ClarenceBN (2 page)

“
Vrooom
!” This sound was followed by the noise of a car crashing into something.

So Clarence did not kiss her.
Be cool
, he thought.
Be cool
. “Figured, you’ve been making me coffee long enough. It was time I took care of you.”

Her eyes widened in surprise as a beautiful blush danced wildly over her cheeks. Too much? Not enough? Hell, he wished he had more practice.
 

She looked down at her coffee and took a sip. “Mmm,” she said, taking a longer drink. His gut tightened as he watched her lips open.

Okay, good.
Great
. Just the smell of this stuff was making his stomach turn, but if she liked it, he’d brew it every damn day for her.

Finally, when half the cup was gone, she looked up at him. “This is the good stuff,” she said.

Clarence grinned. She had a little drop of the coffee on her upper lip. He leaned forward. He couldn’t kiss her, not in the middle of the Child Care Center but . . . “You’re worth the good stuff.” He cupped her face in the palm of his hand and swiped his thumb over her lip. Her eyes were wide open again, but she didn’t pull away, didn’t turn her head. She just looked up at him, her lips lightly parted. Was she breathing heavily? Was that a good sign?

“There,” he said. His voice had gone all hoarse on him, but he couldn’t help it. She was warm and soft against his hand—and that was just her cheek.
 

What would the rest of her be like? Soft and warm and . . .

Without thinking, he licked his thumb. Instead of the overwhelming sweetness of the coffee, the taste was tempered with something more salty, more delicate.

Tammy.

She gasped as he tasted the tiny drop of her and coffee together. She
was
panting now, her breath coming in short, tight gasps—which did some things to her chest that he was having a hard time not noticing. But he couldn’t look at her heaving bosoms—he couldn’t look away from her eyes. All that stuff—the cautious, nervous, hopeful stuff? That was all still there. But it was suddenly buried underneath something else—sheer desire. She tucked her lower lip underneath her teeth and leaned back—not away from him, but so that her breasts were thrust out, as if her body was begging him to touch it. To take it.

Hell, yeah, his gut clenched hard. Harder. Other things clenched, too—which was going to be a problem real fast because medical scrubs were not exactly concealing.

“
Vroom—screech
!” This was followed by a bigger crash and crying.

Tammy visibly shook back to herself. “Oh, Mikey—the bookshelf?”
 

Clarence forced himself to look away from Tammy to the mess that was sprawled all over the carpet in the middle of the room. The boy had hit a bookshelf and knocked a bunch of books off. Plus, he was crying, although he didn’t look hurt. “You okay, kid?”

“I’m sorry,” Tammy said in an automatic way. “I need to deal with him and . . .”

“I can help.” That way, they could hang out a little more, although if the boy was in between them, that probably meant no more coffee talk.

“That’s sweet of you, but he made the mess, he has to clean it up himself. That’s why he’s crying.” She shook her head. “Come on, honey—pick them up. You’re all right.”

Yeah, the heat that had about brought him to his knees was gone. Tammy went to crouch next to Mikey. They were done.
 

For now.

“You want me to refill your mug before I get going in the Clinic?” he asked, picking up her cup.

That happy smile? Totally worth shitty coffee. “Would you? That’s so sweet. Thank you, Clarence. Mikey, honey, say thank you for the car again.”

“Tanks,” the boy sniffed, picking up a book and jamming it back onto the shelf.
 

Clarence went back over to his side of the building and, after dumping his cup down the sink, refilled her cup. The coffee would probably taste funny for days now, but it was worth it.
 

He took the full mug back over to her.
Now
, he thought.
Now
. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning for coffee, right?”

She looked up at him from the floor, a wide smile on her face. God, a woman should not look so sweet when she blushed. She just shouldn’t. “I’d like that.”

“Me, too.”

When he got back to the Clinic side, he leaned against the counter, his head swimming.
 

She was a sweet woman. She liked sweet coffee. And he hadn’t scared her off, not even when he’d touched her.
 

That meant only one thing.

He was going to need more toy cars.

Chapter Two

Tammy moved through the day in a haze. Mikey picked up the books, children showed up, there were snacks—she moved through the schedule as if she were sleepwalking through a dream.

Had Clarence Thunder been flirting with her?

Men didn’t flirt with her anymore. She was fat. She had a kid. She lived with her mother. She had a job now, so that was good, but she was not the hot property she’d been a few years ago.
 

Five years ago, actually.

She looked at Mikey, who was telling everyone he could corral about his
awesome
new car and how it was the best car
ever
and it was his favorite. Clarence hadn’t had to get him a car but . . .

Mikey’s own father, Ezra, didn’t bring him presents. He didn’t visit. And most guys didn’t have a big interest in a loud, crazy three-and-a-half-year-old boy who wasn’t theirs.
 

“Miss Mewinda!” Mikey yelled when Melinda Mitchell showed up at eleven. “Look at my
awesome
car! It’s all mine—I don’t have to share it or anything!”

“Mikey, I’m going to make you put it away if you can’t play nice,” Tammy scolded.

“That is an
awesome
car,” Melinda agreed as she surveyed the room. “How’s the morning been?”

“Good. Really good.” Although Tammy wasn’t sure if that was because the kids had been on their best behavior or just because she felt like she was floating. There’d been that moment when Clarence had touched her. And not because he’d made a mess or needed a boo-boo kissed or any of that. He’d touched her because . . .

She didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she was messy and he couldn’t stand to see coffee on her lips. He was a nurse, after all. He was used to things being neat and clean and sterile.
 

Whatever the reason, he’d touched her lips in a gentle way and it’d done things to her. Things she wasn’t sure she remembered feeling. Things that had been hot and tingling and tight—so tight it’d hurt in the best way possible.

“Yeah?” Melinda looked at her and suddenly Tammy was embarrassed. “How good?”

Okay, so Clarence was a nice guy. A
really
nice guy. He had a good job. And he was good looking—he was like a tank. Plus, he wasn’t scared off by Mikey.

But he was at least ten years older than she was. And nice guys like Clarence were hard to come by. No doubt, he could have his pick of women on this rez—or off of it, even.
 

He couldn’t really be interested in her, could he?

“It’s nothing,” she said to Melinda and headed back to the kitchen to get started on lunch.
 

Tammy cooked the lunches every day. She and Melinda would feed the kids and get the littler ones bedded down for their afternoon nap, and then Tammy would head home. She worked the morning shift, Melinda the evening shift. It wasn’t a full-time job, but the Mitchell Trust, or Foundation, or whatever rich white people named bank accounts when they decided to give money away, was paying her three bucks more than minimum wage to watch kids. She didn’t even have to pay to bring Mikey along with her.

Which meant that, after four months, Tammy was beginning to pay off some bills and have money left over. Not much—not enough to buy fancy coffee—but last week she was able to put fifteen dollars into a sock under her bed to save up for Mikey’s fourth birthday and she still had twenty dollars left over.
 

She had a job she was good at, a boss who liked her and—for the first time in her adult life—a feeling of stability. It was a
great
thing.

Melinda let her go, which was nice. Tammy liked working with Melinda but sometimes, Melinda’s enthusiasm was a bit
much
. They were friends, but not the kind of friend Tammy could tell about Clarence wiping the coffee off her lip and then licking it off his thumb.

Hell, she didn’t even want to tell her sister that. Once Tara got going, it was all over.
 

Instead, Tammy cooked. She enjoyed the break of cooking lunch. It was one of the few times when she was not watching Mikey. As she boiled the hot dogs and steamed the peas, Tammy thought over the morning again. What had Clarence said?
 

“It’s time I took care of you.”
 

Yes, that was it. That confused her. Had she been taking care of him? Well, she made the coffee. But that was because she got here so early. Sometimes, a parent had a job off the rez and they had to leave early in the morning. So she got to the Clinic by 6:30 for the early drop-offs. It only made sense that she got the coffee going. As a bonus, her super-early mornings with Mikey meant that the boy went to bed about seven, leaving Tammy with some quiet time in the evening.

Plus, Tara was the receptionist at the Clinic and Tammy knew that without her morning coffee, Tara could be a real bitch. So it was a matter of self-preservation, really.
 

But Clarence usually got in before Tara did.
 

She’d gotten used to seeing him first thing in the morning. He was a very tall man, the kind that was so big most people did a double-take when he walked into a room. He had a good foot on her, at least, and probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds or more. She’d seen him lift people twice her size out of cars because they couldn’t walk and he hadn’t even broken a sweat.

He was attractive. Maybe not movie-star hot—but then again, she was no starlet herself. Clarence was strong and dependable and kind to the patients. He was kind to kids.

He was kind to her. And that?
That
was attractive.
 

And the way he’d touched her this morning?

That blew past ‘attractive’ and went right over into ‘hot.’
 

She thought about Ezra. Once, he’d made her feel hot, too. Of course, Tammy had been a different woman then. Prettier, shyer, more innocent. More willing to believe what a man said and not what he did.

Once, she’d been in love.

It hadn’t lasted.

That wasn’t what this was, was it? This wasn’t love. This wasn’t even an infatuation. Okay, after the way he touched her this morning? Maybe it was.

Did that make it a bad thing?

She wasn’t the same shy girl she’d once been. She knew better now. Actions spoke louder than words, after all.
 

The hot dogs boiled over. “Oh!” she exclaimed as she shut the heat off. This was not good. It’d been bad enough this morning when she hadn’t been watching and Mikey had taken out the bookshelf. But now?

Clarence was distracting her.

She focused on her task at hand. Lunch could be crazy and they had a nearly full house today. If she got lost in rehashing what Clarence had said—
how
he’d said it—
she was worth the good stuff
?

Somehow, she made it through lunch without total disaster. Then Melinda had the kids get the cots out and everyone lay down. Tammy did the dishes while Melinda read them a story.

When she was done, most of the kids were asleep. They’d been doing this long enough that Mikey had trained himself to stay awake. She’d put him down when she got home. Right now, he was laying on his cot, driving his new, awesome car up and down in front of his face.
 

She loved her son with everything she had. She wouldn’t change anything, really. But there were days . . .

Would Clarence be here super early again tomorrow? The coffee had already been made by the time she’d gotten here, which meant he must have gotten to the Clinic around six or so. That was at least an hour before his normal time. That couldn’t have been an accident.
 

Tara popped her head in, which left Tammy feeling disappointed. Sometimes, Clarence stuck his head in. He’d look around, catch her eye and give her a quick smile. Tara, on the other hand, wanted to talk.
 

Tammy left Mikey on his cot. She thought she and Tara might be able to talk alone in the kitchen area, but Melinda followed them back. Wonderful. To hide her nervousness, Tammy picked up the rag and wiped the counter down again. “Yeah?”

“What the
hell
kind of coffee did you make this morning?” Tara huffed in disgust. “It tasted like a vanilla jelly bean died in there or something.”

Embarrassment flooded Tammy’s cheeks. Was there any way to do this that didn’t involve mentioning Clarence? “Um . . . actually, I didn’t make the coffee today.”

Tara gaped at her. She was always being dramatic like this. “If you didn’t, who did? Don’t tell me that freak—” she bit the words off as she looked at Melinda.