The name YouthAspire triggered some recognition for Aaron, but he couldn’t place it. And he didn’t have time to ponder it further because the gate clicked open, a light going on at the end of the walkway. Aaron looked down to find Grace’s eyes on him, snowflakes clinging to her eyelashes.
“You should go to the door,” she whispered, pressing the second pillowcase into his free hand. “Maybe it’ll help you understand why I did it.” On cue, Aaron opened his mouth to list all the reasons he wasn’t walking up to some strange building and depositing two bags of cash—it could be a brothel in disguise for all he knew—but found there was only one factor that seemed to matter, standing there on the silent street. He didn’t want Grace going. Not when he didn’t know what was on the other side of the door.
“Right. Let’s go make me a felon.” He transferred both pillowcases into one hand and dug the car keys out of his pocket, handing them to Grace. “Go wait in the Suburban. Doors locked.”
To his surprise, she nodded, floating off to do as he’d asked. Grumbling under his breath, Aaron trudged up the path, swatting snow off the lapels of his jacket as he went. Just before he reached the end, the black door creaked open—and two young girls poked their heads out. Which, obviously, made Aaron stop in his tracks.
“Where is Grace?” one of them asked.
“Out of the way now,” came a voice from inside. An adult voice, thank Christ. Both little girl heads vanished and a woman in her mid-to-late forties filled the doorway, taking Aaron’s measure with a sweeping glance. A former sea captain, he thought absurdly. “What’s this? Where’s Grace?”
Dimly, he registered an Irish brogue, but he wasn’t exactly in the state of mind to be charmed by it. He nodded toward the vehicle, sighing when Grace waved in the passenger window, all but bouncing in her seat. “There she is,” Aaron said, sounding grim. “She asked me to drop this off to you.”
Aaron advanced, holding out the bags, just as the two girls appeared again, one slipping between the Irish woman’s body and the door frame, the other from between the woman’s legs.
“What is this place?”
“Sure, she didn’t tell you?” The woman laughed heartily but, in a curious contrast, regarded the pillowcases with trepidation. “We wouldn’t be here anymore if it weren’t for that one.” She whispered something under her breath. “No, we’d be something else altogether.”
He rubbed at his jaw. “I’m going to need a little more than that.” One of the little girls waved at Aaron, the edges of his mouth lifting to return the greeting with a smile before the response registered. Annoyed with himself and the lack of forthcoming information, he gave them a brisk nod instead. “Is this some kind of orphanage?”
“Eh. Of a sort. We’re still figuring out the particulars.” The woman shooed both girls away, her demeanor good-natured. “If you don’t mind me saying…” She eyed Aaron’s wingtips. “You don’t seem the kind of man who does anything without knowing all the details.”
“You’re right.” Obviously the woman wasn’t planning on taking the pillowcases anytime this century, so Aaron stepped forward and slid them just inside the door. “I’m not.”
She was looking down at the bags of cash when she spoke. “Well. If anyone could convince you to take a night off from your scruples, it would be Grace.” Snow puffed onto the walkway in the ensuing pause. “Tell her thank you. Tell her to be careful. I needn’t see her again for a while, looks like.”
Anxious to get back to Grace and begin a new line of questioning, he murmured a good night and strode back to the vehicle, pulling away from the curb as soon as the ignition sparked. Leaving the scene of the crime. Good God.
“All right, Grace—”
“Thank you.” Her words were accompanied by a blast of cold and white snowflakes, caused by her rolling down the passenger’s side window, flinging her right arm out into the night, and tossing her head back. “Thank you,” she said again, this time more high-pitched, but still in her usual musical delivery.
She was not from Earth in that moment. Aaron couldn’t keep his eyes on the road as they constantly returned to Grace. Moisture dotted her cheeks, although he couldn’t tell if the tracks were created by melted condensation or tears—and it didn’t matter, because there was so much more to take in. The hair flying around her face like she’d been filmed sinking underwater, then fast-forwarded. It flew and tangled and danced, strands and swaths of his red silk tie catching on her damp face. Her eyes were closed, but she was seeing everything. Aaron could never express the certainty of it. Or the desperation to know what she could see. To hear her describe it.
He didn’t realize he’d pulled over, alongside a barren stretch of field, until Grace opened the door, jumped out…and took off running. Panic gripped his throat, but he fought through, all but diving out of the Suburban to go after her. Heart pounding triple time in his chest, Aaron caught sight of her form, illuminated by the still-engaged headlights.
“Grace,” he shouted. “Get back here.”
His legs turned to marble as she spun around, arms outstretched, laughing up at the sky. Torn. He was so fucking torn. Between worry and…envy. Look at her, he had the odd urge to shout. Just look at her. The jacket she wore had unbuttoned down the front and that’s what propelled him forward—the fear that she would freeze to death. When he reached Grace, it was as though she’d felt him approach, because she threw her arms around his neck, warm breath ghosting down his neck, all the way inside his shirt. “Don’t be worried,” she breathed. “I can tell you’re worried.”
He curled his hands around Grace’s biceps, setting her away so he could yank her coat together, buttoning it with unnecessarily rough movements, but they stilled on a dime when she laid her warm hands on top of them, his white breath puffing out between them in rapid bursts. “I don’t like surprises, Grace.”
“That’s a shame,” she whispered. “People say I’m full of them.”
“Right now, I’d have to agree.”
Grace’s touch fell away. She stepped back, lifting her face to the sky. “There’s so much bad. Happening all the time, around us. I guess I just…” Her chin lowered and the emotion in her gaze almost knocked him back a step. “I like to stop and appreciate when something good happens.”
The snow had grown steadily heavier, white flakes landing on her face, her hair, and melting in degrees. His tongue felt thick in his mouth as he stood watching Grace, trying to process the meaning of her words. Afraid he would miss what she might do next. I’m in a field in a strange place…and I’m not trying to change that. So unlike him just to stand still and wait. Wait.
“That place.” She rubbed at her throat. “It used to be a leadership camp for teenagers. They had a…tragedy and it was almost closed down. But it didn’t need to be snuffed out, only changed. You can’t throw ideas or people out when they don’t work the first time around, right?”
Her forehead wrinkled, as if finding the right words was frustrating, and for once, they were on the same page. “What if all we get are moments, Aaron? Like this. Like back there. We work and try and sit and stand and what are we working toward? I think…moments. And we—me and you—got to have one tonight. We got to make a moment for a bunch of other someones. So can we just stop and think about it? That’s all I’m doing. I’m thinking in my own way, even if it looks like something else to you. I’m just stopping. And thinking.”
He couldn’t swallow. Every time he tried, his throat clogged, pressure piling on top of pressure. “Okay,” he finally managed. “Okay, fine.”
But he wasn’t fine when she moved closer. Moved closer to the raw, exposed hunk of flesh, formerly known as Aaron. It was insane. Everything was insane. She was forcing him to consider light and shadows, when he’d only ever dealt in black and white. And she was the light. Shining bright enough to flay him.
He’d operated until now as if people were only hiding selfishness, the kind he didn’t bother to conceal. But not Grace. She contradicted everything he held true and it made the earth shake under his feet. She approached him like a lion tamer approaching their target, as if he might get startled and eat her whole. Was he the sane one here? Or had it been her the whole time? It couldn’t be both of them, could it? His thoughts fled when Grace laid her ear over his heart, gasping at whatever she heard. “You feel it, too. You feel the good we did?”
“I don’t know.”
A smile broke across her face. “That’s okay. It’s your first time.”
“Were you part of that tragedy, Grace?” Aaron didn’t know where the suspicion sprung from or how he picked it out among the million questions and thoughts rocketing around his skull. But there it was. “I think you were.”
It took him a few beats to realize she wasn’t breathing, but she drew in a heavy dose of oxygen before he could shake her. “Moments, Aaron. This is one of them. Come live in it with me.” She brushed some snow out of his hair, soft fingertips grazing his ear. “Please?”
Fucked. No other way to describe the situation he’d been sucked into. His body was winded and exhilarated, adrenaline seeping into his bloodstream and warming him, making him hot along with Grace’s nearness. He’d been thrown into a vast ocean without a life jacket, and she was reaching out with something resembling help, but it was so foreign and nothing like he’d ever experienced that gripping on to it was difficult. Slipping. It kept slipping. What finally forced him to hold the fuck on was Grace. She was in the same ocean. Maybe she was always there. What if having him reach out and clasp on was the rescue she needed?
Aaron operated from a different plane of consciousness, sliding one hand into Grace’s hair, the other around her back. He twined the fragrant, but mussed, strands of hair around his fingers and tilted her head back, watching as her eyelids drifted down, catching snowflakes on their descent. Nothing in his life had ever appeared more vivid, more real, than her panting, parted lips, inviting his mouth down. And he went, because there was no choice to make, melding their open lips together, followed by a wet mating of tongues. A groan he’d been holding in since they’d first crossed paths fell from his mouth like a ten-pound rock. Kisses in fields beneath a light snowfall should be sweet. They should be.
Only, he didn’t have any idea what the fuck sweet meant. Especially when it came to physical interaction with a woman. Nor was he feeling anything resembling such a dainty description. No, with her lips struggling to get wide beneath his, attempting to handle each slanting assault from his mouth, Aaron’s cock surged, rousing in his briefs like a prodded snake. But with his eyes closed, he could only see the smiling girl spinning madly in a snowy field—like some mystical fairy—and denial had him breaking the kiss.
“Grace,” he growled into her mouth. “We don’t make sense. You…” God, he couldn’t keep his thoughts straight with her body curved around his, tightly, like they’d been glued together. “You see this field and you see a place to run.”
“Yes.” Didn’t it figure with the most insane shit coming out of his mouth, Grace appeared to follow him without a hitch? “What do you see?”
“Nothing. I see nothing.” His hand cupped the right side of her ass, settling the notch of her thighs over his dick, need spreading like an epidemic. “That’s not true. I see a place where no one would witness it if I took you on the filthy ground.”
Her head fell back, as if her neck had lost power. “I think that means we make perfect sense,” she said on a bursting exhale. “It’s so much better when you say your thoughts out loud and I don’t have to guess. Have I mentioned that?”
As if an unspoken command had been issued, their mouths met again, worked each other’s in a furious, damp slide. Aaron’s arm around her back tightened. He was so thirsty for the untamed taste of Grace that he bent her all the way backward, rolling his hips against her without an anchor, no wall to push her up against save the wind. God, more. He required all of her against him. How had he gone this long without it?
The wicked spike of testosterone in Aaron must have affected Grace somehow, because she turned into a hot, frantic bundle of sex in his arms, trying to hug his hips with the insides of her thighs. Trying to drive him out of his mind with the soft warmth of her pussy, making him groan every time it brushed his lap. No condom. I don’t have a condom. The agonizing realization was a blessing and a curse at the same time. A blessing because Grace was better than what Aaron wanted to give her. Which was to pull her leggings down, so he could deliver a knees-buried-in-the-dirt fucking that she’d feel for weeks. A curse, because…Aaron could feel how bad she needed it—almost as badly as he did—even if it would be bad for her.
Beneath her.
Faceless ghosts from another time and place…the sting of being called a betrayer tried to steal his focus, but ignoring them was easy with Grace’s mouth under his. The threatening memories only served to make him more aggressive, though, as if Grace could cleanse him, impossible though it was.
“Aaron,” she moaned, breaking away from the round of furious kissing. Eyes blind, breath racing, thighs sliding up and down the outside of his legs. “Aaron, oh my God, please…”
Aaron’s fingers were working the buttons of her coat before his brain could command him to stop. There was no ignoring her plea for relief; it stole his remaining ability to reason. To remember why touching her, satisfying his curiosity, was bad. Against the rules. With a curse over the heaviness in his groin, Aaron flattened his palm on her stomach, sliding into the front of her leggings. “Okay, hippie.” He encountered dampness layered over smooth, hairless skin—a fucking jerk-off fantasy come true. She was a mess of want, the evidence wetting her sex, moistening the purple leggings. “Fuck, Grace. If I had a condom, nothing would save you now. Not after feeling this.” He found the entrance of her body, shoving two fingers far as they would travel, both of their bodies jerking at the perfection of that connection. His groan was so ragged, he didn’t recognize his own voice. “I knew you weren’t wearing underwear. Maybe you wanted help getting dressed. Do you like the idea of me sliding a tight pair of panties up your thighs? Tugging the edges right and left until your lips are covered?”
“Yes.” She went up on her toes and the move slid her curves over his muscles, courtesy of the death grip his arm had on her body. But she slipped back down in a boneless drop when Aaron began drawing his fingers in and out. In and out. Stopping to tease her clit with a twisting knuckle, feeling it swell with such tangible pleasure, no reservations. “More, more, more,” she whispered, gaze growing so glassy Aaron wasn’t sure she could see him anymore. And he was nervous without her focus, because he’d been dropping into the middle of the fucking ocean with only her presence to keep him afloat.
“Hey. Grace. You need to look at me, dammit.” His fingers thrust home and held, urgency climbing up his spine like insistent claws. “Be…here with me. Don’t do this to me and just leave.”
The green of her eyes snapped, her teeth digging into that full bottom lip, but there she was. She found his forehead with her own, grinding them together just a little, and the pressure was welcome. So fucking welcome. As if she’d known that simple action would calm the foreign war taking place on the soil of his brain. A brain to which she’d found an undiscovered trapdoor and crawled inside. “I’m here. Your fingers feel so good. I can’t believe you’re touching me like this. I wanted you to.” Her gorgeous little body started to shake, her teeth clenching the same time as her pussy started to seize up around his touch. “I wanted to hold your hand in the woods, too. But this is better. Better. I’m going to…”
“Christ. Do it. Go on, Grace. Fill up my palm with the best you’ve got.” Aaron ducked his head to suck a trail up the side of Grace’s neck, unable to resist a bite beneath her earlobe. Another one. “Girls who get so wet from kissing shouldn’t leave the house without underwear, should they? No. And they definitely shouldn’t leave the house with someone like me. I don’t hold hands. I shouldn’t be allowed within ten feet of you.” He spoke the words angrily into her neck. “This is what I do. I return you home with a dirty secret.”
Half of him expected to be pushed off, away from the hottest female flesh he’d even sunk his fingers into. He wished for it, even though he knew he’d come crawling back, begging to finish the job. Finish her off. None of that was necessary, though, because the words he’d meant as a warning seemed to hoist her over the precipice, her walls closing in to milk his fingers in nothing short of exquisite torture. Because fuck, he needed to feel that squeeze, that trickling fall of moisture around his cock so bad, he tilted his head back and growled into the falling snow.
“Aaron,” Grace moaned, fisting the lapels of his jacket. One hand slid free, up his throat and into his hair, yanking his head down to engage in an open-lipped kiss. Their tongues didn’t touch, thank God, because he might have taken out his dick and begged her to use that tongue where it counted. “Ohhh,” she breathed, her body going totally limp in his arms without warning, their mouths disengaging.
And there he was, dipping a girl backward in a moonlit field, her back bent so far that her hair brushed along the ground. As if they’d been dancing, instead of him finger banging her, telling her obscene things to make her come. “Grace—”
“Shhh.” She extended her arms up toward the night sky. “Two moments in one night. That’s something, isn’t it?”
His throat ached worse than he’d ever felt it. “I need to get you home.”
With a sigh, she straightened and gained her feet, planting a lingering kiss on his lips and floating toward the Suburban. “Okay.” Her eyes sparkled, legs wobbling, as she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Let’s go, Grandpa.”