Just like that, p.20
Just Like That, page 20
His fingers tightened against her scalp. “You got every single thing right,” he said in a husky, clearly aroused again—or still—voice.
She pulled back to look up at him and her breath caught at the heat in his eyes. “My teacher should take a lot of the credit.”
“Oh, I do, honey. I do.”
She laughed. “Of course you do.”
“But,” he said, loosening his hold on her and moving back. “That was just the level one test. We’ll have to see how level two goes.”
Her heart tripped. Level two. That insinuated they were going to do it again.
“Level two?” she asked, trying to keep her voice from squeaking.
“Peanut butter.”
She giggled. And her imagination instantly made up a dozen ways to use the peanut butter with and on Sam.
“I definitely have peanut butter.” She nudged him back and slid to the floor.
“Wait. Smooth or chunky?”
She looked up at him from bending to retrieve her jeans. “Chunky might be uncomfortable for some of the stuff I have in mind.”
He grinned and Danika paused. Oh, boy. He was cute. And nice. And pretty damned good at the whole orgasm thing.
Crap.
She liked him. A lot.
She didn’t need him, of course. So she’d never had an orgasm with any other guy. So what? She’d never let herself. That was all. It wasn’t anything special about Sam.
And there were a whole lot of other things besides sex that she didn’t need him for.
She pulled her jeans up, fastening them as she tried to think of a way to keep from throwing herself back into his arms and begging him to do it all over again.
Completely distracted, she pulled her T-shirt on without replacing her bra and then reached back to put her hair into a ponytail. Then she realized that Sam was staring at her.
“What?”
* * *
Sam was in trouble. Huge trouble. Never-been-this-bad-before trouble.
He was watching Danika get dressed after sex, something he’d done with more than one woman in his life, but this time he was thinking that he could happily do this every day for the rest of his life and never get tired of it.
She was so beautiful. Especially rumpled up from sex with him. And funny. And damned good at the whole sex thing.
Crap.
He liked her. A lot.
But she didn’t need him. He was the only guy to give her an orgasm, but now that she’d let go and realized how great it was, she would let it happen with another guy.
And the urge to put his fist through a wall at the thought would surely fade over time.
“You just…you look gorgeous.”
She smiled. “Thanks.”
Even the way she said thanks made him want her.
Yeah, he had it bad.
He reached out and took her elbow tugging her close, wanting to smell her hair, feel the silkiness of her skin, feel her warm breath on him. “Dani, I just…”
“Oh, come on.” She gave him a frown. “We have several hours until our one night is over. And I intend to use every minute.”
Satisfaction coursed over him. He wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been about to say when he pulled her close, but apparently she’d thought he was going to give her some reminder about his one-night rule.
Before he could speak she put her hand against his cheek. “I remember what you said. One night. Don’t worry. I’m okay with that. But I do want the whole night.”
He was more than happy to give her the whole night. He fully intended to, in fact. But she was okay with it? What did that mean? If she was crazy about him, and addicted to him like he was fearing he was becoming to her, she wouldn’t be okay with it. She’d be resisting it, trying to talk him into more, or distract him, or entice him. Like other women had done. Like most other women had done.
He told himself he should appreciate her respect of what he’d said in the beginning. He should be enjoying the fact that he’d done what he’d wanted to do from the first minute he saw her. He should get busy doing more of it before they ran out of time.
Instead he said, “I don’t think I fully explained the rules, though.”
“There are rules to the rule?”
He shrugged. “More like a definition, I guess.”
She let her hand drop from his cheek to his chest and wiggled closer. “Why do I get the impression that this definition might lead to more time without our clothes on?”
“Because you’re very intuitive,” he said, his hands settling on her hips—and never wanting to move.
“Right. I would have to be incredibly insightful to know that you like it when my clothes are off.”
He chuckled. He did like her.
Naked or not.
Which was what he should be most worried about.
“The one night is technically twenty-four hours. We have until this time tomorrow.”
She looked at him, unblinking, for several beats. Then she slowly smiled. It was a smile full of I’m-so-on-to-you. “This time tomorrow, huh?” She pressed closer with her hips. “We might be able to get through half the things I want to do with you.”
He wanted her again. Right now. He leaned in close, fully anticipating the kiss. Her breath was hot against his lips. The kiss was full of heat and promise.
“Let’s go,” he rasped, pulling back. He needed a shower, he needed Danika again, but… “We have an house full of people to get rid of.”
She chuckled. “We can’t kick them out.”
“Maybe we can’t, but I sure as hell can.” It wasn’t like any of them would be surprised.
Besides, this time they needed a soft, horizontal surface.
Unwilling to let her go, Sam kept her hand in his as they headed for the kitchen.
The place was completely quiet.
The kitchen was spotless and devoid of food and coolers.
“They left?” Danika asked.
“Apparently.”
“You have good friends,” she said, turning and wrapping her arms around his waist.
“Yes. Yes, I do.” Good friends to whom he was going to have to explain a lot of stuff about Danika that he didn’t understand.
He breathed in the smell of her hair and decided that it was worth it.
She tipped her head back and rose on tiptoe to kiss him, her hands ran over his back down to his butt, pulling him close.
He wanted her, but… He sighed and pulled back. He wanted more than sex. It was official. He was in too deep and was probably going to regret a whole bunch of stuff very soon. But for right now, he was going to enjoy. He wasn’t sure exactly what to do, what to say, how to tell her, but he was going to do something he hadn’t done since high school.
He was going to date a woman.
Not just any woman. Danika Steffen.
“Honey,” he said, breaking the kiss. “Don’t you want a shower?”
“I’m planning on getting dirty again. Soon. It would be a waste of water.”
His erection came fully to life. He tried to think of another excuse not to take her again right here and now. “You’re going to be sore if we don’t slow down.”
“I don’t mind.” She kissed his chin, then his throat.
Sam groaned, but still put his hands on her shoulders. “We have time,” he said, looking directly in her eyes so she understood. “We have plenty of time. Let’s just slow down so we can enjoy everything.”
He stopped short of repeating and emphasizing everything.
“Slow down?” Danika looked like he’d just told her they were going sledding. In July. “Why?”
“Because I’m…starving.” So he wasn’t entirely ready to tell her what he was feeling. There was time for that too. Once he got used to it himself.
She laughed. “Okay.” She disentangled her arms from his waist. “I could eat.”
Thirty minutes after having the best sex of either of their lives, they were sitting on the floor next to Danika’s coffee table eating pizza. His good friends had taken all the food with them when they’d exited. Including the steaks Sam had paid for.
They talked as they ate. It was as if the physical release had released everything. They talked about their parents and the heartaches. Sam told her about the night his dad had died and Danika talked about watching her mom become more and more dependent and her father becoming more and more burdened with everything.
But they also talked about the good times. Family game nights, vacations, birthday parties, her dad’s practical jokes and his dad being able to eat more onion rings than three teenage boys put together. And they talked about their friends and their sisters. The sisters who were the biggest joy and the biggest headache in their lives.
As it turned out, and much to both of their surprise since the events of the afternoon had been a first for Danika, she got very hungry after sex that included an orgasm.
“This is the best pizza ever,” she declared. “I used to think this pizza place was terrible.”
He laughed. It was pizza. It was not quite horrible, but far from amazing. “It’s the endorphins, I’m sure.”
She wiggled her eyebrows. “Maybe this would be a good time for me to try eggplant, because I hate eggplant.”
He wrinkled his nose. “For eggplant we’re going to have to go back into the bedroom for a while.”
“I’m ready when you are.”
He was definitely ready. He had a feeling he would always be ready for Danika. But he smiled and shook his head. “You’re going to need more calories for what I have in mind.”
She smiled and reached for another piece.
Oh, yeah, he could definitely do this for—well—a really long time.
He watched her for several minutes, responding to her chatter with well placed “uh-huhs” to keep her thinking he was listening. But she was jumping from one topic to another, laughing at her own comments, and chewing her fourth piece of pizza. It was like she’d drunk three cans of Mountain Dew.
He’d done that to her. He’d made her that happy. A fact he was enjoying immensely.
“If you’re not going to make me like eggplant, what do you want to do?” she asked.
“What would you be doing right now if I wasn’t here, or if your wrist wasn’t in a cast?” He wanted to know about her. What she did, what she liked, her past, her friends, why she was a social worker, what her twenty-first birthday had been like, who had taken her to prom.
She rolled her eyes. “You don’t want to know.” She licked pizza sauce from her middle finger.
Sam had to shift to be comfortable in his jeans at that. “I do. What would you be doing?”
“You’ll think I’m weird.”
Now he was very interested. “Does it involve whips and leather or something?”
She giggled. “No.”
“Are you a superhero?”
“I wish.”
“You don’t have a room wallpapered in photos of Chris Hemsworth where you burn incense on an altar and kiss a life-sized cardboard cutout of him, do you?”
She outright laughed at that. “Nope.”
“Okay, I give.”
“This week I had plans to clean out my attic.”
“Your attic?”
“Well, my half of the attic.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “I suppose the boxes are all heavy.”
She shook her head. “No. Not all of them. Just the ones I need to look through.”
He threw a pillow from the couch at her and she giggled again. “Fine. I’ll be the big manly man and go get the boxes of bricks you need to look through.” He pushed himself to standing. “But I expect to be rewarded for my hard work.”
“Of course.” She looked adorable as she tried to get up as well, but her good hand was holding her glass of iced tea.
He reached down and pulled her to her feet, then kissed the top of her head. “Which boxes?”
“You don’t have to. It can wait. There are just some pictures my sister wants for her new house. It’s not an emergency.”
“But this was what you planned to do before you got hurt?” he asked. When she nodded he said, “That’s why I’m here. To be sure that things get done even though you have a cast on your wrist.”
“The door to the attic is in the outer hallway. I’ll have to get you the key.” Danika started picking up the wadded napkins and tossing them into the nearly empty pizza box. “My stuff is on the south end of the attic. I wish I could tell you that each box is carefully labeled with what’s inside, but the best I did was put my name on them. There are a few with clothes in them and a huge trunk that doesn’t need to come down. But there are four or five others I should look through, since I’m not sure where the pictures are.”
He had all the boxes clustered in the middle of her living room fifteen minutes later. There were six total and there were sixteen steep, narrow steps up to the attic. Sam was embarrassed to have worked up a sweat by the time he was done.
Danika’s face, however, was worth it when she started opening the tops. It was like watching a kid at a birthday party. It had apparently been some time since she’d looked through the boxes.
She pulled out some yearbooks, which Sam picked up and started looking through. She also stacked some photo albums to one side along with several books. She finally withdrew framed photos from box three.
“Here’s the one she wants for her mantel.” Danika passed him an eight by ten black and white photo of three little girls, standing with their arms around one another in front of a lemonade stand.
“How old are you here?”
“Seven. Carmen is nine and Abi is six.”
“You look happy.”
She was looking at the photo in his hand instead of at him. “We were. That’s one thing I do remember, how happy we all were before…”
Her mother’s illness. Sam was still surprised how the knowledge about Danika’s childhood with her mom in a wheelchair socked him in the gut.
“I’m sorry that happened,” he said sincerely. There wasn’t a thing he could do to make that better for her and he hated that.
She looked up at him. “Thanks.” She sounded like she meant it. “It’s not like we weren’t ever happy again. It just changed. Everything had to be thought out and planned. If we went to the zoo, would mom get too tired? Would it be impossibly difficult to get her wheelchair into that restaurant? Things like that. And my sisters didn’t help.”
Sam looked at the grinning little girls in the picture and thought of the women he knew. Carmen was an ER nurse. She was caring and dedicated even while she was being tough and no-nonsense. “What do you mean?”
“Carmen is a take-charge person. She took over all the things she could do. She was even in charge of taking mom to her doctor’s appointments, which is how she got interested in nursing. But she can’t sit still. She was the one who made every outing or family gathering or event into a production. She’d call ahead and make sure everything was set up just right, or she’d call the family and give them instructions about how things would go when they came over for holidays. Things like that. Drove us all nuts.
“Abi, on the other hand, needed two weeks’ notice to be a part of anything. She worked two jobs, volunteered, and was in every extracurricular activity she could possibly find so that she could avoid everything at home. She loved our mom, of course, but she was very uncomfortable with the wheelchair and the doctors and the medications. That’s why, I think, she went into sales…nothing to do with caregiving. Not her thing.”
Sam chuckled and shook his head. “I can relate to a lot of that.”
“You can?”
She looked genuinely interested and he figured that if he was going to find out everything he could about her, he’d probably better share a few things himself. “Jessica is exactly like Carmen. She takes charge of things and orders people around. After my dad died she took over. Everything…” He trailed off, swallowing hard.
“I’m sorry about your dad, Sam.”
He looked at her, deciding if he should go on. He wanted to. Which never happened. Then he decided that if anyone would understand the pain it would be this woman. “He was shot.”
“Oh!” Her eyes were wide. “That’s horrible.”
“It was,” Sam agreed. “Jessica was living in a rough neighborhood. He went over there every day to check on her. One day he got there in time to interrupt a burglary. They shot him and left him lying on her doorstep. He was still alive when Jess got home, but he never regained consciousness.”
Danika was staring at him with her hand over her mouth. “How old were you?” she whispered.
“Sixteen.”
“Oh, Sam.”
“Yeah, it sucked.”
“What about your mom?”
“She left when I was five.”
“Left?”
“Walked out. Never came back. I remember her, but not well.”
“She left?” Danika sounded outraged and was now sitting tall. “How? Why?”
Sam felt he corner of his mouth kick up at her obvious indignation. “She wasn’t cut out to be a mom.”
“But she was a mom. That’s not something you just undo.”
He shrugged. He knew that his mother’s abandonment had helped form him as a person, but it bothered him more to talk about his dad than his mom. “You have to understand my dad, I think. He was intense. He had beliefs and he stood by them, put his whole self into them.”
“Like the youth center?”
“Right.”
“I would think she would have been impressed by that,” Danika said.
“It wasn’t that easy. Dad was a lawyer and made good money in spite of taking lots of pro bono cases. But he insisted on keeping only what we needed. We had nothing in excess. No TV, no video games, only one car, no vacations, things like that. He knew that there were a lot of people out there who were struggling and he didn’t feel right living extravagantly.”
“You didn’t even have a TV?” Danika asked. “Seriously?”
Sam chuckled. “Seriously. I watched TV at friends’ houses, of course, but I didn’t have one until Jessica got custody of me and Sara.”
“That is true commitment to a cause,” she said, with a frown.
