Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series (7 page)

Hefin stood in the hallway. Tightened every muscle in his body, let them all go.

Des was a woman, that’s all. Smart and sweet, gray-eyed and skinny, prone to tears and questions.

He was a Welshman. Land of dragons and rugby.

He would be fine.

Instead of the conference room, he decided to face the dragon and pushed through the double doors that led into the suite of cubicles where he had a desk for no reason he could fathom except it was a good place to keep his lunch and tea. If Des was here working, well, he was too, and wanted his lunch pail, besides.

Slay the dragon.

He made himself take long strides to his desk, not looking left or right, then stopped, near tripping on his shadow.

She was sitting at his desk, fingers flying over a laptop, ginger hair twisted onto a pencil making a pinwheel of escaped strands.

Her nape was freckled.

He looked down at the file drawer that held his lunch pail, the drawer that was currently guarded by her bare leg, the outside of her cotton-covered thigh.

He could see the thin band of her bra through a haze of apricot-colored blouse—he could even see the wash tag from her bra stuck out at an angle from where the clasp would be, and this somehow made its reality as sharp as if he were in the process of removing it.

He walked a step backward.

Her fingers stopped on the keyboard, and she turned around.

Her smile was near twice again cuter than it was yesterday.

“Hefin! Hi.” She twirled to face him in the office chair, and now he was faced with the torture of her knobby, freckled knees. Torture, because he wanted them in his hands. He wanted to move them apart.

“Hello, yourself, there. I just …” He gestured toward the file drawer, certain he’d said out loud what he needed.

She looked in the direction of the drawer, but her auburn brows knit together.

“Sorry, do you need your desk? Carrie said you never used it and there wasn’t another free?”

“No, I just was gettin’ to my lunch there. In the drawer.”

She leaned over, the collar of her blouse coming away from the pretty expanse of her sternum and pulled the drawer open. “In here? I smelled something awesome all morning.”

He finally stepped forward to where she was bent at the waist in her chair, which made everything at least a thousand times worse. Now he could see her bra from the front, could see that it was white and plain and the cups too loose over the top of her breast, could in fact see the very small swell of her breast and the edge of its pale peach areola.

Her breasts had the palest freckles of all, like gold leaf shattered over porcelain. He ignored the heavy, dark pulse in his prick.

She sat up, holding his takeaway bag. “This it?”

He took it, glad he had placed a large order. The big bag of food could be held in front of himself strategically. “Ah, there’s actually a lunch pail there, too.”

“This one?” She leaned over and Hefin closed his eyes. When he opened them, she was holding out his lunch pail. He took it, careful to fit his fingers away from hers on the resin handle so he wouldn’t touch them.

“Great. I’m sorted then. I’ll leave you to it.” He turned to go, anxious to get somewhere he wouldn’t need to remind himself to breathe.

“What is it?”

“What?”

“What’s in your lunch, I mean. I’ve been inhaling it all morning, practically eating it by smell.”

He looked down at the plastic
ThankYouThankYou
takeaway bag as if he had never seen one in his life. “Oh. Pancakes.”

She laughed. Reached back and pulled the pencil out of her hair, and he helplessly watched it tumble in corn-silk heaps around her face. “You brought pancakes for lunch?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“All that’s pancakes?”

“I hope so, that’s what I ordered.”

“A lot of pancakes.”

He couldn’t stop the smile, but kept his gaze on a place on her knee where he could just see a faded ink pen heart. “I like pancakes, I suppose.”

She laughed again. “I guess so.”

Just a woman. “Listen, do you get a lunch? There’s a nice place to sit when the weather’s warm like this. I may share these though it’s unlikely.” He didn’t look at her. Until she was quiet for such a long beat he couldn’t help it. She was looking at him, a small smile curved over the point of her chin.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

He watched her pull a cardigan from her bag and put it on, the pretty blouse lifting at her waistline with the movement, flashing a ribbon of her pale middle. She also grabbed a crumpled brown paper lunch bag and a bottle of water. “Let’s go then,” he said.

She grinned, and in her fancy, girlish work clothes that open grin made her look fey and
possible
. He couldn’t fathom why he couldn’t stop having these impulses around her. Why he would awkwardly transfer his bags and lunch pail to one hand so he’d have one free to press a little against her back, right along where her bra band was, to guide her through the doors.

They walked in silence along an access tunnel that followed the edge of the parking garage until they reached the outlet onto a path that led to Celebration Park. It was an orderly green space with different sections representing different parts of the world, and he led them to the Scandinavia section where bright red modern-looking picnic tables were set into a grove of conifers that broke the wind coming off the lake to the west. When he sat at the tables, the height of the knoll of this area made the lake look infinite if you blocked out the downtown buildings all around it.

He liked it here, and he had taken Des here.

“I haven’t sat up here before.” Des settled into the bench seat right next to him, so they both had a view of the lake. Her hair looked like hot embers in the direct sunlight, a hundred different shades of red and orange and blond. He turned away to stare at the lake, but the brightness of her hair bothered his periphery. “I had no idea there was a view of the lake from this park.”

He focused on unpacking his lunch, unscrewing the lid from his thermos. He
tipped his head in her direction but kept his gaze on the table. She had smoothed out her brown paper bag on the table’s surface as a place mat for a sandwich and an apple cut into neat wedges. “Are you from Lakefield?”

She laughed, and he couldn’t help it. He looked at her. She was tucking her hair behind her ears with both hands. God help him, she had freckles on her earlobes, in the creamy whorls of her ears. “I was born there.” She pointed at the tall main building of Lakepoint Hospital. Then she twisted around to point behind them. “And I grew up in that neighborhood way over there. The one where you can see the church steeple in the middle of all those tiny houses.” She shifted in her seat again and rose a bit. “And then I went to college way over there.” She gestured to the roofs of the Lakefield State University buildings they could barely see through the breaks in the downtown buildings. She sat back down, making his heart stop when she smoothed her hands over her arse to tuck her skirt under her. “You can literally see my entire life from this spot.” She looked over the panorama again. “A whole life lived.”

He caught her eye then and was surprised to find her expression so solemn. Those straight auburn brows of hers knit and she looked away, to the view of the lake.

“Is that weird?” she asked him.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“When I was twenty-seven, almost ten years ago, right before I moved here, the same was true for me.”

She took out an apple wedge and toyed with it. “But you grew up in Wales, right? In Aberaeron?”

Her pronunciation was perfect and he tried not to imagine her practicing it.

“That’s right. And Aberaeron is tiny. My mum could call me home to tea from across town. I didn’t need a prospect from which to see my whole life, I could see my whole life from any point I stood in the village.”

“But you left.”

“I elected into a university training program in engineering after taking some time with prerequirements at a local college. I went to London for a year, then to Beijing for almost three.”

“Oh. Wow. I went to Toronto for a class trip in high school, and sometimes my parents took us kids to Pittsburgh to see my grandparents and the Mister Rogers exhibit at the Children’s Museum.”

“Any place can be exotic when you’re away from home.” He looked down and realized he had used the handle end of his fork to press a design of ropes and knots into the top of his Styrofoam pancake box—his hands distracted while he talked. Des reached over and traced over it with her fingers, softly.

“That’s so pretty. I could hang it up in my house and people wouldn’t even know it was a pancake box.”

“I’ll draw you something better than a doodle on a pancake box.” He closed his eyes, willed the blush away.

“You don’t have to, but I’d like that. Your carvings are so good I can’t believe they’re even real.”

“Let’s eat.” He resisted pushing the heel of his hand over his heart to make it slow down. “Is that all you have, then?”

She shook her head, like she was saying no, but then met his eyes, and hers cleared. “I mean, yeah. PB&J, favorite of six-year-olds and the long-term unemployed everywhere.”

He started popping open his boxes. Glanced up at the whitecaps on the lake. Let himself look at her again, tried not to count the number of freckles in the hollow of her throat. “I guess you’d better share with me, then.”

She touched her throat, like she knew where he was looking. “Pancake me,” she said. And he laughed. Helpless.

Des watched Hefin pour syrup on a huge stack of pancakes. The syrup container was huge, and he obviously had every intention of using it all. He lifted each pancake in the stack with his fork as he poured, to get the syrup over every surface, and the amber stream spilled over his thumb.

He was totally going to lick his thumb.

And then she was going to lick him.

Which, wasn’t true, but when she sat next to him like this, the wind from the lake making his disobedient hair stand on end and his long-sleeved T-shirt rub against the lean muscles in his chest and the hollows under his collarbones, it
felt
true. It felt really, really true. It felt so true that when he set the syrup container down and brought his thumb to his mouth, to tuck under that overblown upper lip, and drew his thumb in and sucked off the syrup, she fisted her hand because she could sharply perceive that same suction bringing up the blood in her own thumb.

Bringing the blood up
everywhere
.

And then she was imagining him sucking the ends of her fingers, maybe biting them. She could see him picking the second container of syrup up, tearing her blouse open, yanking her bra down, pouring the syrup all over her chest, then licking her all over. Using his warm fingers to coat her nipples with syrup so he could lick those, too. Because she had caught him looking down her blouse earlier, and he looked twice, so A-cups obviously didn’t bother him.

He picked up the second container of syrup, and she made a sound.

“Oh, shite, sorry. Sweet tooth, remember? Since I’m sharing, you probably want some pancake to go with your syrup.”

“No, it’s fine. I mean, you should fix them how you like.” Because her pancake-to-syrup-ratio need was absolutely why she grunted when he picked up the other syrup.

Des was feeling hopeless. When she came into the library this morning, she was excited to start her new job, sure, and Carrie was just as nice as she had been the day before, and the work was simple. In fact, it was simple enough that she actually asked
Carrie if she could try out a few redesigns to make what she was trying to do with the functionality of the teen program’s sites even better.

As she tinkered, she found she had no end of ideas, and it was nice to work on her own, without clients and deadlines breathing down her neck. She remembered that a friend in college was into design, and even thought about asking her to refresh her on some design software—some of the pages on the teen site looked a little tired.

But messing with code wasn’t what had her breathless when she walked in the building this morning. Last night, when she thought about Hefin, she didn’t even think about how he had helped her score a job. Last night, when she thought about Hefin, she didn’t even think about how he had witnessed her public breakdown, or that he had sat with her while she cried about her dad. Somehow, her mind had been more taken with how his eyelashes tangled at the corners, how his irises were as dark as his pupils.

She had called up how his breath had felt against her cheek and ear in the dark of the conference room, how her forearm had slid against his inner elbow. How he had put both fingers in his mouth to clean off the pastry cream after she took her half. And then, just like that, he had been with her in her bed, licking her, licking his fingers again until they were slick enough to work her over while his tongue was full inside her, tasting her.

She had curled her nails into the dripping mess of herself trying to re-create what she thought his callused fingers might feel like, the hair-fine scrapes and stings of them, and the warmth of that pain was exactly right.
She
was exactly right, fevered and sliding under the hard press of his fingers, his burning hot shoulders wet with sweat, and
he
had felt the muscles in her soft thighs cord tight against them.

His cock had been heavy and deliciously unrelieved where it rubbed in her sheets but he wasn’t going to stop, not ever, his tongue deep inside her, her hard clit indistinct under the rough skin of his circling fingertips. She had gone over then, her legs and belly shaking, and after she had floated away from Hefin’s body where she had summoned him between her legs, she found she had left herself so swollen she had to cant her thigh open to let the accumulated tightness work itself back to her heart.

“These are yours,” he said.

She blinked at him, bringing him into focus where he was so absurdly clothed, with the wind in his crimped hair and his squint on her face. She looked down. “Did you cut up my pancakes?”