LILY
Gabe crawled out from under the porch, dusting himself off as he walked up the wooden steps. I handed him the tea I’d gotten for him on the way over—I’d hemmed and hawed over flavored or plain before finally taking a gamble on him liking peach. Instead of drinking it from the straw, he popped the lid off and took a few greedy gulps.
The ice in the plastic cup clattered as he wiped his mouth on his forearm. In a few seconds, he’d gulped down what took me half a morning to drink. “Fuck, that’s good,” he said.
But as he said it, his eyes moved all over me, making it abundantly clear that he wasn’t actually talking about the tea.
Everything got a bit swirly when I looked straight at him. Like when I got off the teacup ride at the fair with Ivan. I hooked my arm around one of the porch posts and hung on tight.
“So,” I said, gripping the wood and clutching my tea to my chest, feeling the sweaty coolness of the condensation against my skin, “you’re staying here? And filming here?” I glanced up at the porch ceiling, painted baby blue in the old-fashioned way. When I looked back at him, I found he’d been staring right at me the whole time. My knees felt a bit wobbly, so I gripped the post a little tighter and wedged my tush up against the railing.
“That’s the idea.” He reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a key, and opened the front door. “After you, beautiful.”
I stepped underneath his rippling outstretched arm into the foyer. I was met with a wave of cool air-conditioning and a faint whiff of furniture polish. The house was even prettier inside than it was outside. Dark, shiny woodwork was offset with immaculate paint in elegant colors that nobody used anymore—mauve and chartreuse and olive green. Sitting on the side table in the foyer was a sales brochure with photos of the house. I peeked inside and saw an eye-popping row of zeros. It wasn’t just expensive. It was a fairy tale. And standing there in the reflection of the foyer mirror was this fairy tale’s rugged, dashing prince. He checked something on his phone, and the muscles of his jaw fluttered.
What was happening to me? I was getting all hot and bothered over jaw muscles? I blamed the fact that I’d been binge-watching him all morning. The Powers of Suggestion wasn’t just sexy and exciting, it was also playfully cheeky, and it let me get a delightful glimpse at Gabe’s personality. He didn’t take himself too seriously and always investigated the mystery du jour with a respectful curiosity. He never exploited anybody’s fear or superstition but tackled everything with an almost boyish zest. Cutie patooootie. It wasn’t my fault that my hormones were shooting through me like an exploding cartoon thermometer.
It took real strength to stop myself from staring at him, but for the sake of not being a total weirdo, I managed to turn my attention to a ring of old skeleton keys hanging on the newel post. It weighed about five pounds, and it had a small silver tag engraved with the words The Willows.
The house had a name. I’d always loved the idea of a house with a name.
“This place is incredible,” I said, admiring the way the staircase curved and wound up the floors. The steps and landings made a concentric series of rectangles with a sparkling chandelier in the center, suspended from the ceiling of the top floor.
“Right? Sitting right there on Airbnb.” He was close enough for me to feel the heat and warmth of his body and to smell some sort of sexy musky something. Maybe cologne, or maybe a dash of hair product. I looked at his thick dark hair for any sign of gel. I didn’t see any. But really, I’d have to touch it to know. Lord.
Oblivious to my lusty thoughts about his hair-care regimen, he went on. “I found it mentioned in a few books when I was doing research. I couldn’t hit book trip fast enough.” He glanced at me. “I can’t imagine owning a house like this. When I was growing up, my dad was in the army and we moved a ton. One cinder-block ranch house after another. This place is like a palace.”
I nodded slowly, watching him like I’d watched him on television. When I was watching his reruns, I’d been mesmerized thinking of him doing ordinary things—bringing his effortless sexiness to grocery shopping, and making scrambled eggs, and taking out the recycling. I’ll bet he’s a very conscientious recycler. Now that same thing was happening again except in reverse—what I was actually seeing fuzzed into a sexy daydream. Army had apparently been the keyword. I envisioned him in fatigues being brave and dashing. Shirtless—definitely shirtless. Hello, soldier!
Clearing my throat, I hooked the keys back over the post. I looked at Gabe again but this time zeroed in on what I imagined was the only imperfection on his entire body. The cut across the nose that I’d given him. Nice. Leave it to me to deface a masterpiece! Maybe later that afternoon I could pop over to the Telfair museum and dump nail polish all over the Bird Girl statue.
I dug the tube of arnica cream out of my purse and unscrewed the cap. I put a little dollop on my fingertip, got up on my tiptoes, and gently dabbed it on the bruise and the small cut. He watched me the whole time. Never winced, never grimaced. Just focused right on me with those deep-brown eyes of his. There was an expression I’d read about in my smutty romances. Bedroom eyes. I’d never known what that meant . . .
Until now.
He was so intense about the very act of staring at me that I didn’t even know what to say. So I just smiled awkwardly at him, feeling like my lips were sticking to my teeth. I rubbed the extra arnica into my hand and managed to whisper, “That should help.”
“Feels better already.” For a few seconds, we stayed locked in stop-motion. This time he turned away first and raked his hand through his hair. It was exactly what he’d done when he’d popped out of the lake in Africa. I’d freeze-framed that moment more times that I cared to admit. Same smile and everything. His shirt pulled tight over his biceps, and I realized that if he moved his hand a little bit farther, I might get a glimpse of the muscles. I didn’t know what they were actually called, but I knew he had them. The muscles. The man muscles. The V muscles. With veins!
The thought of them made me groan. Out loud. A sound that I think I’d only ever come close to making when I licked cake batter directly from the beater.
“What was that?” He cocked his head slightly, smiling. “Was that you?”
My cheeks went from hot to on fire. I was about point-five seconds from tumbling into his arms or tackling him on the steps as I roared, Not all Southern girls are polite! But instead, I clasped my hands, clenched my thighs, and squeaked, “Ghosts. Had to be the ghosts.”
He followed me around as I wired up the house, wearing my rolls of gaffer’s tape on his forearm. We put mics and recording devices in each room so that no sound would go uncaptured. He carried my ladder like it weighed nothing at all and never griped when we had to move it a few feet this way, or that way, or back again. But the thing with the tape was what was really getting to me. It meant that every time I needed a piece, I had to get really close. Close enough to be within grabbing distance, which made me want grab his fashionably wrinkled black linen shirt in my fists and send his buttons pinging all over the . . .
Hoooo-boy. I was going to have to get ahold of myself here, and quick. I’d already whacked him up upside the face. I couldn’t be ripping off his buttons too. “Could you hand me that wire?” I said, trying desperately to sound professional. “The thin one? With the white line in the middle?” I pulled a plastic hook and removable foamy backing from my pocket. I peeled the paper backing off the wall side of the squishy adhesive strip and affixed it to the plaster, pressing the plastic hook in place. Gabe reached into the hallway for the cord, still keeping one hand on the ladder to make sure I didn’t fall. He tightened his grip on the middle rung, and the veins in his forearm grew even more noticeable.
I tried to think if I had ever been so close to anybody so sexy. I mean, unless I counted one of the personal trainers at the gym, whose attention I had only ever gotten by falling off a yoga ball, I think it was a resounding, deafening no. “Did you model before you got into television?”
Oh, Lily, Lily, Lily. I clutched the top step of the ladder, hooking my fingers over the plastic cap. “That was supposed to be an inside thought. I think maybe I need a snack.”
Gabe laughed a lovely embarrassed laugh. “I’m no model. Just a guy who likes to make home movies and somehow managed to make a career out of it.”
With burning cheeks, I hooked my patch cable up with the mic as he watched me. Normally when I did my work, I didn’t think in particularly techy terms. But today I did, and I watched the male end slide into the female end. Mmmm-hmmmm.
I made my way down the ladder, each step surprisingly unsure because my thighs were literally trembling. When I was back on the ground, he took a step toward me and I held on to the side of the ladder, frozen with desire as he got closer and closer. He leaned in and reached out his hand so that his fingertips were brushing my cheeks. He’s going to kiss me. Oh my God, he’s going to . . . I inhaled, fluttering my eyelids closed and raising my lips to his.
“Here,” he said.
When I opened my eyes, I saw he’d only been pulling a piece of backing paper from my hair.
“Right, yes.” I rubbed my lips together and glued my eyes to a nearby light switch. I was horrified. He’d been trying to help me, and I’d turned into some kissy-faced wanton woman. One pint of ice cream in my pajamas wasn’t even going to put a dent in this embarrassment; I was going to have to stop by the grocery and get one of those plastic buckets of cheap Neapolitan. What is wrong with me? I jammed the little piece of paper into my pocket and straightened my shoulders. And wiped my sweaty hands on my bare legs. “Well! I think that does it!”
Gabe shook his head. “One more room.” He pointed behind me. “Master bedroom.”
I glanced over my shoulder and into the bedroom across the hallway. It was beautiful, spacious, and luxurious. There was a massive plaster fireplace on the wall and a gigantic old wooden bed in the middle. The bed had fancy sheets, like something out of an overpriced home-wares magazine. But the covers were a bit rumpled, and I spotted a cell phone charging cord plugged into the wall and an empty glass on the nightstand. It was the room where he was staying. It was the bed where he had slept. I envisioned him with his waist barely covered by the sheet, like in a soap opera. Cue the Young and the Restless theme song.
“Of course,” I squeaked and grabbed the last of the mics. Feeling frazzled and embarrassed, I scurried toward the room before realizing I needed one more sticky hook from my bag. I spun around to grab it. When I did, I smacked right into him, and the air left my lungs with a whoosh.
I stayed there. Frozen. The longer he held my stare, the more bedroomy his eyes became. But I had no idea what to do with a man as handsome as he was. I couldn’t make a move on him—I could hardly look right at him. So I chickened out and tried to pretend that I was actually trying to grab a piece of tape from the roll on his arm. But I got distracted when I touched his skin, and I slid my hand off the tape and onto his forearm instead.
As soon as I touched him, I saw something wild in his expression. Something so intense, it sent a prickle of goose bumps right through me. It was as if I’d fired a starting pistol. He took one more step toward me and said, “I want to kiss you, Lily. Better stop me right now before I can’t stop myself.”
I wasn’t used to this kind of treatment at all. I was used to men who confused chivalry with going dutch and thought unbridled desire was some sign of disrespect. False! What I’d always wanted was a man. But I’d never imagined a man quite like this.
And I wasn’t about to stop him. No, siree.
He gripped my hips and shoved me up against the wall. The plaster was cold against my skin, and the chair rail dug into my tush. He pressed his hips into my stomach and pulled my face toward his. He wasn’t shy about it. He was aggressive and furious and unrelentingly male. Knotting my hair around his fingers, he cupped my jaw, looked hard into my eyes, and kissed me. Oh God and heaven above, did he kiss me. Kissed me like I’d never been kissed before. Our teeth clashed, my lip got pinched, my tongue got swept aside. He growled into my mouth and dug his fingers into my thighs.
It was electric, dizzying, and disorienting. I opened my eyes to make sure I didn’t miss a thing, not a second of this beautiful man kissing me. I’d been watching him all day, and I couldn’t stop now. I watched him devour me, get lost in me, savor me. This time, reality didn’t fuzz into the dream. The dream became the reality.
Gabe really let me feel his strength, pinning me with such force that I came up onto my tiptoes and whimpered. We pawed at each other, so frenzied that I didn’t know whose breath was whose. I pushed him back from me an inch and let my fingertips slide across the bare skin above his belt under his shirt. I traced the lines of the hills and valleys of his abs and the very top of his treasure trail. And the muscles. Oh, glory, glory, glory. There they were.
The muscles.
When he felt me tracing them down past his belt line, he inhaled hard and pressed me against the wall even harder. He took his hand away from my hip just long enough to slam the bedroom door. With his other hand he drew my knee up, like we were about to tango. Standing on one foot, hanging on to him for support, I thought how easy, how simple, how natural it would be for him to hoist me right up off the floor, and . . .
Whoa, nelly, this was bananas!
I flattened my hand and pushed him away, sucking in a breath. “I . . . ,” I said, locking eyes with him. “We have to slow down . . .”
My skin stung from the coarseness of his stubble. He looked greedy, and his stare was intense. Almost a warning. Like I might not be able to stop him now that he’d gotten started. “Why?” he growled, letting me feel his hardness against my thigh. A lot of hardness. Big hardness.
The gruffness of his voice and the pressure of him against me just about made me lose my resolve. But still, I stayed strong and sensible. I was no prude, but I was no wanton woman either. “It’s the heat.” I tried not to let him hear that I was, in fact, panting. I smoothed one of the fist-shaped puckers I’d made on his shirt. “Makes people do crazy things.”
Gabe told my cleavage, “It’s not the heat.”
Feeling flustered, shy, and more than a little annoyed with myself for not having the guts to go headlong into what was surely going to be the most delightful of afternoon delights, I reached for the carved-crystal doorknob. Except when I tried to turn it, nothing happened. I jiggled it back and forth, but it didn’t turn. Gabe let out a breathy laugh behind me, and I looked at him over my shoulder, still holding on to the knob.
“Suppose that explains the keys downstairs,” he said and adjusted his pants to accommodate his now much more noticeable bulge. Gaaaaah!
Only the tiniest thread of common sense was preventing me from shoving him backward onto the bed, climbing on top of him, and saying, “I’ll sew your buttons back on myself!” as I sent them pinging around the room like a handful of M&Ms.
He took a step toward me. I was actually trembling with desire—it was buzzing through me, through every muscle and bone. “For the record,” Gabe said, “I want to take you. Right here, right now.”
My breath came out as a shudder. If he came at me again, I was going to crack like an overstuffed taco shell. Just one more scoop of Gabe and I was a goner. “Noted,” I whispered.
He hooked my chin with his brawny finger and made me raise my eyes to his. “But instead I’ll get us out of here, take you to dinner, and pretend like fucking you hasn’t been the only item on the agenda since you nearly knocked me out. We clear?”
I was stunned with desire. Shivering with need. Pulsing with please, please, please. Yet somehow, in the midst of all of it, I hung on tight to the antique doorknob and managed to whisper out the only word that was left in my head. “Crystal.”