Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (7 page)

“It’s important work.”

“I’m sure.”

She stood up and pointed to a pile in the corner. “We just need these now, and we’re good to go.”

“What’s in them?”

“Garlands. I have to hang them all over the front of the house, and then I put a whole bunch up downstairs, and I decorate them with mistletoe and Christmas ornaments and the whole shebang. It’s like a Christmas explosion. The guests eat it up.”

“Who are your guests, eighty-year-old women?”

“You might be surprised.”

Carson picked up the boxes, surprised to find that garlands weighed a ton.

“Let me get a couple of those.”

“No.”

“One.”

He let her take one off the top, and he followed her down the curved staircase to the front of the house.

“Show me where you want this outside, and I’ll hang it for you.”

“You don’t have to do that. You already did the kitchen, and—”

“It’s just something to keep me occupied. You know how I am.”

She pushed open the door onto the covered front porch, smiling even as a bitter wind picked up her hair and flung it into her eyes. “Yeah, I know. You should really get a house like this. It’d keep you busy for forty years. You wouldn’t even have to think hard about what to do. There’s always something breaking or falling down or coming apart. It’s like your perfect residence.”

Then her face fell, and she covered her eyes with her hand. “I didn’t mean that like it came out.”

“It’s okay.”

“Forget I said it, all right? I don’t want you to think I’m pining. Everyone else thinks I’m pining, but I feel like at least one person in town other than me should be aware of the actual situation.”

“Which is that you’re not pining.”

“Exactly.”

“Got it. It’s fine.”

She took her hand away and peeked at him from under her lashes. “Is it?”

Carson’s chest tightened. It wasn’t okay. It was four degrees and windy, she wasn’t wearing shoes, and he’d been living with her for two weeks. He wanted her like a heartbeat, the pulse of it low and insistent whether he was sleeping or awake. He wanted to take her, to fuck her until she couldn’t move, and he was pretty sure she wanted that, too.

And none of it troubled him as much as the fact that he also wanted to please her.

Every time he walked into town, somebody told him how much they loved Julie.
She’s worked miracles over at the library. We couldn’t get by without her at the hospital gift shop. The Methodist Women’s Auxiliary wouldn’t exist anymore without Julie. You wouldn’t believe the way she’s whipped the Chamber into shape
.

He didn’t know if it was supposed to mean “thank you” because he’d brought her here or if it was a warning to back off. He just knew it kept happening, and he’d stopped resenting it.

She worked miracles, and everyone loved her, and he woke up every day having burrowed a little deeper into her life.

She scared him, but he wanted her anyway.

“Tell me where to hang these, so I can go inside and get my coat on,” he said. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”

“Is that how you order around your minions?”

“More or less.”

“How many languages can you say ‘fuck’ in?”

Carson smiled. “I’d need my fingers to count, and they’re busy holding your fucking boxes.”

That made her laugh. She walked down the porch steps, wool socks on a scrim of snow, turned around, and began pointing. “All along the front there, and also up there. You’re going to need the extension ladder to do that level. Then down the gutters …”

It was the laugh that did it.
Her
laugh, directed at him. Her hair whipping around in the wind, and her socks planted in the snow, and just … the Julie-ness of her. Seeing her that way, smiling up at him without reserve, struck a final blow to the dam he’d built against all the old feelings. It gave way with a flood of pleasure that warmed him despite the cold.

She was special. She was Julie. She was
his
.

Forget keeping his distance. As soon as he got her fucking garlands up, he was going to kiss her.

Julie sat by the front window, watching Carson’s legs on the ladder. She couldn’t see his face or his hands, but just his being up there made her wobbly, nervous for his safety, weak with yearning that just kept getting worse.

At night, she dreamed he was in her bed, in her body. She dreamed he was part of her life, here in the house. Cruel dreams that she wished away, but wishing didn’t get her anywhere with Carson.

When she was twenty and she decided to give Glory her kidney, she’d wished Carson would understand, but he didn’t. For Julie, it had been the first opportunity she’d ever had to prove that she could be selfless. Different from the way she’d been raised. She’d liked Glory, known she was a good woman, known she would die within the year if she didn’t get the transplant.

Why not give it to her? What did Julie need two kidneys for?

But Carson—despite being grateful—had read her the riot act. He’d repeated the risks of general anesthesia and major surgery, staph infections and renal failure, shortened life span.
You barely even know my mother. You don’t know what you’re getting into
.

After the surgery, she was weaker than she’d expected, and he grew more restless every day, pacing the hospital room, pacing the corridors. The semester was starting, and he wanted to head back to Alfred and finish up his degree.

I’m staying here for a while
, she told him when she got released to recuperate at his parents’ house.
I like it here
.

College hadn’t really worked out for her. Except for Carson, she hadn’t found anything there to latch onto. She didn’t know who to be. And without knowing that, she was afraid to latch on to him too hard. Afraid of being subsumed in the very energy and purpose that attracted her to him in the first place.

He was so confident, even then. So sure of himself, when Julie was still just finding her feet.

But in Potter Falls, strangely enough, she knew exactly who she was.

He hadn’t even tried to talk it through.
You can go
, she’d said, and he’d just left. Packed up his things and drove back to school.

It took her months to process that it was really over. Years of wondering if she could have done something different, kept him somehow without ruining him. Gone with him without losing herself.

She became his mother’s friend, and he became a stranger who came to visit periodically and knocked her equilibrium out of whack.

In his room across the hall from hers, his backpack leaned against the wall, the top an open mouth from which he retrieved things as he needed them. He’d been around for half of December, and his dresser sat empty.

When the time came for him to leave, he’d be fast about it.

She wanted him to stay. She had always wanted him to stay.

Carson set about it deliberately. He hung up all the garlands, put away the extension ladder, and tucked the boxes back into the closet. Showered. Dressed in clean jeans and flannel over a thermal shirt. Shaved for the second time today.

When he found her, she was in the front room—the first one guests would see when they arrived to check in. She stood on a low step stool, tacking mistletoe up along the crown molding. She’d draped garlands along the ceiling in loops, then filled them with Christmas stuff. Sugarplums, tiny reindeer, twinkling lights.

Carson walked right up to her. He was used to being taller than Julie, but the stool put her a couple inches above him. The house smelled like orange peels and cinnamon, and she smelled like the coconut shampoo he’d found in her shower.

“You’re making this real easy for me,” he said.

“The mistletoe?”

“The mistletoe.”

“It’s a handy excuse for a kiss.”

“I don’t need an excuse to kiss you. I need excuses
not
to kiss you. And I’ve run out.”

Her eyes had crackles of black in them. He’d forgotten. It had been a decade or more since he stood this close and looked.

Julie sighed, feigning exhaustion. “It’s kind of hopeless, isn’t it?”

“It’s like a sickness.”

“That’s romantic.”

Carson grinned. “You’re a disease.”

“You’re my cross to bear.”

“An epic mistake that I keep making, over and over again.”

“A colossally bad idea with really hot arms.”

“You like my arms?”

“Don’t even pretend you don’t know it. You have the body of a god.”

He wrapped his hand around her neck and rested his fingers on the knot that held the bandana on her hair. “I like your hair long.”

“Thank you.”

“Would you do me a favor and take this stupid thing off?”

“Take it off yourself.”

Her lips formed a ridiculous bow, like on a cartoon cupid. Soft and pink, the most feminine part of her entirely feminine body. He waited to kiss them, drawing out the anticipation just a moment longer now that he had something to anticipate. He kissed her throat instead, lingering over the spot where the blood thundered beneath her skin. Slid the tip of his nose along her neck. All the while, he worked the knot loose.

“Leo?” he asked as he pushed the bandana off.

“It’s been a long time.”

“You’re not seeing him.”

“I’m not seeing him.”

“I’m going to kiss you now.”

“Please.”

Their mouths met, a soft brush of lips that reminded him how good it would be in a few
seconds, when they kissed like they actually meant it. Six years? Eight? It was an eternity since he’d touched her, far too many months since he’d fit his hands over her hips, slid them up to her waist, measured the distances and angles between every curve of her lithe little body. She felt different, but not in a bad way. She’d come into herself. Everything about her was Julie now. The right Julie. The woman he’d sensed behind the fancy fingernails and hundred-dollar salon haircut when he sat behind her in history class freshman year at Alfred.

He kissed her jaw and stroked his hands up her back.

“Kiss me for real,” she whispered.

“I’m getting to it.”

She took his head in both hands and pulled his mouth toward hers. “Hurry up.”

This time when their lips met, hers were wet, and her tongue darted out to slick over his bottom lip. His arousal dropped out of his head and into his dick, a sinking heat that became an ache when she pressed her breasts against his chest and dug her nails into his scalp.

“Carson,” she said. A complaint and a plea.

“All right, woman.”

He stroked his tongue into her mouth, and it was like flash paper igniting. Too-bright heat and light, then a burn that followed his hands over her ass, weighing her breasts, trailing along the back of one thigh toward the hot center of her. Her hips tilted into his, and the extra few inches of height meant that when she let him wrap her leg around his hip, the core of her settled against the crown of his cock, a hot, needy pressure that made him tug her close with both hands and grind against her as he showed her with his tongue what he wanted to do to her.

God, she killed him. Every time, like nobody else had ever kissed him before. Hamstrung with lust, he’d taken her once on her knees in the backseat of a car. He’d fumbled open his fly and fucked her in an alley outside a restaurant his parents had dragged them both to in Fenimore when they weren’t together, when they were barely
talking
, and it wasn’t because he didn’t respect her, it was
this
. This crazy connection that told him where she wanted him to touch her, how hard, how much pressure she wanted. This sense of being perfectly in the moment, centered over Julie, pushing with everything he had in exactly the right direction for once.

Like all the rest of the time, he was flung all over the place, and Julie gathered him up and handed him back to himself.

He didn’t know how to stop craving her.

“Tell me we’re not stopping.” He bit her earlobe because he knew she would shudder, and she did. His fingers found their way inside her sweater and unhooked the clasp on her bra, spilling her breasts into his hands. He tweaked a nipple, already bunched and sensitive. Carson wanted to see her. He wanted to feast on her for as long as she’d let him, until he didn’t need her so fucking much anymore.

It wouldn’t work, of course. He wasn’t stupid. He couldn’t use her up or shake her off or run away from her. He’d tried all that. He’d tried everything.

“I want you, Julia. Upstairs. All night.”

“It’s only two in the afternoon.”

“We have a lot of not doing this to make up for.”

“You think I’m easy, don’t you?”

He pushed up her sweater and drew her nipple into his mouth, and she moaned. She was easy. For him, she’d always been that way. Every time he turned to her in the middle of the night. Every time he came back to town and told himself no, then put his hands on her anyway, she said yes. She moaned it in his ear. She came on his cock, hard and fast, and unraveled him.

“Let me tell you a secret.” He pulled her shirt down, because he was going to get his way, and they both knew it. “Men like easy women.”

She grinned. The glint in her eye told him she had something clever to say before she opened her mouth, so he was already smiling when she cupped his dick in her hand and squeezed. “That’s funny. Women like hard men.”

“I’ll show you hard,” he promised.

“You’d better.”

Chapter Seven

Julie pounded up the attic stairs, breathless and happy and urgently excited.

There was no way to remember this kind of joy, to hold on to the elation that lived in the body and rose like sap in the springtime when he touched her.

People liked to pretend that emotions had something to do with the brain, but they were physical sensations, and Carson’s hands, Carson’s mouth, conjured up this excess in her. Even when they screwed each other angry, when sex became a form of combat, there was a pure green streak to it, alive and good.

She shucked her sweater and let her bra drop off her arms before he even made it into the room. This morning, she’d left the bed unmade and a pile of dirty clothes next to the closet. Probably she should care, but she didn’t. Let him see her private mess. She would admit him to her room, her body, her life.