10
Dave
In my whole life, I’d never seen snow like that. Heavy as concrete and with drifts past the tops of the garage doors. I got out the shovel and the snow blower and got to work, yard by painstaking yard. I had no sense of how long it took me to clear a path from the garage to the generator shed, but by the time I got back inside, I saw that shit had taken a serious turn for the worse.
Grandma was standing next to Lisa, with her wrinkly hand on Lisa’s smooth forehead, while on television played reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. Lisa stared at me, blinking hard. “Oh, Dave! There you are,” she squeaked. “Hi! Hello!”
Christ. “Gram, you’re freaking her out.”
“No, we’re all good!” Lisa said, her voice high-pitched and panicked and sounding exactly the opposite of all good. “Took us a while to get a…signal?” With this, Grandma nodded slowly, and Lisa looked back at me with even more panic. “But so far, we’ve discovered a man named Stand With Knife is buried underneath the house, and a lady named Jane Gunderson killed her second husband with a cast-iron pan in the kitchen in 1899.” Lisa blinked hard and raised her feet onto anxiously pointed tiptoes beneath her bent knees. “The more you know!”
“But not a goddamned peep about you, honey bunny!” Grandma roared, making a frustrated alphabet soup with the planchette.
Lisa scrunched her eyes shut and sucked in a breath from between gritted teeth. “Never know what’s coming up next! Third time might be the charm!”
I had to hand it to her. Not every woman could stumble into an alternate reality with so much grace, and I felt somehow proud that, even though I’d only known her a little while, I could read right between her lines to hear her say, Oh my God, help me! I mean, it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out, but still. I liked the secret language.
After a couple of long strides, I was prying the planchette out of Grandma Katrina’s hands. “Prude!” she snarled. “No sense of occasion! None!”
“I think you might need a nap,” I told Grandma, looking her in the cataract-clouded eyes.
“You need a nap! And a shave!” Grandma said.
I widened my eyes. Listen, Baroness…
There was a flicker of laughter at the corner of Grandma’s mouth. Hell on wheels. “Fine! All right, fine,” she said and snatched up her iPad. As she padded away, barely picking her slippers up off the wood floors, I heard the ding-ding of an app, followed by her asking, “Okay, Google! How do you test for royalty?”
Lisa snort-snickered as she boxed up the Ouija board, minus the planchette. I took Lisa by the hand and led her into the kitchen. “She’s intense,” she said, ruffling up her hair with her fingers. “I like her. But holy moly!”
I totally got that. As a preemptive measure, I put the planchette on the top shelf of the glasses cabinet, too high for Grandma to reach it even with her mechanical arm. “Did she freak you out too badly?”
Lisa ruffled her hair a bit more. “Naw, nothing a few sessions with my therapist and some hypnosis won’t fix.” She was totally deadpan. Absolutely killed me.
“I’ll pay for it,” I said without cracking a smile.
“Big shot.”
And then we both dissolved into hushed laughter. But all kidding aside, I was a bit worried about her. I was pretty sure Lisa had never been accosted by some old lady who wanted to ask her a thousand questions about her bloodline, for God’s sake. “You sure you’re good?” I asked.
Lisa gave me a little smile and then made some hair-smoothing moves like she was putting herself back together. Finally, she blew out a long breath and nodded. After that, she seemed to have totally regained her composure and was somehow even prettier than I’d remembered her from an hour before.
“You hungry?”
“Always.”
“My kind of woman, but I’m not talking about lunch.”
“My kind of man!”
I wrapped my arm around Lisa’s waist and pulled her into the walk-in pantry. I pressed her up against the shelf full of pasta sauces and oils and vinegars. “Full disclosure, Grandma doesn’t actually live with me. In case you were worried about that.”
A tickled smile started to show on Lisa’s face. “And why would I be worried about that?”
“Don’t know.” I dropped my voice. “But maybe because when you come, it’s like a fucking earthquake. I’ll bet you made the needles shift at the USGS.”
Lisa tried to shove me, but I didn’t budge, and instead, I just pressed my chest back into her hands, crowding her up against a row of chutneys that I got in a gift basket from my investment banker. Lisa said, “She really is a piece of work. I just don’t know why she wants to figure out my heritage.”
I couldn’t help myself and moved my hand around behind her ass. I gave it a squeeze, and Lisa moaned, then pushed her hips into my thighs. “She wants to get me married off, that’s why.”
Sizing me up carefully, she shifted her puckered lips to the side. “Is that so?”
Nodding at her, I bent down, nudging her cheek with my nose. I crowded her space a little more, and the glass jars shifted behind her. “But I’d rather find the one myself.”
I hoisted her up on one of the pantry shelves, and a box of crackers tumbled to the ground, followed by a bag of pasta. Lisa reached up and hooked her arms around me. “And how do you plan to do that?” she asked as she hooked her ankles around my ass and raised her eyebrow.
Goddamn it, what a pistol. Perfect in every way. “One step at a time,” I told her and then put her down to give her a piggyback ride up to my bedroom.
* * *
When we got to the master suite, I let her slide off of me onto the bed and then went down onto my knees between her legs. I hooked my fingertips over the waistband of her leggings and pulled them down. No panties now—God bless this motherfucking blizzard.
“Won’t she wake up?” Lisa whispered, propping herself on her elbows and glancing at the door, which I’d closed and locked.
“She’s out cold, at least until midafternoon, and she couldn’t hear us anyway. She’s in a different wing.”
Lisa’s eyes flashed with that word, wing, and her gaze moved around the master suite, darting from the ceiling to the long silk drapes to the leather sofa on the other side of the room and up and down the posts of my bed. “This place is really amazing.”
“You know what else is amazing?” I brought my tongue to her clit, tracing the edges and tasting her for the first time so far. “This.”
She moaned up at the ceiling, and I pushed her thighs open wider. I got a little obsessed with the idea of my cum still inside her from last night—fucking dirty, fucking lewd—but I let myself go there. Her smell was the trip wire, her taste the fuse. I’d seen it last night, and I had the bite marks to prove it. She was sweet as frosting on the surface, but underneath was a whole different story. As I sank down deeper, giving her more of my tongue, her fingertips moved softly through my hair. Her toes curled below me, gripping the rail of the bed frame.
I slid my first two fingers into her, and her body bucked off the mattress, her ass squeezed tight. I worked her clit slow and firm and eased her back into submission. Inside my pants, I was rock hard. Wiping my mouth on her thigh, I grazed that soft skin with my stubble. “I’m going to make you come like this, and then I’m going to get inside you, where I’m going to come again. And again. We clear?”
Her grip on my hair tightened. She lifted her face to meet my stare, and she said, “Crystal.”
“But I need you to be a little bit quieter than last night.” I dragged her ass closer to the end of the mattress, the seam of the edge making a line in that perfect flesh. “Because I don’t want any interruptions.”
Lisa pursed her lips, holding back a laugh. “Sorry.”
“Don’t you dare fucking apologize,” I said and got back to business.