She wandered into the paint section and got a few small containers, a pale yellow, a sage green, and a blue the shade of the prairie sky in winter. Then she wandered into the fixtures aisle and chose three different handles for the cabinets. Her tasks completed, she went into the plumbing section to look for Lucas, but he was nowhere in sight, so she fell back on her default time killer. She found the books section and started browsing.
The store had a nice supply of gardening books geared to South Dakota’s extreme climate shifts. Temperatures routinely dropped to below zero for weeks at a stretch in the winter, and topped out around a hundred in the summer. “Humid subcontinental climate,” she muttered to herself.
A book focused specifically on roses caught her eye. Remembering the recalcitrant Country Dancers, she picked it up and started paging through it. Twenty minutes later Lucas rounded the corner, sheets of paper flapping from his hand. “Somehow I knew I’d find you here,” he said when he saw her sitting on the floor, the book open on her lap, her tablet beside her. “That took longer than I thought it would.”
“No worries,” she said absently, then looked up at him. She intended for her gaze to go from the open book to his face, but somehow the trip up took longer than she planned. He had such long legs, the denim of his jeans fitting snugly to his thighs. They rode low on his hips, seemingly held there by his hands. His gray T-shirt made his brown hair glint in the lights, and soft strands curled against his collar. He needed a trim, she thought, but oh, how she’d regret losing any of that thick soft hair. It felt like silk against the sensitive inner flesh of her fingers while she kissed him.
Heat crackled between them before he blinked and shut it down. “What’s that?”
Not trusting her voice, she held it up so he could see the cover.
“I’m pretty sure Gran had that one,” he said.
“Really? She had books?”
“She had hundreds. I figured with a librarian moving in I needed to clear the shelves. Her books are all in boxes in the basement,” he said. “We can look through them later.”
“I thought it was strange she didn’t have any books in her house, with all those shelves,” Alana said from her seated position. “But you don’t have to put books on shelves.”
“She loved books,” Lucas said bluntly. “Books and her house and roses and her kids and grandkids, and Walkers Ford.”
“I can tell,” Alana said quietly. “It’s in every room in that house.”
“Get what you need?”
“I grabbed a few paint samples. We can test them out on the wall to see how they look in the natural light. I also got these,” she said, and held out the three door pulls she’d chosen. “Do you hate any of them?”
Three seconds to scan the options. “No.”
“We’ll take them home and try them out once you paint the cabinets. You can return the ones that don’t work.”
He looked at her. “This isn’t a one-and-done trip, is it?”
“It can be,” she hedged. “White paint. White appliances.”
“No character.” He gave a resigned little grunt. “I’ll pay at the register. We pick up the plumbing after we pay.”
He held out his hand and effortlessly pulled her to her feet. It was a talent of his, guiding people from one position to another, from one frame of mind to another, and his touch was no less potent when it happened under horrid fluorescent lighting in a home-improvement superstore than it was in her kitchen.
Flustered to the point of blushing, she set the book back on the rack, then walked with him through the checkout and back to the truck. He drove through the parking lot to the sheltered overhang. While they waited for the handcart loaded with plumbing supplies, he stared straight out the windshield.
“It doesn’t matter why, but that blush gets me every time,” he said.
The words were largely emotionless but slightly puzzled, as if his reaction surprised him. She turned to look at him. He looked at her, his face still devoid of expression, but heat simmered in his brown eyes, now the color of melted dark chocolate.
“Oh,” she said.
The clang and bump of the handcart across the threshold splintered the tension into shards. Bill of lading in hand, Lucas opened his door and got out, leaving her to take a deep breath to slow her racing pulse. She’d expected the longing to lessen, that the tension and nerves and eagerness and anticipation leading up to their first sexual encounter would dissipate after the first time. Familiarity bred contempt, or at least comfortable awareness.
It hadn’t, a fact that rewired her understanding of desire. Now she knew. She knew the hard planes of his naked torso, knew how her body quivered around his as he slid inside her, knew that maddening, compelling, sparking arousal that built with each stroke. Visceral heat flashed like a strobe light in her breasts, deep in her sex.
The tailgate clanged shut, then Lucas’s door opened with a “thanks” called to the retreating employee. “Dinner?”
“Yes, please,” she said automatically.
“Preferences?”