GABE
She was one hell of a kisser, and I couldn’t wait to taste her again. Her lips were kiss-reddened from my stubble, and she was blushing hard. And Jesus, I wanted her. I wanted her in bed, naked. I wanted to take her through sunset and halfway through the night. But she’d stopped me, and I respected that. For now.
I took one last look at her fantastic cleavage and turned around, adjusting my hard-on with my back to her. The struggle was real. My inseam was not prepared for her, not even close.
Once I got myself situated, I focused on how to get us out of the bedroom. I didn’t have my phone, and as I could tell by looking at the pockets of that tiny little flowered number she was wearing—fuck me—neither did she. We were on the second floor, with a view of the big overgrown yard. Right below the window was the roof of the back porch. That made it easy. “I’ll climb down and get the keys.” I unlocked the metal latch on the window, gripped the sash with both hands, and gave it a push.
The damned thing didn’t budge at all.
Lily gave it a try, but it was the same result. Not even a rattle. “Humidity,” she said. “Or else it’s painted shut. But there’s that . . .” She spun around, pointing at the door.
Above it was a louvered window, one of those old-fashioned things that has a hinge on the top. Walking across the room, I cracked my knuckles and then hooked my fingers over the top of the doorjamb, getting ready to pull myself up.
Lily tugged on one of my belt loops and wagged her finger at me. “There’s no way you and all this”—she gave me a glance up and down—“are going to fit through there. I’ll go.” She kicked off her sandals. “Give me a boost.”
I let go of the jamb and raised my eyebrow at her. “You think I’m gonna let you be the hero?”
She gave me an equally sassy eyebrow lift. “That way you won’t get stuck in the window, and you might even get to cop a feel.” She sealed the deal with a shimmy of her hips that made her boobs shake.
The way they shook reminded me of the way flan jiggled, like the kind I’d had in Spain. I liked flan. But I liked her boobs way better. “Sold.” I crouched down and intertwined my fingers. Using my shoulder for support, she nestled her heel in the cradle of my hands. The skin of her calf was smooth and soft, and I noticed a tan line on her foot in the shape of her sandal. It was V-shaped, like the straps of her flip-flop. It was also the same shape as her panty line, now at eye level. I ground my teeth, thinking how badly I wanted to yank those suckers off her. I could hear the lace ripping already.
“Ready?” Lily asked.
You’ve got no idea, sweetheart. I cleared my throat and looked away from that enticing, mouthwatering ridge. “Count of one, two, three,” I said and gave her a boost like we were doing some sort of cheerleading move.
She rose up into the air with a squeal. She wasn’t heavy at all, but the position was awkward, and as I hoisted her up I had to step into her. My forehead was against her ass, and my face was between her legs. “I take it back. This was fucking brilliant.”
Lily giggled above me. I inhaled deeply. There was the faintest hit of something other than her perfume and her lotion. That scent, that salty warmth, gave me a pulse of desire right through my balls.
Her toes curled slightly as she leveraged herself against my hand. Yet again, I was painfully hard in my pants. With her free leg, she anchored herself against the doorknob. The change in position put my nose right on the edge of her shorts. I pressed my forehead against her ass and suppressed a growl.
“Well, hello,” she said, all low and sultry.
Now she decides to have her way with me. “Hurry up before I can’t help myself and sink my teeth into you.”
“OK!” she giggled. “OK,” she said again, with more focus. She wobbled a bit, but I kept her steady. I heard the window creak open above me, and with her free leg she tried to get a toehold on the door, but her foot slid right down the shiny off-white paint.
“Give me a little more,” she said. “Please.”
Maybe it wasn’t supposed to sound dirty, but Jesus, that’s how I heard it. My mind was in the gutter, and it was there to stay. I hoisted her heel up farther, but it wasn’t enough. She was halfway out the window, with her torso out and her hips still on my side. There was no way for me to get enough leverage by boosting her heels alone. It meant one thing.
I was going to have to put my hands on that ass.
“All right. I’d apologize if I were sorry, but I’m not,” I said. “I’m going to have to . . .” Very gently, I put one hand in the center of her magnificent ass cheeks.
“Oh Lord.”
Under my palms, her skin was so soft and voluptuous that all I could think of doing was giving it a flat-handed spank. I could almost hear the crack of my palm against her. I gripped her hips and gave her a push. It got her about halfway through, up to her waist.
“Keep going,” she told me, getting into it now. “Don’t be shy. I won’t break.”
Now I didn’t even try to suppress my growl.
Her laugh echoed through the hallway. “Harder, Mr. Powers. Harder.”
She was killing me. “Don’t know, Lily. You might have to hang out there for a while so I can do a safety check.” I dug my hands more firmly into her ass.
“Give me one more good thrust, you animal,” she said through another wonderful giggle. “I can take it.”
Fuck. I gave her one more shove, and she finally wedged her knee out of the window. She wriggled through the opening, hung on to the sill with her fingers and thudded down onto the floor. “One enormous set of ancient skeleton keys, coming right up,” she said as she pitter-pattered down the hallway.
What a cutie.
The keyhole gave me a peekaboo view of her face and her cleavage, but the scene cut to black as she tried the first key. She gave it a twist, but it answered with a clack and she pulled it out, giving me a new angle on her beautiful face. “So tell me about this show you’re filming,” she said.
Her spaghetti strap slid down, revealing her bra strap underneath. Beneath that was the faint, pale edge of a tan line. I saw the top of her bra—the delicate scalloped edge was pink trimmed with white. Because she didn’t know I was watching, she didn’t fix it, and I pressed my fist to my mouth to stop myself from groaning. She tried another key, and the keyhole went dark again. She huffed and pulled it out, giving me my perfect view once more. “Gabe?”
Focus, Powers. Focus. Answer the goddamned question. “This is for the pilot,” I explained. “I’ve found it’s a hell of a lot easier to actually film an episode than pitch an idea on paper.”
She nodded and wrinkled up her eyebrows, as animated as if I was sitting across from her. “Makes sense. Does that mean you’ll do more episodes? If they . . .” She trailed off and looked up at the ceiling like she might find the word up there. “Give you the go-ahead or whatever the lingo is?”
“Yeah. That’s the idea.”
She tried another key, and the hole went dark again. Again she gave it a twist, but the lock didn’t shift. “So the guy who I talked to this morning?” she asked. “That was . . .”
“My producer.” I realized I didn’t sound nearly as annoyed about him as I sometimes felt. The fact was, even if he was an occasional pain in my ass, he’d made it so I got to spend the day with Lily. And I had zero complaints about that. “Markowitz. But let me ask you something. Do you believe in these Savannah ghosts everybody’s always talking about?”
She froze with the keys swinging from the ring. “I don’t really know. I think so.” She wrinkled up her eyebrows again. “But I’ve never seen one or anything. It’s really just stories for me.”
Now there was an idea. “Maybe I can get you on camera telling some of those stories.”
Her eyes widened and then scrunched shut with a cringe. “Oh, I don’t know about that.” She shook her head and smiled. “No, I don’t think . . . That’s very nice of you. But no. I’ll leave the television stuff to you.” Now she actually fanned herself. “Lord knows, you know what you’re doing.”
The idea of her watching my show was intensely hot to me. A kink I never knew I had.
The next key on the ring was a long and thin one, slimmer and shinier than the rest. She placed it in the lock, slid it into the keyhole . . .
And poked me right in the goddamned eye.
I lunged backward, trying to catch myself before I fell. But no dice. The bare floors were slippery, and I clocked the back of my head on the hardwood. “Fuck,” I groaned, clasping my eye with one hand and my head with the other.
“Oh my God, are you OK?” she asked as the jingling got more urgent. “Hold on! It’s got to be one of these!”
“Totally fine.” I blinked hard against my palm and felt my eye welling up with tears. “Just getting comfortable.”
I blinked up at the circular plaster chandelier medallion as tears streamed down my cheek. What the hell was going on here? I’d spent my whole career avoiding dangerous situations. I get within ten feet of Lily and it’s one disaster after another. She was like the Bermuda Triangle.
Lily finally found the right key and came bursting in. Through the blur of the tears, I watched her try to put together why the hell I was lying on the floor. She looked at me and the door and the ring of keys in her hand. “What happened?”
You happened. “Listen. Why don’t we go get dinner now? Then we can come on back here to do some taping.” I rubbed my eye with a knuckle. “We can make a night of it.”
In response, she gave me an openmouthed, wide-eyed stare. “Ummm . . .”
Granted, dinner and work didn’t exactly have the same ring of romance as dinner and drinks, but it didn’t seem that bad. And anyway, she’d been the one who’d told me we had to slow down. “Or . . . not?”
But Lily shook her head. “Working tonight is just fine! But I . . . thought we said seven thirty.”
I craned my neck to check the grandfather clock in the hallway. “It’s already five. The sooner we eat, the sooner we can get back here to do some recording.” And possibly find our way back to this room.
Lily played with the keys a little nervously. “OK,” she said slowly. “That’s fine. Sure. But don’t you have something you need to do? Don’t you have to, I don’t know, maybe . . .” Her babbles were getting faster and more urgent. “. . . shower or change or something?” She cringed again and face-palmed her forehead. “Not because you need to. Sorry. I’m just saying, no need to rough it on my account.”
In my book, roughing it was washing my boxers in a piranha-infested tributary of the Amazon. Going straight to dinner with her in downtown Savannah wasn’t. I was pretty sure she was trying to distract me from something or that there was something she didn’t want me to know about. That was when I remembered the wallpapers on her cell phone—that chubby little boy. Maybe she had babysitting duty. “You worried about kids? I love kids. I take care of my nieces whenever I get a chance to visit them.”
She shook her head quickly. “Not kids.”
“Dogs? I love dogs. And cats. All animals, really.”
She looked sternly at me. Seriously focused and genuinely worried. “All animals?”
I mean . . . “Unless it’s some kind of man-eating Malaysian jungle lizard, we’re all good.”
She offered her hand to help me up. Still, she seemed very concerned. The eyebrow rumple ridge was in full form. “It’s not Malaysian. And it’s not a lizard. But the jury is still out on man-eating.”