Room at the Inn (Novella): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance (8 page)

She couldn’t control what he would do after that. Probably he would leave. It was who he was. It was what he did.

That didn’t have anything to do with this. When he was here, he belonged to her. Everybody in town knew it. Julie was sick of pretending she didn’t know it herself.

She leaned down to peel off her socks, nearly toppling forward in her haste. Carson’s hands slapped down on her hips to steady her.

“Whoa there.”

“Don’t rescue me. Get your clothes off.”

“Are we in a hurry?”

She straightened and went up on tiptoe to nip at his lower lip, threading her hands in the hair at the back of his head and giving it a sharp tug as she kissed him. “
Yes
. We are in a god-awful hurry. Pants. Off.”

Her other sock came away, and she peeled out of her jeans and panties in one fast push and crawled onto the bed on all fours, giving Carson a show that she knew from experience he’d appreciate.

“Mercy,” he mumbled from behind her. She heard the jingle of his belt buckle as he yanked it open.

“No mercy,” she promised.

Not for her, and not for him. She’d cringed away from colliding with her attraction to Carson—her
feelings
for Carson—for most of her adult life. Enough, already. Let him hit her.
Let him slam into her and knock her over with a tidal wave of sex and passion and deep recognition that she’d felt since the day he first spoke to her in class.

Let it happen, and then she’d see what was left of her when the tide rolled out.

She flopped onto her back and finger-walked her hand down her stomach. “Hurry, or I’ll get the party started without you.”

His dark eyes blazed hot. “Show me what you did that night when you were moaning my name.”

“I’m sure you can imagine it.”

“Don’t make me imagine it. I’m sick of imagining things. I want to see.”

She dropped her hand and showed him. Her slippery fingers inside her body, circling her clit, dipping back and forth until her eyes closed and her other hand found her nipple. She didn’t have to imagine him inside her, because his weight hit the bed and she could feel him breathing, feel his heat. His cock bumped her hip. His mouth covered her exposed breast, and then he pushed her hand upward and said, “Let me help,” and he penetrated her with his fingers while she worked her clit.

Perfect. Perfect heat, perfect pressure, perfect suction on her nipple. It took all of twelve seconds before she said, “I’m going to come,” and he said “Good” and pressed up against her G-spot, hard, and the orgasm leaped the tracks and hurtled into another whole dimension of intensity.

She could hardly breathe. She kept gasping, and he was laughing, pushing her hand aside and moving over her so his chest vibrated against her limp, starfish body. He kissed her, still chuckling.

“Bad form, Vance,” she complained. “You can’t laugh at me for going off like a rocket.”

“I just forgot what you were like.”

“I’m not
like
anything. It’s you, with your giant man-fingers and all those muscles and everything. You’re like an enormous magic sex-toy Christmas present.”

He laughed again, ducking his head against her neck. “You needed to get off for Christmas?”

She shook her head. “All I’m saying is, I’m having a lot of trouble pretending you’re the Virgin Mary at this point.”

That broke him up, and she cradled his head and smiled at the ceiling while he laughed against her neck. The whole hard, naked length of him hovered over her, his thigh splayed between her legs, his arms braced on the mattress. She wanted to keep him there. Always.

She wanted him inside her even more.

“Get off me, and I’ll go get a condom from the bathroom.”

“I’ve got one in my jeans.”

“Of course you do. You always have a condom handy. It’s one of your enormous magic sex-toy features.”

“I always have a condom handy in Potter Falls.”

“What, it’s just me you have oops sex with at random, inopportune moments?”

“Yep.” He brushed her hair off her forehead. “You’re special, Jules.”

“Aww. Thanks, sweet pea. Now go get the condom.”

He got it. While he was opening the package, she slid down his body and warmed him up with her mouth, just to make sure he was ready. He was so ready.

By the time he’d rolled the condom on, Julie was ready again, too, but she felt like teasing him, so she threw a leg over his hips.

“Cowgirl?” she asked.

He had her on her back so fast, the walls blurred. “Not a fucking chance.”

“I thought you liked cowgirl.”

“Honest to God.” He pushed up her knee and thrust inside her, not bothering with slow or careful because he knew she was ready, and he knew how they fit. Perfect. “It’s like you don’t remember me at all.”

Carson liked to be on top.

He grabbed her wrists and locked her arms over her head.

She lifted her hips and wrapped her legs around him, arched her back, tossed her head.

In the middle of her, that deep, satisfying ache. That wet heat of intrusion. She loved it so much. She’d missed it in a way she never admitted to herself.

She was a goner, lost in a terrifying impulse. Too late to turn back. Impossible not to admit that this was what she’d wanted, what she always wanted from him.

Impossible to pretend she hadn’t loved him all this time.

But she didn’t have to say it. She could be who he needed her to be, even now.

“Jeezy Pete,” she said, putting as much round-eyed
ohmygoodness
into her voice as she could manage. “You
are
hard.”

And that was the last coherent remark she formed before she lost her mind, and all she could do was meet him stroke for stroke, take him in, kiss him, and jabber senseless words in his ear, dirty words that made him go faster and harder and deeper and man, oh man, there was nothing like this.

There was no one like Carson.

He made her come, and he kept going, let her catch up, and made her come again.

They kept doing it, pausing to rest and make each other laugh and run down to the kitchen for snacks. They didn’t stop until she ran out of condoms, and by then, it was almost
dawn.

Chapter Eight

It was the kind of high that lasted. Carson figured the staying power of this particular Julie high probably had something to do with the fact that they were always postcoital, midcoital, or precoital. Basically, his entire life now boiled down to sex, foreplay, and sleeping. Not necessarily in that order.

He walked around town with a smug expression on his face—he’d caught it in a shop window, the answer to the hitherto perplexing riddle of why everyone seemed to be smiling at him. Strangers on the street. Uncle Bruce at the hardware store. Even his father, once, briefly, and possibly by accident.

They were smiling at him because he looked happy.

He thought nobody had the power to bring him down from it. Then he ran into Leo at the diner.

Carson was minding his own business, drinking coffee and looking at a pamphlet about gold-leaf restoration he’d tracked down on eBay. The Potter Falls bank, a squat marble structure with a gilded dome, needed a facelift, and he had some notion of figuring out what needed to be done with the dome and … well, he didn’t know what. It wasn’t a job that could be dealt with in the winter. He could leave the pamphlet with Julie, though, if it came to that, and ask her to pass the info along to the historical society ladies.

Leo plucked the pamphlet out of Carson’s hand and studied the title page as he took a seat across the booth. “Little light reading?”

“What do you want?”

“My key back, for starters.”

Carson fished his key ring out of his pocket and started unthreading the loaned key to the shoe-factory building.

“Here you go.”

Leo took the key. The waiter set Carson’s plate on the tabletop. Grilled cheese and fries that no longer looked all that appetizing.

“You’ve been over there a few times.”

He’d been in there twice more. There was something sacred about what came over him in that place. A weight that he ached for—a trust or an anchor, or possibly both.

“I just poked around.”

“Have you talked to Julie about it?”

Carson looked down at his hand wrapped around the mug. He hadn’t. If he told her, she’d hear something different from what he was saying. She would get her hopes up.

Or maybe she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the same girl he’d left here all those years ago. She had her own life, and she knew the score as well as he did.

“I think you should,” Leo said.

“Yeah, well, no offense, but who asked you?”

Leo sort of smiled and shook his head. He leaned back against the booth, his legs widespread, his open face disarmed in a way that made Carson uncomfortable. “Do you even remember why you hate me?”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I’m curious. Do you remember?”

“ ’Course I remember.”

He hated Leo because they’d been best friends. From somewhere in the mists of time around second grade all the way through to their sophomore year in high school, Leo was always over at the house, eating Mom’s cookies, playing Legos, watching TV, and doing homework with him. Until they’d fought.

“Then say it.”

“We argued.”

“About?”

“About me leaving.” Story of his life.

Carson took a bite of the grilled cheese. It was dry and cold, and he had to work hard to chew it.

“You said Potter Falls was a shitty little backwater, and you couldn’t get out of here fast enough.”

“And you said you were going to own the place one day, and I was going to die alone out in the world somewhere, and nobody would notice or care.”

Leo nodded. “So why was that it for us?”

“What do you mean?”

Leo leaned forward. “It wasn’t much of an argument, Carse. You insulted Potter Falls, which you knew damn well means a lot to me, and I was pissed off because I cared more what you thought than anybody else. And jealous because you were going to leave me here for something better, and I knew even then I’d never leave. I said something in the heat of the moment that I later regretted. We were fifteen. Why didn’t you ever get over it?”

He’d never gotten over it because Leo turned into a pompous asshole who’d grown three inches their junior year in high school, taken possession of his father’s three-year-old Mercedes, and started escorting girls to the movies in Fenimore.

But maybe that wasn’t much of a reason, either.

Carson shrugged.

Leo squinted at him.

He had green eyes, the best feature left in a face that wasn’t aging with much grace. Piercing, intelligent eyes that Carson had sometimes felt could see further inside him than anyone else’s.

“Are you back or not?” Leo asked.

Carson shrugged again.

“Are you going to break her heart this time?”

Digging his wallet out of his pocket, Carson stood up. He dropped a ten on the table. He’d nearly cleared the door when he heard Leo’s last words.

“If you decide to stay, look me up. We could use somebody with your skills in this town.”

Carson stalked up the street, away from the meager offerings of downtown Potter Falls.

Fucking Leo Potter. Lord of the manor. King of the Chamber of Commerce.

Hard to feel anything but animosity toward the guy who’d been banging Julie not too long ago.

Especially when he’d once known you better than anybody.

Especially when you were afraid he might be right.

Carson had made it a personal goal to seduce Julie in every room of the mansion.

There were a lot of rooms.

It helped that she was airing them out, changing all the linens in preparation for the arrival of guests in a few days. He would find her when he got back from his morning poker match with his dad or after he finished whatever chores she’d given him to do—put the star on top of her Christmas tree, strip a wallpaper border from the guest bathroom on the first floor, build custom shelving for a small, triangular closet wedged into a weird angle of the kitchen that Julie wanted to turn into a pantry.

This afternoon, a fine coating of sawdust covered his arms, and he found her on the second story, vacuuming under a bed. She sat up when she heard his knock, took one look at his face, and said, “No way. I’m all grimy.”

“I like grimy.”

“I stink.”

“So do I.”

She snorted. “That’s not exactly an enticement.”

Carson sank to his knees behind her and widened his thighs to straddle her bent legs. He
coaxed her back against him and wrapped one arm around her waist.

“It’ll be primitive and nasty,” he said against her ear. “That’s the best kind.”

“Only men think that’s the best kind.”

He took her breast in his hand and rubbed his thumb over her nipple. “You can bite me if you want.”

“I bet you taste like salty meat.”

“With sawdust on top.”

“I’m getting wet just thinking about it.”

He took a chance and unzipped her pants. She was. “You’re such a pervert.”

“Takes one to know one.”

He slipped his hand through her folds, his finger over her clit until she moaned and bumped her ass back into him with a light collision.

“Your hands drive me crazy.”

“Your everything drives me crazy.” A harder bump. “I’m going to fuck you from behind now.”

“God, the sweet nothings.” But she was panting, and she sounded happy.

“Until you grunt.”

“I never grunt.”

He grinned and dropped his zipper. “You will this time.”

She did, too. Afterward, he helped her finish the room, cleaned them both up over the course of a long, slightly depraved shower, and made her dinner in repayment.

Carson had finally figured out how to get his father out of the house. The magic words turned out to be “Julie needs your help.”

It was sort of true. Or at least within range of the truth. He’d been fussing with the triangular closet shelves for a couple days, but he wasn’t happy with the way they were coming out. Bruce reminded him in an excessively casual way that when it came to custom work, Martin did the best carpentry of anybody in town.