Just a Number (19 page)

“I…um…” Stammering isn’t a good sign, but it’s all I’ve got. If I lie, they’ll all see through it. “Well…yes?”

Shit. I don’t think I meant to say that out loud. This brings on a bout of nervous rambling.

“He’s really great, and I know you’d all really like him.” Dad doesn’t look so sure, but I know he’s wrong. In fact, he’s known my mystery man longer than I have, so it’s not like he can say that Owen’s a bad guy, right? Yeah, let’s go with that.

“How much older?” Dad asks, his tone serious, all signs of his earlier joking with Owen gone.

Double shit.

“Does that matter?” I ask. “I mean, if I’m happy, what does age really have to do with it? It’s just a number, right?”

“It matters,” Dad says, emphasizing his words, “because he could be taking advantage of you.”

“Alan, stop,” Owen interjects suddenly, his tone borderline defensive. I can tell that he’s trying not to be insulted by my dad’s assumptions.

“He’s not,” I tell my dad, my voice low and harsh.

Dad looks across at Owen and shakes his head. “I won’t stop. This guy can’t find a woman his own age, so he heads out and manipulates young girls?
My
daughter?”

I roll my eyes at his stupid double standards. I guaran-damn-tee you that if it came out that Owen was dating a much younger woman, Dad would be high-fiving the shit out of him. How do I know this? Because of his previous advice to go out and find some “hot young thing” to help him forget about his whore of a wife. But because it’s
me
dating an older guy, it’s all of a sudden forbidden and the guy is “taking advantage of me.”

Whatever.

Before I can let my simmering anger, or this conversation, escalate to a full-out raging boil, I force a smile and excuse myself. I head over to the table that houses all the booze and find that the wine bottles are empty. Knowing that Dad has a spare fridge in the basement where he stored the alcohol because the one in the kitchen is full, I head down there.

I grab a bottle of wine and set it on the counter, not quite ready to go back upstairs yet. It’s quiet down here—a little cool, sure, but I’m okay with that. I’m far enough away from everyone that I can let my dad’s words roll off my back and get a hold of my emotions. I know he doesn’t mean to be an asshole, and I’m sure this is the last conversation he wanted to have during the holidays. But it’s out there now, and I handled it as best I could.

“Hey.” Even though his tone is soft, concerned, it still startles the hell out of me, and I jump.

“Owen,” I say, breathless, as I slap a hand over my fluttering heart. “You scared me. I didn’t hear you come down here.”

“Sorry,” he says, stepping closer to me as I lean against the washing machine across the small room from the spare fridge. “You okay? What he said…”

“Was complete bullshit,” I finish for him. “I’m not… You would never…” Apparently I’m still pretty upset about this, and I struggle to breathe through my rising anxiety.

“Never,” is all he has to say, and I’m instantly reassured. “He just…he worries, Amelia. I get that.”

“Fine,” I agree. “I get it, too. But if you were out there boning some hard-bodied twenty-year-old—”

Owen laughs, distracting me for a minute before he adds, “Which I am, remember.”

Unable to keep the stupid smile from my face, I roll my eyes. “Okay, fine…but if he knew that—without knowing
who
she was—you’d be a fucking hero. What the hell kind of logic is that?”

“Guy logic.
Dad
logic.”

“It’s stupid.”

Owen steps closer, so close I can feel his warmth and smell his cologne. I want him to pull me into his arms and make this all go away. But we can’t…can we? I reach out for his hand, and he takes it without a second thought.

“I realize it doesn’t make any sense, sweetheart.” His thumb moves back and forth over the back of my hand in its usual soothing way. “But we’ll do whatever we can to make him understand. Okay?”

I nod, stepping closer to him without thinking, and I place my other hand on his hip. I know I shouldn’t, and something in my brain tells me to back away, but I just can’t. I need to be near him right now as much as I need air to breathe.

At least, that’s how it feels.

Owen must feel the same way, because his free hand comes up and cradles my jaw tenderly, his long fingers teasing the short hairs at the nape of my neck as he leans down to brush his lips over mine.

“I know we shouldn’t,” he whispers, his warm breath tickling my skin, “but I just can’t help myself.”

“Good,” I tell him, pressing my mouth to his firmly before either one of us comes to our senses.

It doesn’t take long before we’re completely lost to each other again. Owen’s tongue slides along my lower lip, and I sigh, giving him just enough room to slip past them. I can taste the scotch on his tongue as it sweeps over mine, his fingers curling behind my neck to hold me close. The booze has emboldened him, and I’m too hurt to know any better. I just want to forget what happened upstairs and lose myself in him.

Warmth flows through my veins like a wild fire as I loop my fingers into the waist of his pants, pulling him forward to deepen our kiss and fully welcome him into my embrace. He doesn’t try to pull away; in fact, he goes with the momentum until he’s got me pressed hard up against the washer.

Something in the recesses of my brain screams at me to end this before it gets out of hand. I choose not to hear it, my desperation to be reassured of Owen’s intentions winning out and making it sound like no more than a whisper that eventually fades into nothingness.

It’s clear he’s just as anxious to show me how he really feels as his hands move to my ass and he lifts me onto the washer, pushing himself between my legs. My skin blazes like it’s on fire as his hands move down my thighs to the hemline of my dress, and I tremble when they slip beneath the soft fabric and begin to push it up toward my hips.

The second his fingers hook into the sides of my panties and tug—too light to remove them, but hard enough to make the pulse between my legs intensify—I throw my head back and moan. “Oh, god. Owen…”

He kisses his way down the column of my throat and along my collarbone. Waves of warmth wash over my skin with every pass of his lips, and my heartbeat grows louder and louder.

Thump thump thump.

Growling, he pulls me forward again, forcing me closer to his body until I can feel his erection pressing against me.

Thump thump thump.

I’m about to beg him to keep going when I realize the pulse in my veins doesn’t match the one I’m hearing in my ears, but when he tugs on my panties again, I forget all about it.

Right up until I hear, “What the hell is going on down here?”

16. You Found Me

W
hen we’d first arrived, I didn’t foresee any of this happening. Sure, I knew that Amelia and I would have more than our fair share of difficulty covering our relationship up, but we were both confident that we would succeed. Did I expect the topic of conversation to focus on the woman I’d been seeing? No, I can honestly say I didn’t. I mean, I suppose I expected someone to say something, but to have it brought up while surrounded by everyone was a bit unexpected. And uncomfortable.

What I expected even
less
was for Amelia to be blind-sided about our relationship.

Julia bringing it up hadn’t been a malicious act; I think she was genuinely curious and happy for Amelia. At least, this is what I hope, because I’d like for my younger sister to approve of our fast-growing relationship.

Additionally, I don’t think Alan ever meant to ask Amelia about the guy she’s seeing in front of everyone, but he did, and when he mentioned that she was being taken advantage of…well, I didn’t take too kindly to that. I wanted to set him straight. To tell him that I would
never
take advantage of her. That I cared for her more than anything.

But I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to avoid an all-out brawl in the middle of his living room. So, instead, I tried to keep my voice as even as possible and asked him to end the interrogation, even though I could feel my blood beginning to boil. He didn’t need to play bad cop right now. Especially with his daughter.

Amelia was hurt, though. I could see it in her eyes as she forced a smile and excused herself from the group without another word on the subject. Julia looked at me apologetically—not because she knew about us, but because she didn’t mean to cause an argument—and Alan sighed, clearly upset with himself.

He’d offered to go talk to her, but Carla gently suggested he leave her for a few minutes, telling him that Amelia just needed a little “girl time” to process things. I knew otherwise, though. What Amelia needed was to be reassured of us. And I needed to reassure her as much as she needed to hear it.

I waited a few minutes before excusing myself to use the washroom, and when no one was looking, I bypassed the stairs and headed for the basement door instead. I never meant for things to escalate as far as they did between us. All I knew was one minute, I was telling Amelia that I wasn’t taking advantage of her, and the next I was kissing her.

It was only supposed to go as far as kissing as a means to reassure her of my intentions, but our mutual need to prove our feelings to one another takes over. In a burst of intense heat, I’m throwing her up on the washer with her legs around my waist. Her skin is warm and soft as I slide my hands up her thighs and beneath her skirt. She moans my name, sending a tremor through my body, and I instantly grow hard as I pull her hips toward me.

I know I should stop—I even try telling myself to step away several times—before it gets to the point of no return, but we’ve already passed it. More than once. Just like every time Amelia’s hands are on me, I forget about everything around me. Her lips anchor me to wherever she is, and nothing else matters.

We’ve completely lost control—a known problem—and it seems unlikely that either one of us is within the right mindset to put a stop to the runaway train we’ve found ourselves on.

There is one thing that can stop us, though. One thing we’d wanted to avoid more than anything during our stay here, and it happens: we are found out.

“What the hell is going on down here?”

Amelia inhales sharply, and I remove my lips from her neck as she meets my startled gaze, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. We both recognize the voice but are too stunned, having been ripped back to the reality of the situation, to visually confirm her presence.

Once Amelia fully realizes the weight of what’s happened, she drops her hands to my chest and pushes, hopping off of the washer and adjusting her dress as she rushes toward the stairs. My eyes follow her and land on a very surprised and confused Carla Atwood staring between the two of us with wide-open eyes.

“I-I came down to check on Amy,” Carla tries to explain. “Figured she’d need someone to talk to. Definitely didn’t expect to walk in on…” Most people who walk in on a scene like this would sound apologetic, but Carla doesn’t; she sounds upset.

“Carla, I can explain,” Amelia says pleadingly, her voice quivering with fear.

“Oh, I think I understand quite clearly.” Carla looks past Amelia at me, and I stop in my tracks, a healthy distance from both of them as she shifts her gaze back. “Your dad—”

“We’re going to tell him,” Amelia interrupts desperately. “We were just waiting until the right time. Th-this wasn’t supposed to happen here.”

“But it did.” Carla shakes her head and heads back upstairs.

“Wait, Carla…
Please!
” Amelia’s voice is strained as she calls after Carla, chasing her up the stairs and reaching for her. “You can’t tell him. N-not today.”

Carla whirls around at the top of the stairs and looks Amelia straight in the eye. “You want me to lie to your father?”

“Not lie,” I interject carefully, quietly.

Amelia decides to finish explaining, letting me off the hook. “We were going to tell him after Christmas. You know how much this time of year means to him. We couldn’t risk upsetting him now. This—what you walked in on just now—wasn’t supposed to happen. We weren’t…and then everyone was…it just…” She sighs, defeated. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. We…we slipped up for a second.”

Amelia exhales loudly, pressing her hands together in front of her. “I know you don’t owe me a damn thing, but I’m begging you. We’ll tell him, I swear. We just need a little more time.”

Carla seems to weigh everything we’ve told her, and while she still doesn’t seem particularly keen to the idea, her posture softens, conceding to our request. “Fine.” She raises her gaze, her determination obvious, and points a finger at Amelia, then down to the foot of the stairs where I still stand. “You have until the first week of January to tell him…or I will.”

“Thank you.” Amelia smiles weakly, grateful.

Carla meets Amelia’s appreciation with a shake of her head. “I’m not doing this for you,” she informs us both. “I’m doing this because I care about Alan, and I don’t want to see him upset right now. You’re just lucky it was me who offered to come down here in his place. I shudder to think what would have happened had he walked in on the two of you carrying on like that. I suggest you figure out a way to keep it from happening again, because next time…” She lets her threat hang there before turning on her heel and stepping through the basement door, leaving Amelia and me alone.