When Cal walked into the Butternut Library a couple of days later, he didn’t see Billy. He did, however, see a redheaded woman sitting at the checkout desk, reading Car and Driver magazine. “Can I help you?” she asked without raising her eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “Is Billy here?”
She looked up, suddenly animated, and Cal got the distinct impression she already knew who he was.
“Billy’s in the computer area with our tech support,” she said, pointing him in the right direction. “Go straight back and to the left.”
“Thanks,” Cal said. When he got to the computer area, he saw Billy talking to a boy who couldn’t have been older than fourteen. He was sitting on a swivel chair and typing furiously on a laptop balanced on his knees.
“Is this really necessary?” Billy was asking him as Cal approached.
“Yes. I need to do a security update on the router’s firmware.”
“I thought . . . we already had a firewall for security.”
“We do. But there’s a vulnerability in it, and I need to apply a security patch to prevent DOS attacks.”
Billy started to say something, but she stopped when she saw Cal. “Hi,” she said, immediately flustered. “Are you . . . ordering more books?”
“Not today. I just wanted to . . .” I just wanted to be with you, he almost said, but her tech support had stopped typing on his laptop and had swiveled his chair around so that he was facing them. “I’m sorry,” Cal said. “Were you two not done here?”
“No, we’re done,” she said. “I’m mean, I’m done. Anton won’t rest until our computers are more secure than the Pentagon’s.”
“Actually, that’s not possible,” Anton said seriously. “The Pentagon has this program called ‘Hack the Pentagon.’ It actually invites select hackers to break into its computer system so it can find and fix weaknesses before they’re exploited.”
“All right, well, I think we can agree we don’t need to do that here,” Billy said, sounding faintly agitated. And then, as if remembering herself, she introduced them. “Anton, this is Cal. He’s visiting here for the summer. And Cal, this is Anton. He knows more about computers than anyone within a sixty-mile radius.”
“That is possible,” Anton said without a flicker of a smile. He did, however, shake the hand that Cal had extended to him.
“Anton, I need to speak to Cal now,” Billy said. “If there are more issues with our router, we can discuss them later,” she added firmly, and she led Cal over to the sitting area, which was empty now.
“Your tech support looks like he’s in high school,” Cal said, keeping his voice low.
“Oh, he is. He’ll be a junior this year,” she said, starting to gather up a few newspapers and magazines that visitors had left lying around. “Are you sure I can’t help you with something?” she asked, going to hang a newspaper up on a rack. “Or did you stop by just to . . . talk?” She smiled, a little shyly. God, she looked pretty today, Cal thought. She was wearing one of those summery print dresses she seemed to favor and a pair of flat sandals. Her long brunette hair was pinned up in a kind of bun, though a few strands had escaped from it and were floating appealingly around her face.
“No, actually I came by to see if you wanted to have lunch,” Cal said.
“Lunch?” She glanced at her watch. “It’s two thirty.”
“Is it that late?”
She nodded. “I took my lunch hour at twelve thirty.”
“So take another one,” the redhead from the front desk said, bustling into the sitting area.
“Cal, have you met Rae?” Billy asked.
“I have now,” Cal said as they shook hands.
But Rae was all business. “I’ll take over here,” she said. “I’ll make sure Anton doesn’t make our system so secure we can’t even get into it. And you,” she said to Billy. “You need to take a second lunch break. Right now.”
Billy hesitated, but Rae took her arm and started steering her toward the library’s front door. “All right,” Billy said, obviously amused by Rae’s pushiness. “I’ll go. I just need to get my purse.” Rae, satisfied, disappeared into the stacks, and Billy retrieved her purse from the checkout desk drawer. “It’s hard to believe sometimes,” she confided to Cal, “that Rae works for me.”
“Still, she seems like an excellent employee,” Cal said, eliciting a laugh from her.
“Do you want to go to Pearl’s?” Billy asked once they were standing in the bright sunshine on the library’s front steps.
“No. I already ate.”
“I thought you said—”
“I wanted to be alone with you,” Cal said, turning to her. “I was up all night last night thinking about you.”
“You were?” she said, blushing.
“Yes, I was,” he said. “Do you want to go for a drive?”
“That depends. Is Officer Sawyer going to pull us over?”
“No. I’ll drive at the speed limit, I promise.”
“All right, let’s go,” she said with a little shrug, and she let him take her hand and lead her over to the next block, where his car was parked. It wasn’t until he’d reached the edge of town and, through sheer force of habit, found himself driving in the direction of the lake, that Billy asked with a trace of amusement, “Where are we going?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet,” he said. “Any suggestions?”
“The town beach? That’s close.”
“Hmm.” He looked at her, his eyes lingering on her legs. Her dress wasn’t immodest in any way, but it still left plenty of bare leg exposed. He swallowed hard. “Isn’t the town beach kind of crowded?”
“Only if you consider fifteen hundred sticky toddlers and their exhausted mothers crowded,” she joked.
“Right,” he said, glancing over at her again.
“You keep looking at my legs,” she said.
“Do I?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I want you to look at them.”
“Do you?” He looked at them again, and swerved his car slightly in the process.
“I mean, I want you to look at them if you can look at them and stay on the road at the same time.”
He laughed. But before he could look at them again, she took one of his hands off the wheel and placed it on her knee. “Maybe that’s safer,” she said.
“You think so?” he asked, marveling at the softness of her skin beneath his hand. He caressed her knee and then gave it a little squeeze. They were on Butternut Lake Drive, the foliage so thick that it formed a green canopy over the road and only occasionally allowed a glimpse of the iridescent lake through the trees on their left. He moved his hand off her knee and began to slide it slowly up the velvety inside of her thigh.
“Here, take this right,” she said, suddenly.
He slowed down, but there was nothing on his right but the entrance to an abandoned logging road. “Here?” he asked.
“Why not? No one uses these anymore.”
He hesitated for less than a second before turning down it. Thankfully it hadn’t rained in several days; a little mud, Cal thought, and he would have spent the rest of the afternoon digging his car out. Even as it was, though, the ride in his Porsche was a little bumpier than he would have liked. He was driving with two hands again, and Billy, he noticed, was bracing herself against the dashboard. When they’d driven a couple of hundred yards into the woods, she indicated a little clearing just off the trail. He turned into it, cut the engine, and looked around. “This is nice,” he said of the dappled sunlight playing around them and the sweet-scented air coming in through the car’s open windows.
“It is nice,” she agreed, but he could see her shyness had returned. God damn, he thought, who knew shyness could be so sexy? He reached over and brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. Then, leaning over the console, he kissed her in a way that was meant to communicate what exactly he wanted the two of them to do together right now. He thought she understood, too, when a tiny moan escaped her.
“I wish this wasn’t here,” she said, indicating the gearshift.
“I wish I had a backseat,” he said, still kissing her.
“I wish you had a Range Rover.”
“Billy, if I’d known I was going to meet you this summer, I would have bought a Hummer.” She laughed, but the fact remained that there was only so close they could get to each other in this car, which was ironic considering how little room it had. After some more kissing and touching, Cal failed to see any humor in the situation at all. “Do you think you could . . . come over here?” he said of his side of the car. “I could slide my seat back.”
“I—I don’t know,” she said. “I can barely move in here. I can try, though.” She tried. “Oh my God,” she muttered when she got stuck at one point, “what would Lizzie Bennet say?”
“Who’s she?” Cal asked, trying to help her.
“A friend of mine,” she said, wriggling mightily. “Well, actually, she’s a character in a Jane Austen novel. And she would definitely not approve of this.”
Finally, with his help, she succeeded in climbing over the gearshift lever. Billy was straddling his lap—who knew it was possible for someone to straddle anything as demurely as she was straddling his lap?—and they were laughing and kissing at the same time. Cal couldn’t get enough of her. Her mouth was cool and sweet, and her body pressed—no, wedged—against his managed to feel both firm and supple. He wanted to touch her everywhere at the same time. He brought a hand up to the front of her dress and started to unbutton it, which was no easy feat. He had so little room to maneuver that he was tempted to just rip the whole thing off her.
But no, he wanted to undress her with care. And besides, her dress was way too pretty to rip. So he unbuttoned another button and peeled open the top. He could see her bra now; it was buttercup yellow. He smiled. Of course she was wearing a buttercup-yellow bra. It was just the kind of thing he imagined Billy wearing. He ran his fingers over the outside of that bra, and when he felt her hardening nipple dimpling the fabric, he slipped his hand inside it and caressed her breast. Her skin here was soft, too, softer even than the inside of her thighs. His fingers settled on her nipple and stroked it, gently and then harder, until Billy squirmed in his lap in a way that made him groan. “I’m so glad you wore a dress,” he said, reaching under it with his other hand. “Especially since I don’t think we have enough room to take all our clothes off.”
“Oh my God, Cal, are we really going to do this?” she whispered, her breath soft on his cheek. “In here?”
“I hope so,” he said. “Why? Are you worried about what Lizzie will think?”
“It’s way too late for that. I just didn’t realize people actually . . . did this in cars. I mean, on TV or in the movies, but in real life . . . ?”
“Are you kidding? People do it in cars all the time. It’s like . . . America’s pastime,” he said, nuzzling her neck with his lips.
“Isn’t that baseball?” she asked absently. He already knew she loved it when he touched her neck.
“Then it’s America’s other pastime,” he said, and he moved his lips to the extrasensitive hollow at the base of her neck.
After a few more minutes of him kissing and tonguing her there, she moaned a tiny moan. “Oh, all right, fine,” she said. “What the hell.” And when she kissed him now, he could feel her breasts through the thin, silky material of her bra. Her hands groped impatiently at his hardness through his blue jeans.
Cal wanted her so badly now he couldn’t even think clearly. He tried to stay in the moment, though. And it was such a good moment. It was a lovely day, and there was a lovely woman straddling his lap. He breathed in the scent of her. It was delicious. Clean, like soap. But warm, too, and summery, as if she had the smell of the sun on her skin and the wind in her hair. He kissed her deeply and put his hands on her waist. She wriggled against him in a way that made him almost crazy with his desire for her. He was considering how best to remove her panties within the ridiculous confines of his front seat when he heard a noise. A faint humming noise like a mosquito, only from farther away. He tried to ignore it, but it got closer and louder. No, it was not like a mosquito, he decided. It was more like a lawnmower, a very large lawnmower.
He pulled his mouth reluctantly away from hers. “What’s that noise?”
“What noise?” Billy asked, kissing him again.
“Listen,” he said. She kept kissing him, though. “Do you hear it?” he asked, interrupting her. “It’s getting closer now.” She paused, and Cal saw the exact moment when Billy heard it. She bit her lip in consternation. “Oh no,” she said, trying to scramble off his lap, and then giving up and reaching to open his car door.
“What?” he said, watching her practically tumble out of the car. “I thought you said this was just an old logging trail.”
“It is. But it’s an old logging trail that people ride ATVs on sometimes,” she said, glancing back at the trail behind them.
“Oh, Christ,” Cal groaned. As she straightened and pulled the bunched skirt of her dress down, he was treated to a last glimpse of her pale, smooth thighs. She looked so rumpled, so sexy, and so tempting standing there, buttoning the buttons on her dress, that he almost told her to stop, to get back into the car, and give the fast approaching off-roaders something to remember. But he knew she couldn’t be persuaded to do this now, so he got out of the Porsche, closed the door, and leaned casually against it, as if the two of them had come out here just to have a conversation.
And no sooner had Billy finished buttoning up her dress than two boys on Motocross bikes came barreling down the logging road behind them. Billy waved to their occupants and their occupants waved back before disappearing down the trail.
Cal exhaled slowly and smiled at Billy, though his body was practically aching with disappointment. “I’ve got to get back. I’m sorry,” she said, leaning over and giving him a conciliatory kiss on the lips.
“Don’t be,” he said, putting his arms around her waist. “Just come over to my cabin tonight.”
“I can’t. I have a library board meeting this evening, and they can last for hours. And then I have Luke . . . What about on Saturday?”
Cal shook his head. “I can’t. I’m going to Minneapolis to see a friend of mine from graduate school.”
“That sounds nice,” Billy said.
“Well it’s not just a social visit. He’s got his own architectural firm, and he wants me to take a look at it. He might be expanding. I’m probably going to be there at least for a week, but I’d like to see you when I get back,” he said seriously.
“All right,” she said. “Except for next Friday. I’m driving Luke to camp.” She sighed a little sigh. “Why do I feel like we’re two ships in the night?”
Cal smiled. “I’m hoping eventually we’ll collide.”