Divine Solace: 8 (8 page)

Out of deference to vanity, she brushed her teeth and washed
her face, pulled her hair back in a tail and added a touch of makeup before she
came out of her room, even though she was wearing a pair of paint-stained jeans
and a man’s T-shirt in size small. Unlike what she’d worn at Tea Leaves
yesterday, this shirt was a worn, thin cloth that clung, with a deep V-neck
that showed off quite a bit of cleavage. She hadn’t bought the shirt for those
reasons, but because of its softness and usefulness for dirty house projects.
However, when his gaze slid over her, she wasn’t unhappy with her choice.

He’d made her a breakfast casserole topped with fresh
tomatoes from her potted plant. A glance out the French doors showed he’d moved
the tiles she’d stored in the back shed onto the patio and set up the Skil saw,
along with grout and other tools.

“I’m late,” she said.

Turning from the stove, he smiled and slid the casserole
into a bowl he had waiting for it. “Breakfast is a better wakeup call than an
alarm clock. I’m glad you grabbed some extra sleep.”

She hadn’t been sure what kind of awkwardness to expect, but
obviously any felt was all on her side. He wore his jeans and a community
college T-shirt with a sailboat printed on it.

“I get it now. You really have outgrown the Goth thing. You
just wear the jewelry so the kids you teach think you’re cool.”

He snorted, poured them both a glass of juice and held out
her chair. She slid into it, trying not to think about how that same maneuver
had gone last night. Taking a seat across from her, he nudged salt and ketchup
her way. “My students range from eighteen to fifty, so there’s no way I can
convince all of them I’m cool. I gave up. Hope you don’t mind that I started
setting up.”

“Not at all. Did you sleep?”

“Quite well.” His eyes caressed her in a way that made her
flush. “Though I wish I could have given you the same experience.”

“I slept well enough,” she said quickly, making it clear she
didn’t want to talk about that. A puzzled look crossed his face, but he
respected the boundary, backed off. The conversation stayed relaxed and general
over breakfast, and then they got started.

She helped him lay the plywood and he put it down with the
nail gun she’d borrowed from Tyler and Marguerite. However, the kitchen space
was small. It became clear he made more progress without her being underfoot,
so she soon shifted to being a gofer and keeping him company. Finding a radio
station he liked, she sat on a stool in the living room, discussing music and
watching him when he didn’t have a task for her.

Once the tile placement started she was busy again. He
initially proposed doing the tile cuts with the wet saw while she laid the
tile, but he was the one with the tiling experience. When she showed him she
was more than capable of making straight cuts with the saw, he pursed his lips
in a gratifyingly impressed expression and agreed to let her do the cutting
while he laid out the floor.

She thought she could watch him work all day long. As he’d
hefted plywood, denim had creased and stretched in a pleasing way, the Florida
heat outside quickly dampening his shirt with sweat. When he used the nail gun,
she was entranced by the grip of his long brown fingers, the way his biceps
rippled with each shot. She studied the intentness of his expression as he
measured and judged the distance of the tiles.

They talked about this and that—the music on the radio,
anecdotes about his students or her customers at the tea room. Depending on the
topic, his lips would curve or eyes sharpen. As he worked on his knees, placing
tiles, she thought of him stretched out in her guest bed, hand on his erection,
his eyes seeking her in the shadows.

In the bright light of day she wasn’t sure she should have
done what she’d done last night. Nighttime was when everyone was more
vulnerable to foolishness. But she recalled something Marguerite had told her,
on a day Gen had snapped at Chloe for trying one too many times to set up a
blind date for her.

You’re comfortable being alone, Gen, but you’re also
lonely. Unlike many women, you don’t let that lead you. You don’t act only on
emotional impulse. But don’t forget you can also trust yourself to make choices
to alleviate that loneliness, if and when you desire to do so.

She thought of what Noah had said last night, about how to
understand a Dom/sub relationship. “Can you come to a club just to watch? To
learn? Do they frown on that?”

“Not at The Zone. It’s as much a nightclub as a BDSM club.”
He was squatting, putting spacers between the next group of tiles. Glancing up
at her, he wiped his forehead with his wrist. His long hair, braided in a tail,
had fallen forward over his right shoulder. “You’d be welcome to come with me
and Lyda one night as a guest. No pressure. The Zone is one of the best clubs
around, both for checking things out and playing.”

Since Tyler was a part owner, she had no doubt of that.
“We’ll see.” She nodded to the floor. “I feel like you’re doing all the work.
You really should let me pay you.”

“You’re doing plenty. Having to get up and cut tile and do
other stuff is half the labor time. You handle that Skil saw like a pro. Most
women wouldn’t have both the muscle and the light touch to cut the tile without
breaking it.”

She shrugged, though the compliment pleased her. “My first
husband and I renovated our house together. I learned from him. He was a
contractor.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out.” Noah’s eyes met hers.

“A lot of people have the same story.” She wanted to move
off that topic, fast. “Have you been married?”

She told herself it wasn’t a dumb question. She’d met plenty
of twentysomethings who’d been married and divorced a couple times before
hitting thirty. She’d been one of them.

He shook his head. “No. Only been collared once.”

At her quizzical look, he elaborated. “To a lot of
submissives, being collared is as serious as being married. The Master or
Mistress is accepting permanent ownership.”

Marguerite often wore a delicate choker, a double helix of
pearls with an angel pendant. She’d given it to Tyler at their wedding. At the
time, Gen had thought it odd, a bride presenting a necklace for herself to the
groom. Yet when Tyler fastened it around Marguerite’s neck, the surfeit of
emotion in his expression, and the hushed demeanor of friends Gen now knew were
also part of the BDSM world, had told her he’d considered it an immeasurable
gift. The gift Marguerite must have been offering him was her willing
submission, promised to him forever. A collar.

Finding out Marguerite was a Mistress hadn’t been a huge
shock. Finding she submitted to Tyler was initially harder to understand. Yet
just like Chloe and Brendan, if a person spent any time around Marguerite and
Tyler, it made sense. Marguerite could rule the world with a look, but it was
Tyler’s possession of her heart and soul that had brought the reserved woman
true happiness, peace with her past demons.

Maybe that was the mature woman’s true Cinderella story. Not
that the prince came on his white horse and swooped her away from all her
problems, but he got off the horse and stood by her, helped her deal with all
of it through an entire lifetime. The thought gave her a wistful twinge. She
turned her mind back to the safer, more hypothetical discussion of collars.

“You get a vote, don’t you?” she asked. “I mean, a Mistress
doesn’t just slap it on you without your say-so? And you can take it off when
you don’t want that anymore, right?”

“Or the Dom takes it off when he doesn’t want the sub
anymore.” The tightness in Noah’s voice told her that had been his experience.
He?
Noah hadn’t given her the vibe of being bi. Though obviously he was, if
he’d been willing to be “married” to a man, according to the terms of the BDSM
world.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He kept his gaze on the row of tiles he was placing. “It was
probably a good thing. Least that’s what Lyda says. And Tyler, and anyone who
wants to give me an opinion on it.” He threw her an attempt at a smile, but it
didn’t detract from the hardness in his eyes. She thought of that
Yours,
unconditionally
on his back. Had that been something he’d done for his
Master?

“If I’m asking inappropriate questions, please tell me,” she
said. “Your world is so different to me. I don’t want to be rude.”

“You’re fine. Actually, I think our worlds are pretty close
to the same when it comes to this. Whether they end it or you do, a broken
heart’s a broken heart, right?”

His bald statement made it hard for her to turn away from
the subject this time. “Yeah. I asked for the divorce, both times. The first
one, Guy, he was an alcoholic. His drinking got worse as our marriage
progressed. I tried to work it out with him, but it was too one-sided. He hit
me one night, broke my nose. That was the final straw, but it wasn’t the worst
thing. The worst thing was him choosing the bottle over me.”

Over and over again, after the first year of their six-year
marriage. She wondered if a woman’s self-esteem every recovered from that, no
matter how many times she told herself it wasn’t her, it was an illness, all
the stuff they said on TV and in the Al-Anon meetings.

Noah sat back on his heels. Rising, he came to her, ran his
finger along the uneven line of her nose. His expression held her still as he
leaned down, pressed his lips to it. Then he straightened and went back to the
tile placement, leaving her with a curious ache in her chest.

“And your second husband?” he asked, eyes back on what he
was doing.

She shook her head. She’d taken this as far as she wanted to
go with it right now. “My past is the past. At least I only made the mistake
twice.”

“Sounds to me like they made the mistake.” He’d marked
another trio of tiles and now pushed them toward her. “Can you cut these? It turns
me on, watching you use that saw. Plus I get to look down your shirt when you
pick them up.”

It pulled a chuckle from her, as she was sure he’d intended.
“Perv,” she said. But she bent extra low and shimmied her chest at him before
picking up the tiles and sashaying out the door with a lot of hip swivel. His
wolf whistle drove the other, darker thoughts away.

Once all the tiles were placed, he mixed the grout and
slathered it into the cracks, scraping off the excess. After that, she treated
him to a Subway run. They sat in the back yard at her picnic table, feasting on
foot longs and chips. She broke the third of a three-for-a-dollar cookie deal
with him. Very magnanimous of her, since the food would disappear in his lean
frame and be absorbed by his male metabolism, while she’d have to increase her
daily walks to keep the fat at bay. Yet he pushed his half of the cookie at
her, teasing her into finishing it before they returned to the kitchen to wipe
down tiles.

“Lyda is a workout fiend,” he said as they moved around one
another on hands and knees, polishing the tiles with shop rags. “She does one
of those basic training type classes a few times a week. She’s the instructor.”

“Which explains why she has the killer body.”

“Yeah. But the nice thing about women is there are all types
of bodies.” He gave her that once-over look he did so well. “You’ve got a lot
of nice curves. But see, you just rolled your eyes, the way women do. You don’t
realize how nice it is, to have a soft ass pressed up against your dick while
you sleep, sliding your hands around a great set of tits first thing in the
morning…

He stopped at the look on her face. “Sorry. That was a
little crude. Doing tilework reminds me of being back on the construction crew,
which was all guys.”

Actually, his blunt observation underscored his sincerity,
which she appreciated. As a result, the rough language turned her on more than
she wanted to admit.

He’d turned away from her, allowing her gaze to linger.
Thank all the gods for Florida sunlight, he’d removed the T-shirt a couple
hours ago. The way his jeans worked with his body while he was on all fours
made her have a few crude thoughts herself. “You’re not as housetrained as you
first appear. It…intrigues me.”

His head swung back toward her. The hair at his temples was
slick with sweat. Not allowing herself to think too much, she gestured. “Come
here.”

She was sitting on her heels. He pivoted toward her,
abandoning the cloth and putting his knuckles to the tile, staying on his
knees. She watched his shoulders and hips roll with the movement. He stopped
within inches of her face, the flicker in his eyes suggesting what “not
housetrained” could mean. She backed up and rose onto her knees, bringing her
head above his. Gripping the edge of her T-shirt, she lifted it to wipe his
brow, giving him an up-close look at her breasts cradled in white lace. She’d
worn a bra with more push and lift today, because being around him made her
feel more sexual, more female. His breath on her cleavage was a slow, measured
burn.

Whoa, girl.
But she didn’t want to
whoa
. Maybe
it wasn’t just at night that strong desires could rise to the top.

Scooting behind him, she nudged his calf. He looked back at
her, his braided tail of sleek hair falling over his shoulder as he adjusted his
stance so his knees were shoulder width apart. Moving between them, she removed
her T-shirt entirely, sliding it down the damp valley of his spine, absorbing
an appealing sheen of perspiration. There actually were good things about
Florida humidity.

As she traced the individual bones beneath the thin layer of
cloth, she leaned forward, which pressed her hips against his ass. His buttocks
flexed beneath the pressure as he braced against her weight. She thought of
what he’d said, about strap-ons. What would it feel like, to do that to a man?
The firm shape of his testicles pressed against her thigh when she bent, put
her lips between his shoulder blades.