that fogged the glass and made it hard to see through the humidified air. Her brain was trying to calculate the thick air even though her shower hadn’t even hit warm. When she inhaled, something was off, and a round of coughs made her worry about a fire, even though there was no smokey smell. Better out than in she figured as she called out again between hacking coughs shortening her breaths, this time louder and without the spray. As long as Ice wasn’t mixing on high in the blender, he should hear her calls.
“Ice,” she called out, only to find her voice caught and sent her into a coughing fit she wasn’t able to quell. Her head and body tilted, and once again she needed to grab for the wall as she tumbled from the room and called, this time desperately, for the man downstairs. “Ice!”
