It wasn’t hard for me to arrange for Caitlin to get a ride home with one of her friends that night, so I drove straight to Simon’s place. Upstairs in his bedroom he slid the flower crown off my head, then plucked the roses from my hair and my dress slowly, one at a time, letting each fall to the floor, to the bed. He spent an eternity taking my hair down, carefully leaving the pins on his bedside table, winding the loose strands of hair in his fingers as they were freed.
“I can’t get enough of your hair,” he murmured as he unlaced my bodice slowly, drawing the garment off my shoulders. My chemise slipped down over one shoulder and his mouth lingered on the skin that had been exposed. He took just as much care with the rest of the layers of my outfit, untying and unpinning, peeling fabric from me like removing petals from a flower. As I did the same for him, stripping away his clothes, he kept coming back to my hair, drawing it over my shoulders, teasing my skin with the ends of it. “The way it curls around my fingers like it’s alive . . . I can’t get enough of it, enough of you. I’ve never . . .” He sucked in a breath and didn’t finish that sentence, choosing instead to kiss me deeply and lead me into the shower.
We spent an inordinate amount of time soaping each other up, removing every trace of dust and dirt from a day spent in the woods. I took full advantage of the opportunity to really explore him. He had a runner’s body, lean and muscled. I stroked my hands down powerful thighs, kneading the muscles there, before I sank to my knees in front of him. I tilted my head up to watch the water sluice down his stomach, and his eyes burned down into mine as he watched me take him into my mouth. He let out a guttural sound and one hand cupped the back of my head, gripping my hair without pulling.
“Not fair,” he gasped. “I’m supposed to be wooing you. This . . .” There was a dull thud as the back of his head hit the shower wall. “This is the other way around.”
I didn’t care, and I let him know with every lick that I was exactly where I wanted to be. We tested the limits of his house’s hot water heater, and I was impressed with its capacity.
I should have known when Simon said he’d take care of me, he didn’t mean it as innuendo. Well, not entirely. After our inordinately long shower he wrapped me in his bathrobe and started a load of laundry so my Faire outfit would be clean for the next day. We ordered takeout and enjoyed a cozy night in.
Later that night he got his revenge for the shower, alternating the teasing caress of an errant rose petal across my skin with a slow stroke of his tongue or a whisper of breath until my body quivered underneath his. My mouth searched blindly for him, kissing anything I could reach: cheek, chin, throat. I bit down on his shoulder and he gasped in a shock of indrawn breath. By the time he grabbed for a condom and then pushed inside of me, we were both beyond ready, and we rocked together mindlessly, racing for climax, surging together.
Afterward he took my mouth in a lazy, sated kiss that went on for days. “Now, my dear Emily,” he said. “Now you can say you’ve been wooed.”
Twenty
My mind was still full of roses when I went to work at the bookstore on Tuesday. Chris had asked me to take care of opening the shop on my own, so it was safe to say she had gotten into this whole having-an-employee thing. Little by little, over the weeks she had taught me almost everything there was to know about running the shop. After setting up the coffee counter and unlocking the front door, I got the front register ready to go. The morning progressed in what had become a comforting routine. A few people who worked downtown had started making a point of ducking in for a morning coffee and pastry. I thrilled inside every time; my idea had actually worked. Business wasn’t exactly brisk, but I wasn’t bored, either.
When Chris got in later that morning she gave me a knowing smile; roses were on her mind too.
“Nice weekend?” She sounded casual, almost disinterested. As if she hadn’t seen me adorned with roses, being elaborately kissed in front of a crowd.
“Yeah.” I kept my voice equally nonchalant as I finished making her vanilla latte. Her favorite. I knew that by now. “Pretty good.”
Chris snickered and took a sip of her latte, closing her eyes with a smile. “You’re getting pretty good. Are you sure you’ve never been a barista? Never put in time at a Starbucks?”
“Nope. I could make more money at a bar. But I have to say, this is a lot more fun.”
“The coffee?”
“All of it.” I gestured around, encompassing the entire store. “I’ve enjoyed helping you out, setting all of this up.”
“This wouldn’t exist without you. Well, the store would, obviously, since it’s been here. But all this . . .”
“It wasn’t much,” I protested. “A few tables and chairs.”
“And our new book club has its first meeting next month. And Nicole said a writers’ group called over the weekend. They want to have meetings here. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but I couldn’t have done it on my own. Organizing it all.” She tipped her cup at me in acknowledgment. “That’s something you’re very good at.”
“Oh.” The compliment flustered me, and I busied myself by wiping down the counter. “I don’t know about that. I just . . . I get an idea in my head of how things could be, and if I can make them happen I do it. Doesn’t seem like much.”
“Well, it is. Stacey keeps saying she can’t believe it’s only your first year at Faire. You have everything so well organized at the tavern.”
I laughed. “That’s where my years at working in bars comes in handy. A bar is a bar, even if it’s out in the woods.” But I couldn’t keep the smile off my face or the pink out of my cheeks. People had been talking about me. In a good way. That wasn’t something I was used to.
As the day went on, Chris did whatever paperwork needed doing at the beginning of the week while I did, well, everything else. Unpacked the boxes of new books that were delivered on Monday, tidied up some shelves. Little indie bookstores didn’t do a roaring business on a Tuesday at the tail end of summer, so we weren’t exactly busy. After a while Chris looked up from her paperwork.
“You know Lauren, right?”
“Lauren Pollard? She’s one of the kids, right?” Meaning, one of the kids in the cast. I was pretty sure Chris was talking about one of the dancers who came by the tavern a few times a day for water.
Chris nodded. “Nicole goes back to school at the end of August. I told Simon I wanted a high school student to help out this fall, and he suggested Lauren. She’s going to come in on Friday. Do you think you could train her back here?”
“Sure.” Even as I automatically agreed, my stomach dropped and my world stopped spinning. While we occasionally had a rush of customers, on the whole we were barely busy enough to keep the two of us from being bored. There was no need to hire reinforcements unless . . .