Chapter Seventeen
Cassidy tried to keep her mind on her work, and she managed it, more or less, until that awkward mid-afternoon gap. There was no lunch rush to clean up from, and they were done with all their prep for dinner. They’d established a pattern in the last couple weeks of this being their make-out time. She saw Will wipe his hands and hang the cloth back on its hook and then look at her speculatively. She might as well get it over with.
“We need to cool it,” she said. “You asked me to marry you yesterday, in front of Emily. Obviously you’re not catching on to the ‘casual’ idea, so there’s no more ‘casual.’ Understood?”
“Absolutely,” he said with an enthusiasm that seemed a bit out of place. “No more casual, no more sneaking around and hiding in the back room. I think that’s great.”
“Okay,” she said. She’d been expecting more resistance, maybe even thought about letting herself be persuaded. Stupid to feel deflated, and even more stupid to be thinking about playing those sorts of games with him. She wasn’t a tease, not usually, and she sure as hell couldn’t afford to start new habits with a man like Will. “So—”
She’d been about to suggest they take the opportunity to close for an hour so she could run a few errands, but then she noticed that Will wasn’t walking away. He wasn’t ducking under the counter and heading for the door. He was approaching her, his gaze intent and heated.
Her whole body flushed in response. She wanted to step forward, wanted to throw herself at him, but she backed up instead, finding the counter at her back and trying to borrow some of its stability. “Will—” she began.
His voice was low when he interrupted. “No more casual,” he repeated. “No more hiding.” He was close, now, and he stopped moving long enough to look into her eyes. Looking for refusal, she realized. She could stop him with just a shake of her head, a wrinkle of her nose.
There was no moonlight to blame, but all the same she didn’t move a muscle, and he reached for her.
The kiss was rough, his mouth demanding instead of requesting, his arms holding her where he wanted her, his body a hard answer to questions she hadn’t thought of yet. And she gave in to it, let herself be swept away. Oh, the feel of his stubble as he pressed his open mouth to her neck, sucking and nipping and taking whatever he wanted from her. One hand on her back, pulling her closer, the other under her shirt, up to the side of her breast and then working in between their bodies to find her nipple, hard and straining against the fabric of her bra. He pulled away just far enough so he could slide his mouth down to her other breast, sucking on her through her shirt, then leaning his head back and impatiently jerking her top off over her head.
They were in the front of the diner. Anyone could walk by, look in, and see—oh, they could see his mouth trailing lower, raising goose bumps all along her tummy as it passed. They’d see her throwing her head back, cradling his head in her hands to make sure he didn’t get away, to keep him exactly where he was doing exactly what he was doing.
It was Will who had the sense to head to the back room. His hands under her ass again, lifting her, turning her, kissing as they moved, deep, wet kisses that felt more intimate than any sex Cassidy had ever had. These kisses said something. They spoke of desire, but of more than that, of something she wasn’t ready to discuss or even acknowledge, not under normal circumstances.
They stumbled through the door to the back room and Will set her down on the chest freezer. Perfect. Her head was a little higher than his, and she liked it, liked being able to control the kiss, to bend his head back and take what she wanted. She wrapped her legs around him and pushed herself forward, feeling his hardness through her jeans and his damn dress pants. So close to where she needed it, but frustratingly out of reach.
His lips didn’t leave hers as he fumbled with the button and then the fly of her jeans, and she lifted herself, dragging her body up and closer to his as he eased her pants off her ass, down over her hips. And then his hand was there, his fingers sinking into her as his thumb found her clit, and it was too, too much. She cried out, arched into him, lost all sense of where or even who she was as she gave in to the sensations. He was inside her, outside her, all around her, and she needed him. She needed more, just a little bit, she needed, oh, just like that. “Will,” she gasped. “Oh God, Will!” She fought for control. This was too much. She was too vulnerable with Will just watching her.
“Trust me,” he whispered. It was impossible to resist. She did trust him, and she let go. Her whole body shook, the waves of pleasure rolling through her over and over again.
When she managed to come back to herself, Will’s fingers were still inside her, still moving, gently, comfortably. He’d eased off on her now too-sensitive clit, but the fierceness of his gaze made it clear they weren’t finished.
“There’s nothing casual anymore,” he growled. He was still fully clothed, still gave the impression of being in control of himself as long as she didn’t pay attention to the need in his eyes. He unclipped her bra with one hand and slipped the fabric off her breasts before covering them again, his mouth on one side, his hand on the other.
He was in charge. She’d lost track of what was giving and what was taking, because it was all too mixed up in a mass of mutual need. He slid his mouth down her body, crouched a little, and then lifted her, rearranged her until she was half lying on the freezer, her knees over his shoulder, his mouth—
Oh, his mouth exactly where it needed to be. His fingers were still inside her and they started moving again, pressing forward toward his hunger. He grazed her clit with his teeth, sucked, flicked with his tongue. She thought about telling him it hadn’t been enough time, she couldn’t get excited again right away, but just as she opened her mouth to speak he hit the perfect spot, inside and outside at the same time, and her word came out as a high, desperate moan.
Her response clearly spurred him on, and she gave in to the sensations again. Her eyes closed as her back arched, and she just let it all happen. She barely noticed him shifting around, although at some point she realized her legs were wrapped around shoulders that used to be clothed and were now naked. That felt right, felt good, but there was still something more she wanted. Then Will shifted again, this time kissing his way up her belly to her breasts, and then to her lips. He was tight against her, the head of his cock rubbing the same swollen flesh his mouth had just been devouring. Again, there was a pause, a check of her expression to be sure she wanted the next step.
He saw what he was looking for, apparently, because the next move was a slick, hard slide inside of her. God, yes, that was what she’d been missing. She needed to feel full, stretched, needed their joining to be as complete as it could be.
And Will seemed focused on the same goal. He drove into her hard, his hands on her hips to steady her and pull her to him. He didn’t speak, but he stared at her, and when she closed her eyes to escape his gaze, he slowed his movement. “Look at me,” he said. Ordered. And damn it, she did as he said. Just for right then, just when he was making her feel so good, when they were both naked and honest together. For right then, she’d give him what he wanted.
He gave her what she wanted in return. Hard, fast, and rough, he claimed her body, added fuel to her desire, and staring at him, watching him, she saw him coming apart just as thoroughly as she was. This was happening to both of them, together. They were a team, fighting to satisfy their mutual need. She wrapped her legs around his ass and pulled herself forward to meet each of his thrusts, raw, animalistic, and perfect.
Will was the one to break eye contact, his eyes closing as his climax neared, and Cassidy gasped in relief. His gaze had helped her hang on, but it had been getting more and more difficult to hold off, and she let herself go, almost screaming as the orgasm ripped through her. She heard his muffled roar somewhere in the distance, felt him drive into her body that was now liquid, was now light, just energy barely held together by the confines of her tender skin.
As their bodies relaxed, she propped herself up on her elbows, and he leaned down to meet her. Their kiss was gentle this time, an expression of affection rather than need.
“Do you understand what I mean?” he whispered. “This isn’t casual. Not for me.”
She couldn’t deny him, not right then, so she nodded. “I understand.” Then she let herself fall back onto the freezer. She’d gotten what she wanted. She’d affected him the way he affected her, at least to some degree. And now that it had happened, she realized what a disaster it was. Now instead of one person with a broken heart, there were going to be two.
…
Maybe Will had been naive to think good sex would be enough to fix whatever the hell was going on between him and Cassidy. But, no, it wasn’t the sex he’d been counting on. It was the admission at the end of it. She’d given up on the “casual” nonsense, hadn’t she? He could have sworn she had.
But that night when she came home from the diner, she didn’t even come find him in the library, just went straight to bed. Her own bed, without him.
And the next morning, when he made sure he was in the kitchen before she left for work, she’d just reminded him of Emily’s plans for the day and then slipped out the door. He’d thought about drinking the cup of coffee he’d fixed for her, but instead he poured it down the sink. When Emily woke up, he gave her the unnecessary reminder about the planned trip to the lake with Riva and ate breakfast with her, Marion hovering behind them as usual to make sure they enjoyed her cooking. He wondered briefly if Marion would like to work at the diner instead of the house, but it was bad form to poach domestic staff, so he didn’t suggest it.
Instead, he dropped Emily off at Riva’s, turned the car toward the diner, and then pulled over to the side of the road. He’d woken up early that morning and made Cassidy coffee, and she’d brushed past him like he was invisible. He’d spent the last couple weeks working almost full-time at a menial job he didn’t really enjoy, and while she thanked him at the end of each shift, she didn’t seem to actually care if he showed up or not. She didn’t seem to care about him at all, not unless he was actively engaged in giving her orgasms.
Damn it. He pulled out his phone and hit one of the speed dial numbers Emily had entered in at his request. A few minutes later he was back on the road, this time with two laughing, chatting girls in the backseat. Riva’s mother had been only too happy to hand over the chaperoning duties for the day, and the girls directed Will to their favorite swimming spot with only a few missed turns. They parked in a gravel lot that already had a few other cars, made their way down a well-marked path, and emerged at an area of flat rocks that stepped down and up and around a dark-blue lake.
“We can jump from those rocks,” Emily explained to him, “and, look, there’s a little waterfall over there. And a spring in behind those trees—you can build a dam in it and send the water down a whole different way.”
“Is that a good thing to do?” he asked.
“It’s not, like, a pristine ecosystem,” Em said defensively. “Kids have been doing it for years.”
“No, I didn’t mean it was bad for the environment. I just wondered why you’d do it. Does something good happen if the water finds a different channel?”
She looked momentarily confused by his question, then shrugged it off. “It’s just fun.”
And it turned out, it was. He took off his shoes and socks and rolled up the cuffs of his khakis, exposing skin that hadn’t seen the sun since a week in Aruba a few months earlier, and he waded around the lake to the spring and felt useful and powerful when Em and the other kids asked him to move heavier rocks or logs to help with their damming efforts. He felt the mud squish between his toes and slapped at the mosquitos that attacked in the shade and the blackflies that chased him in the sun, and he felt himself relax. Tension was good: it meant he was really living, pushing for things and having adventures and stretching himself. But this? Relaxation was good, too.
“Last summer,” Riva told him, “Cassidy and Em and I sent the water way over there. There were two little ponds that had to get filled up to make the water high enough, so we built the rest of the path—the banks, I guess—while it was dry, and we had to guess where the water would leak out when it started flowing, and then when we were wrong, we had to really go fast to plug the hole, because if you let something like that start it will just keep getting bigger. It took us all day, but it was awesome!”
Maybe if Will had been paying closer attention he would have been able to follow the hydrodynamics of Riva’s story a little better, but he’d been distracted by the idea of Cassidy there, playing with the girls the way he was. She’d spent a whole day with them, just mucking around. That was what she’d been able to do, back before Pippa had gotten sick and Cassidy had become the sole adult in this little family. If he’d met Cassidy the summer before it all went wrong, she would have been relaxed and happy, the way she was for about fifteen seconds post-orgasm these days. But it was probably best not to think about Cassidy and orgasming while he was in a public place with his teenage daughter.
They spent a good day at the lake. It wasn’t a fancy resort, with expensive equipment and solicitous staff, but that was okay. Will couldn’t remember ever having had a sense of satisfaction at one of those resorts that matched the feeling he got when he and the girls and few other random kids managed to send the water from the spring off in a new direction, one the local gang swore they’d never seen explored before. And maybe he’d enjoyed more exciting gourmet fare elsewhere, but the picnic Marion had packed with the girls and Riva’s mother in mind was more than enough to feed the three of them, with good, solid sandwiches to give them energy for the afternoon. Will waded a bit, the cool water soothing the bug bites on his exposed skin, but wasn’t too sorry he didn’t have a bathing suit with him. Even the girls admitted it was early in the year for swimming there, but they swore the water would be perfect in August.
They stopped for ice cream on the way home, and after they dropped off Riva, Will and Emily headed toward the diner. It was comfortable, now, to be alone with his daughter. He wasn’t hyper-aware of her anymore and could just relax and enjoy her company.
But his tension ramped up pretty dramatically when she said, “You really like Aunt Cassidy, don’t you? I mean, like her.”
Shit. His instinct to tell the truth warred with his inclination to honor Cassidy’s wishes. “Sure, I like her.” Probably too late to play the word game, given that Em had already clarified her meaning, but at least he was trying. “I really respect her, too.” Good, good, redirect the conversation. This was a thirteen-year-old girl, not a North Korean interrogator. “You and she seem to have a great relationship, and she works really hard at the diner. She’s selfless, but she still has a spine, which I think is a hard balance to find, maybe especially for women.” Fantastic! He could shift this into a conversation about societal pressures on women and not have to answer anything personal at all!
But Emily was too quick for him. “She’s really pretty, too. I mean, she’s not, like, done-up all the time, but she’s pretty even without makeup, and that means it’s real beauty. Right?”
“I… Yes? I think she’s very pretty, even without makeup.” His mind raced. If he were talking to an adult, he’d have a million possible segues to get him out of this. But he wasn’t talking to an adult, and for all his self-congratulation just a few moments earlier, he still wasn’t all that great at talking to teenage girls. And, maybe, he wasn’t quite as motivated as he should be to change the subject.
“How would you feel about that? If I did like her. If I liked her?”
He let himself take his eyes off the road for just a moment, just long enough to appreciate how beautiful his daughter was when her eyes lit up. “It’d be perfect,” she gushed, actually bouncing a little in her seat. “She hasn’t had a boyfriend in a really long time, and she likes you a lot, I think, even though she’s kinda—you know. Kinda mean about it.”
Yes, he did know. But that wasn’t what he wanted to focus on. “Who was her last boyfriend? You met him?”
Now it was Emily’s turn to act cagey. “It was a while ago. I don’t think it was a big deal, or anything. I’m sure she didn’t really like him that much, not compared to you!”
So he had to sort through the thirteen-year-old’s version of romance in order to get any straight answers. He thought about turning off the main road in order to take longer to get to the diner, but Emily knew the route well enough to notice his deception.
He drove a little farther, found a spot with a wide, safe shoulder, and pulled over. Then he twisted in his seat so he was looking her in the eye. “I do like her,” he said. “And I think she likes me back. At least, sometimes I think she does. Sometimes, I’m not so sure. But even if she doesn’t like me now, I feel like I could convince her to like me if—” He stopped. This was his daughter, the one person in the whole world he should be protecting. Shit. “Okay, if a woman, or a girl, or whatever, really doesn’t like a guy, and he keeps trying to make her like him? That’s not cool. No means no, and the guy’s crossing a line, and if any guy ever tries that with you or one of your friends, you need to give me a call. Okay? When you’re older, you might not need to call me; you might be able to handle it yourself, but I’m always happy to help out if you need me to, even if the helping out is just talking about it.”
He paused. “This might be an important conversation we’re having. I haven’t known you for that long, but I want to make it completely clear right now that I’m your dad, and I am one hundred percent on your side, for everything. If you committed murder, I’d be shocked and scared and really, really freaked out, but I’d also be on your side. I’d help you get good lawyers and the help you needed to make sure you didn’t kill anybody else, or whatever. I don’t actually know what the best way to be supportive of a murderer is, but I’d figure it out and I’d do it. Okay?”
“Geez, Will, I’m not going to commit murder. What are you even talking about?”
He exhaled. “Okay, yeah, murder was a pretty extreme example. I’m just saying you can count on me for anything. You don’t like the way a guy’s treating you? And maybe you’re a bit embarrassed because you’re worried you led him on, or something? Don’t be worried. I’m on Team You, always. If you led him on, too damn bad. It doesn’t give him the right to expect anything from you, and I will absolutely deal with him if he tries, as long as you let me know.”
She kind of looked like her aunt when she raised her eyebrow that way. “You’ll ‘deal with him’? Seriously?”
“If you want me to. Or if you want to deal with him yourself, I’ll just support you while you do that.” Okay, he’d definitely lost the thread of this conversation. Good intentions had turned to complete gobbledygook. “The point is, I’m on your side and you should always feel free to talk to me about anything that’s not going the way you want it to, and you can trust me to follow your lead on how you want it handled. Is that part clear?”
She was quiet for a moment, and then she looked at him, and the shine in her eyes was somehow a little deeper and stronger than it had been before. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Okay.” He nodded. This was good. Everything was back on track. “So, the next point is—if your aunt really doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to get to like me, that’s her call, and I need to respect that. Because that’s how stand-up guys handle being rejected. It’s not fun, but that’s too damn bad.”
Emily nodded slowly, thoughtfully, then said, “I think she really does like you, though.”
Nice to hear it, at least from one source. “I think she does, too. I hope she does. But she’s clearly got some concerns about me, or about ‘us.’ And I’ll be honest—when I started this conversation, I was thinking that you and I could create some madcap scheme to persuade her to give me a chance, and there’d be switched identities and elaborate charades and probably some forged documents or something. But as I’m thinking about it? It feels like that wouldn’t be fair. Not to your aunt, because she deserves to know that both of us respect her wishes and aren’t trying to push her into something she doesn’t want. But also, it wouldn’t be fair to me. Because I want to be with someone who wants to be with me.”
“But if she does like you?” Emily pressed. “If she’s just being a bit stubborn about admitting it? I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, but Aunt Cassidy can be a bit stubborn. That’s what my mom always said about her.”
He managed not to snort. “Yes, I think I’ve seen that. I try to think of it as her being strong-willed.”
Emily apparently didn’t have the same snort-aversion he did, and hers was as adorable as her aunt’s always were. “Yeah, okay, we can call it that. So if she’s being strong-willed, what can we do?”
That was the big question, of course, and it was the one he still couldn’t answer. “I’m not sure. But I think it’s important that it be me doing something about it. Because whatever I do could blow up in my face, and if that happens, I want her to know she still has you. I don’t want her to worry that she’s going to lose you.”
Emily’s expression was thoughtful for a moment before relaxing into another of her beautiful, pure smiles. “You do like her. Like, a lot. You’re more worried about her being okay than about you getting what you want. Right?”
Well, he’d pretty much blown the secrecy thing already, so he let himself nod. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“That’s perfect. That’s what she needs.” Emily sighed. “If she’ll just go along with it!” She shot him an assessing look, then nodded her head reluctantly. “Yeah, okay, I’ll keep out of it. But I’m cheering for you, okay? I’m secretly…” She grinned. “I’m on Team You. I’m on your side. But I’m also on Team Aunt Cass, and I’m on her side. So if you could make it so the two of you are on the same team, that’d be excellent. No pressure or anything, of course.”
“Of course,” he said drily, and shifted the car back into gear and out onto the road. He was doing well with one of the Frost girls. But the larger challenge was definitely ahead of him.