Chapter Nineteen
Eleanor had never thought of her bathroom as a sexy place before, but as she took her shower late on Monday morning, all she could picture in her head was the way Will had taken her up against the wall of her shower yesterday.
She was a sick person, obviously. Everything in her house reminded her of sex now, from the sight of her shampoo and conditioner bottles to the Christmas wreath she’d hung on her front door—the scent was pine, just like Will. She couldn’t even look at her comfy sweatpants in the same way—every time she glanced at them, she remembered the feel of Will’s hands beneath the fabric, exploring her skin.
Her face flamed. She was sick, all right. She hadn’t checked Dr. Bridges’s symptom checker in ages, it felt like, but as soon as she was done with her shower, she found her phone and pulled up the app.
But what was her symptom? Sex on the brain? While she deliberated on what to type into the app, her phone rang, and Summer’s name flashed on the screen. Eleanor answered it immediately. “Hey, what’s up?”
“You have to come,” Summer said. “I want you, Becca, and Hayley there, and it is going to be awesome.”
“What is it?”
“A Licorice Fiddles show!” Summer said, squealing.
“A what show?” Eleanor asked, amused by Summer’s squealing.
“No. What? You haven’t heard of them? I’m going to get you their latest album, you’ve gotta listen to it beforehand so you can sing along at the show.”
Eleanor had never heard Summer sound so manic before. “Oh—okay,” she said. “Are you sure you want me to come, and not Jackson?”
“It’s my Christmas present from Jackson,” Summer said, laughing. “I want to spend it with my friends. Then I come home, and it’s just me and Jackson, and it’s Christmas all over again. We’re going out to pizza tonight to plan everything. Tell me you’ll be there.”
“I’ll be there,” Eleanor said.
Summer hung up with another giddy squeal, and Eleanor laughed, staring at her phone.
*
Will knocked on her door at seven. He’d called her not long after Summer, asking if he could drive her to the pizza place. Eleanor smoothed down the dress she was wearing over a pair of comfy leggings, making sure it didn’t look bunchy. She fluffed her hair, then opened the door.
“You look amazing,” Will said.
“Thanks. And thanks for picking me up.”
“Happy to do it.” He grinned that heart-stopping grin, the one that promised mischief and pleasure and toe-curling good times.
She shook her finger at him. “Oh, no, mister. Don’t smile at me like that or we might never make it to dinner.”
“We could order in,” he said, grabbing her finger and giving it a little nibble. “It’s not my fault that everything associated with you now reminds me of sex.”
“You, too?” she asked.
He crowded her against the door frame. “I want you pretty much all the time,” he said, nipping her neck.
“Bitey man.” She rolled her head to the side, giving him easier access to the spot behind her ear that made her entire body turn to mush.
“Dinner,” he said, stepping away abruptly. “Need to feed you so you have more energy for later.”
Pouting, she followed him to his truck.
Pizza My Heart wasn’t too crowded on a Monday night, so their party of six had a large corner of the dining room to themselves. They ordered a pitcher of beer, although Hayley asked for a milkshake, making Will and Jackson laugh. Eleanor guessed it was an old joke.
Hayley and Jackson hadn’t batted an eye when Will held Eleanor’s hand at the table. Hayley just gave her a quick flash of a smile, and it confirmed what Eleanor had suspected—Hayley had known all along.
Hayley nudged Eleanor at a break in the conversation. “You know your celebrity couple name is Willie, right?”
Eleanor snorted. “What?”
“Will and Ellie make Willie.”
“My name’s Eleanor,” she said with a pointed look.
“Well, Ellie is what he calls you,” Hayley said, sticking out her tongue. “It makes Willie.”
“Ignore her,” Will stage-whispered in Eleanor’s ear. “She fell out of the treehouse all the time as a child. I think she hit her head too much.”
Eleanor giggled.
“I wonder where Becca is,” Summer said, checking her phone. Then she frowned. “She can’t make it. But, ohmygosh, look!” She held her phone up. “Alana, the lead for the Licorice Fiddles! Look!”
Eleanor smiled at the expression of joy on Summer’s face.
“We can’t see it if you keep waving your phone around like that,” Jackson teased.
Summer rolled her eyes. “Alana tweeted about us—here, I’ll read it. Our social media guru Jackson Jaynes just bought family tix for our XMas Tacoma show. Sucker! We’d have gotten him in free.”
“Breathe, baby,” Jackson said, pretending to fan Summer.
She swatted him. “How can I breathe when Alana’s texting about us? I feel faint.”
“We could check it in the symptom checker,” Eleanor said, holding up her phone.
“The what?” Marius said, pouring beer.
“Symptom checker,” Eleanor said, a little more shyly now that everyone was staring at her. “It’s this thing, through the Dr. Bridges website. You just type in your symptoms and it tells you what might be wrong with you.”
“That is the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard of,” Hayley said, snatching Eleanor’s phone. “Where’s the app?”
Eleanor pointed it out, and Hayley started narrating aloud as she typed, “Jackson’s head is swollen.” Hayley tapped the button to submit the symptoms and announced, “Jackson’s either got meningitis, a subdural hematoma, or…he’s an egotistical bastard.”
“It does not say that,” Jackson said.
“Dr. Bridges says so, and he knows what’s what,” Hayley said. “Or is Dr. Bridges a she? Now I feel sexist.”
Marius took Eleanor’s phone from Hayley. “Dr. Bridges is a dude—there he is in the picture.”
“Actually,” Eleanor said, “Dr. Bridges is really more an amalgam of several doctors—male and female, I’d imagine. But I usually think of Dr. Bridges as a man. Probably because of the picture.”
Summer asked if she could look at the app, and Marius passed it to her. “Incredible,” Summer said. “I could see myself going crazy checking every little twinge.”
“I sort of do that,” Eleanor said, feeling herself blush.
“Aw, sweetheart, you’re perfect,” Will said, and the endearment sounded so natural coming from his lips, Eleanor would’ve been surprised to learn that they’d been apart for four years.
He punctuated the statement by dragging her over to him on the bench seat so her legs were draped over his knees, and kissing her cheek.
She felt like her face was glowing with gooey love feelings. This man was well on his way to taming her again.
“So, the Tacoma trip,” Summer said.
“Tacoma?” Eleanor asked.
“Yeah, the Licorice Fiddles are playing at a club downtown. That’s okay, right? It’s only an hour or so to get there, and we can either come back that night, or stay over at a hotel. The guys can come, too, but it’ll be just us girls at the show.”
“Girls night out!” Hayley said, raising her milkshake.
Eleanor couldn’t help her smile. She had been completely embraced by these people, brought into a group of friends who were including her without question. It felt like she’d always belonged with them.
“I don’t know if we should all be going to Tacoma,” Will said.
Hayley reached around Eleanor to smack him on the shoulder. “It took a wedding and a mate to get you here, and now you don’t want to leave?”
Eleanor opened her mouth to ask about “mate,” which must refer to her but sounded awfully weird, but Will glared at Hayley. Even Eleanor felt slightly cowed under that stare.
“You okay?” Eleanor asked him.
The intense look in Will’s eyes faded as he turned his attention back to Eleanor. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
After a few minutes, the conversation returned to the original teasing, jokes, and conversation, and everyone seemed to have forgotten Will’s reluctance to go to Tacoma. But Eleanor didn’t. And she also couldn’t help but notice his tight grip on the steering wheel of his truck as they drove back to her place.
“I want to talk,” she said.
He looked over at her, then back to the road. “Of course. What’s up?”
“Something’s wrong.”
“You sense something?” His voice sounded alarmed. “Like a bad feeling?”
“No, all I sense is that you’re not…ugh. Will, would you just pull over for a second?” She wanted to look at him, face to face, and find out what was bugging him.
They’d reached the turn-off for the Jaynes property, so Will drove up that road and up the old driveway. It was a route so familiar to Eleanor she could probably follow it with her eyes closed.
He stopped them when they were out of sight of the road and faced her, taking her hand. “Ellie,” he said. “What’s going on?”
“You haven’t been yourself since the Tacoma thing,” she said, her voice sharp.
“Worried about the territory is all,” he said, his voice gruff.
“Territory?”
“Property, I mean. Yeah.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Give me a kiss, help me forget. Everyone thinks I’m crazy for worrying.”
Eleanor kissed him, and didn’t protest in the slightest when his tongue touched her lips and transformed the kiss from something sweet to urgent. She pulled off his shirt, wanting to feel his rippling muscles beneath her fingers with no fabric in the way. Skin to skin.
His tongue was hot and wet, searching through their kiss, through the oblivion he seemed to crave. He pulled away for a moment and whispered, his voice guttural, “Take off those leggings. And your panties.”
“Bossy,” she muttered.
He laughed. “You’re the one in charge. You always have been. From the very beginning.”
Maybe he’d chased her, maybe he’d tamed her. But she laughed, knowing what he said was also true: she was in charge. As she slid off first her boots, then her leggings and underwear, she looked at him in the shadowy cab of the truck and felt the smirk on her face. His expression was rapt, and she could hear his breath coming just as heavily as hers in the enclosed space.
He unfastened his jeans and slid them down along with his boxer briefs, freeing his erection. When he turned back to face her, his expression was dark with lust, eyes half-lidded, mouth determined. “Come sit on my lap,” he said.
Not interested in questioning the order, she clambered over as gracefully as possible, but when she started to straddle him, he maneuvered her so she was facing the windshield.
“Easier to touch you this way,” he said, pressing a kiss to her shoulder.
She could feel his lips through the thin cotton of her dress. Not only that, she could feel a much larger, more insistent part of him pressing against her bare thigh. She shivered.
“You cold?” he asked. “I can turn up the heat.” He brought one of his hands around, skimming it slowly along underneath the hem of her dress before traveling up to her breasts.
“Not—not cold,” she gasped as he tweaked one of her nipples.
“Good.” He kissed her shoulder again, then bit it a little too hard before pressing another kiss there.
Eleanor thought she might fall over. The desire flooding her system was overpowering, despite the less-than-romantic setting. Will’s bossiness, the little bit of roughness he was exhibiting, was a huge freaking turn-on.
“Hold onto the steering wheel,” he said. “I’m gonna touch you everywhere.”
Nodding wordlessly, she did as he told her. He lowered the zipper on the side of her dress, loosening the constricting fabric but leaving it in place. Then he reached up the back of her dress, his hands hot and big, until he found the snap of her bra and unfastened it. He didn’t remove her clothing, but left it hanging on her as he began to explore. The sensation of his lips at the back of her neck had her squirming almost as much as his fingers lightly pinching her nipples.
“Will—” she panted.
“Yes?”
He sounded so calm, so infuriatingly calm. How could she admit that he was torturing her?
“Noth-nothing,” she said.
His teeth grazed her shoulder, followed by laps of his warm tongue. And his dick was right there, close to her entrance, tantalizing in its nearness. Her thighs were damp. If she could maneuver just a tiny bit to the right…
A hot hand clamped down on her hip. “Hold still,” he said. “I’m not done touching.”
“You mean teasing,” she said, not even trying to hide the sulkiness from her voice. He was torturing her and he knew it and he knew that she knew it. Why bother pretending otherwise?
With a smile in his voice, he said, “Tomato, tomahto.”
“No,” she said. “It’s just tomato. Nobody around here says tomahto.” The irritation left her voice and her last words turned into a whine as he pinched one of her nipples even harder. She arched her back into the feeling—pleasure and the tiniest bit of pain.
And then that hand—the one not holding her hip in place so she couldn’t wiggle too much—went down her stomach and settled between her legs.
She gave up trying to think or have any control whatsoever, simply lost herself in the sensation of his fingers moving through her folds, moving slick and light over her clitoris. “Will,” she said, “please.”
“So polite,” he murmured.
“I am not fucking kidding around.”
His chuckle sounded evil, but he gave her what she wanted, guiding himself into her entrance and plunging inside. The relief was exquisite, but it only fueled more desire, more want. She clung to the steering wheel like it was the only thing holding her on earth, because otherwise she’d float up into the heavens on sensation alone, gripping Will inside her, over her, through her.
He feathered his finger over her clit and bit her shoulder again. She came in a sudden explosion of sensation, her whole body tense, out of her control. She was Will’s, truly and completely.
“Ellie,” he groaned, clamping her tightly to him with those muscular arms.
She felt his release within her and she sighed, leaning her head back to rest on his shoulder. He kissed her neck, nuzzling close so that the faint whiskers of his five o’clock shadow tickled her cheek.
They rested, catching their breath, and Eleanor realized that although they’d talked about his concerns for the property, and his “bad feeling,” she still didn’t know what was going on in that big handsome head of his.
He loosened one of his arms around her torso just enough to skim his hand along her bare thigh, raising goosebumps in its wake.
Later. They could talk later.