“For now,” I say.
“That’s a good answer. It means you plan to pick up that brush again tomorrow. Do I get to see today’s work?”
“No,” I say without hesitation. “You already saw it before it was finished.”
“And what, Faith, makes a painting of me ‘finished’?”
“I’ll know when it happens.”
“But we’ve established it won’t be tonight.”
“No,” I say. “It won’t be tonight.”
There’s an inference there that he will be around to see it another day, or night, but unique for Nick, he doesn’t push. Instead, his gaze lifts beyond my shoulder and he scans what I know to be the now shadowy horizon. “It’s peaceful here,” he says. “I see why you were drawn to this place.”
“It’s easy to feel alone here.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Yes,” I say, my stare unwaveringly on his, my answer the truth, for so many reasons I will never explain to anyone.
His eyes hold mine as well, and that warmth I’d seen in his stare of minutes before expands between us. “Tonight, Faith?”
“No,” I say softly, because while alone is good, he feels better. “Not tonight.”
His big hands come down on my waist, and he pulls me to him, our bodies flush, and when his gaze lowers to my mouth and lingers, I know he is thinking about kissing me, I desperately want him to kiss me. But he does not. Instead he says, “How about those gourmet pancakes?”
“Mine or yours?” I ask, finding a smile isn’t so hard to come by with this man as I’d once thought.
“I’m thinking we better go with mine,” he says. “But we’re going to have to make a run to the store.”
To the store.
With Nick.
Hard limit number two: Just sex. Don’t get personal.
I have to put the brakes on everything but sex.
I should tell him this, but he’s laced his fingers with mine, and he’s leading me toward the stairs.
I repeat my new hard limit often for the next hour. In my head, and not to him, and I do this for what I consider a logical reason. He likes a challenge. I’m not going to issue him one on something I can’t afford for him to win. So over and over, I mentally recite: Hard limit number two: Just sex. Don’t get personal.
The first road block to maintaining that limit is that I go to the store with Nick in the first place. I should have said no to this trip, but the fact that he’s absolutely consuming, assuming, and arrogant while there, should have made limit number two easy to follow. The opposite proves true. I learn little things about him and he learns little things about me, like that I hate mushrooms, and he hates olives. He loves orange juice and so do I. Cereal is a necessity, the more marshmallows the better.
In other words: Hard limit number two is a failure. And when it comes to Nick Rogers, resistance is futile.
The man finds ways to touch me the entire time we’re in the store, drawing attention to us that he seems to enjoy, while I dread the wagging tongues to follow. And I know every moment that I should tell myself to back him off, but I don’t. Instead, I help him load up bags with nuts, strawberries, cream, and various other items, and before long we are back in my kitchen, both of us working on his specialty pancakes. And we’re talking too much. We have on too many clothes. This is not what I signed up for, but I don’t stop it from happening. Somehow, we end up on my bed with our clothes on but no shoes, eating pancakes. Talking again.
There is so much—too much—talking going on. And yet I’m doing a lot of the talking. What is wrong with me? “Tell me about your most memorable courtroom experiences,” I prod, my excuse for prodding, my need to finish my painting, to finish the story in his eyes.
Nick laughs. “Where to start?” He considers several moments. “Okay. How’s this for memorable? I’m giving the biggest closing argument of my very young career at the time, and I have enough adrenaline pumping through me to fuel an eighteen-wheeler. I’m halfway through it and it’s going well. Really damn well.”
“And you nailed it.”
He laughs again, that deep, sexy laugh, that seems to slide up and down my spine, before landing in my belly. “No. I would have, or so I tell myself to this day, but the judge let out a burp so loud that the entire courtroom went silent and then burst into laughter that went on eternally.”
“Oh my God. Did you—what did you do?”
“I had to finish, but no one was listening. Thankfully no one listened to the opposing counsel either.”
“Did you win?”
“I won,” he says, setting our empty plates on the nightstand behind him, before adding, “and I was proud of that win then, but looking back, the case was a slam dunk anyone could have won.”
I study him, charmed by this man who gave me humor over the grandeur I’ve expected. “Humble pie from Nick Rogers? Really?”
That warmth is back in his eyes. “There’s much about me that might surprise you, Faith.”
“So it seems,” I say, but I do not tempt fate, or his questions, by once again telling him the same is true of me, nor do I have a chance to be lured into that misstep. He reaches for me and pulls me to the mattress, his big body framing mine, his powerful thigh pressed between mine. “There is much about you that has surprised me, Faith Winter, and I should tell you that I am so far from fucking you out of my system that I haven’t even begun.”
He doesn’t give me time to react, let alone speak, before his lips are on mine, and he’s kissing me, a drugging, slow kiss. And it seems now that I feel every new kiss he claims deeper now in every possible way. He is the escape I’d hoped for, but he is so much more. And eventually we are once again naked, but it’s not kinky spankings and naughty talk. It’s not just sex at all. It’s passionate, and intense, yes, but it’s softer and gentler than before, in ways I don’t understand but feel.
Until we are here and now, in this exact moment when the lights are out, the TV playing a movie with barely audible sound. His heart thunders beneath my ear, telling me that he is still awake as well. I inhale, breathing in that woodsy scent of him, wondering how one person can feel so right and so wrong at the same time. Macom had felt right and then wrong, though the wrong took me longer than it should have to admit, but he was never both at once. Ironically too, when I look into Nick’s eyes, I believe he feels the same of me.