Resisting Molly (2 page)

BOOK: Resisting Molly

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“Yes. You’ve spent enough time moping over her. Do whatever you have to do to get yourself put back together.”

The tentative smile that broke out on his lips was the first I had seen in longer than I wanted to think about, but all too soon it flickered and vanished. “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine—but I’ve got to run or I’m going to be late.” I gave him a peck on the cheek and hurried out the door before he could say anything else.

I didn’t know if I was going to be fine at all. I had my part time job at the video game store while I worked on my degree, but even if I found something full time I wasn’t going to be able to afford a place on my own. We lived in a fairly small town packed with retirees where housing was limited and rent was expensive, so there was no guarantee that I could even find a place before fall classes started in about a month. Dad running off this way was liable to leave me high and dry, and I’d be lucky if I didn’t end up living in my car.

Going with him was no alternative, though. Garvena was nothing—a highway intersection with one small general store and a couple of dozen farming families scattered around and the nearest college a two hour commute away. While it might be the perfect place for Dad to get himself straightened out, it wasn’t any good for me.

Brynn listened wide-eyed while I gave her a rundown of my morning then uttered a low whistle. “Wow, that sucks hard. I am so sorry.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I’d offer you one of the spare rooms here if I wasn’t leaving, but…” She blinked as her voice trailed off. “Well, why the hell not?”

“What?”

“Move in here.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

She grinned and started bouncing again. “You need a place to stay. There’s plenty of room here, and Dad won’t mind. The man needs someone around to make sure he remembers to eat and stuff like that anyway—he’s completely hopeless on his own. I was worried what was going to happen to him all by himself here, and this way we can kill two birds with one stone. Oh, this is perfect!”

I stared at her aghast. “Brynn, this is so
not
perfect. I can’t do that to your dad. Jeez, the poor guy finally gets some time to himself after riding herd on you for twenty years and now you want to turn around and saddle him with me?”

She stuck out her tongue at me. “Oh, pooh. I’ll bet he doesn’t care. Let’s find out!”

With that she flounced out before I could protest again. I trailed her down the stairs and by the time I caught up to her on the porch she was already rattling off the whole story as though she was stuck in fast forward. When she got to the part about staying in his house Jonathan cut his eyes over to look at me and raised his eyebrows in a silent question. I shrugged helplessly, but he knew as well as I did that it was impossible to stop Brynn whenever she got an idea into her head. Finally she ran down, and her dad gave her a few seconds to make sure she was finished before he looked at me once more.

“Molly, you know that you’re welcome to stay here any time you need to for as long as you need to.”

The compassion in his voice sent a twinge through my heart. “I really don’t want to impose on you. You’ve probably been waiting years to get a moment’s peace from Miss Chatterbox here, and the last thing you need is me moving in and messing that up.”

“You’re practically family, Molly. You can’t impose,” Brynn objected.

“Besides, unlike certain people you can actually be quiet for five minutes at a stretch,” her dad added drily.

“I don’t know…”

“Well,” Dr. Sanders offered, “how about this? You can stay here in one of the spare rooms while you look for something permanent. If it will make you feel better you can throw in something for rent and help out around the house a little. Then when you find a place that suits you better you can move without having to worry about breaking a lease.”

I gnawed on the corner of my lip. “Are you sure this isn’t going to put you out?”

“Oh, Daddy,” Brynn exclaimed, throwing her arms around his neck, “you’re the best.” She turned to me. “This is gonna be so awesome! We can move your stuff in tomorrow morning then we’ll get to spend every minute together until I have to leave.”

I still wasn’t sure about the whole thing, but the way Dr. Sanders’ eyes danced over his daughter assured me that everything was all right. I’d make certain that I didn’t overstay my welcome, though. I took another quick glance at those eyes and felt an odd thrill shoot through me. Probably just relief, but relief shouldn’t have been so unsettling.

In the end it turned out to be just as easy as Brynn had said. By noon the next day we had unloaded my meager load of belongings into the spare bedroom across from Brynn’s, and I handed her dad four hundred dollars for my first month’s rent. He flatly refused to take a penny more despite my protests, and I made a silent vow to make up for it by helping out around the house.

It didn’t take long at all to settle in and get comfortable. I had spent so much time there that it practically felt like a second home already. When I wasn’t at work Brynn and I were joined at the hip and spent most of our time either getting her packed or revisiting our old haunts so she could say goodbye. In the midst of all that, a week after I moved in I saw my dad off, waving a final goodbye as he turned west onto I-10. That was a weird feeling, the nail in the coffin lid of my life under my parents’ roof. For all that I was twenty I had always had that security, and now I was truly on my own at last—even if I was living with my best friend’s dad.

The following week we packed up Brynn’s car and her dad followed her off to get her settled into her new apartment in College Station, and for the first time in my life I was really alone. When I came home from work in the evenings I had that giant house all to myself, and that felt even weirder than when my dad left. It wasn’t scary, exactly, but it was very quiet and extremely lonely and after the first night I took to sleeping on the couch in the den with the television left on for company.

That’s where Dr. Sanders found me when he got home. For once I had a Saturday off so I had stayed up late Friday night watching movies and texting until I finally passed out from sheer exhaustion. I was having a dream about playing hide-and-go-seek in the house with a bunch of little kids when I heard my name.

“Molly,” it came again. That low, sexy voice was the stuff dreams are made of. Very, very naughty dreams.

I sat up and blinked at the dim figure standing in the doorway. A moment’s panic jolted me before I dimly made out Dr. Sanders’ face in the flickering light of the television.

“Just wanted to let you know I was home,” he said.

That was when I realized that all I had on was panties and a sleeping shirt which had hiked up in my sleep to reveal quite a bit more of myself than other people usually got to see. Blushing wildly I tugged it down to a more modest position and hoped like mad that it had been too dark for him to see anything.

“I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow,” I stammered.

“Technically it is tomorrow,” he replied, gesturing towards the clock. “I probably should have let you sleep, but I didn’t want you to wake up and hear me banging around and worry that you had an intruder in the house.”

There was a bright flash of light from the television as it flipped to a commercial and for an instant I got a clear look at his face and the way he was looking at me. Hunger mixed with a longing that seemed to be etched into his bones, so deep that it took my breath away and my heart stuttered in surprise. Then the picture went dark, mercifully draping his face in shadow once more. Not that it mattered; I was never in a million years going to forget that look.

“Thanks. I should probably go up to bed now that you’re home.” My voice came out in a hoarse croak that I hoped he would chalk up to being woken from a sound sleep.

“Sorry I disturbed you. Goodnight.”

When he was gone I lay there frozen, willing my heartbeat to slow while my mind raced trying to process what I had just seen. No one had ever looked at me like that before, with such naked desire that was almost predatory, and while the intensity of it was a little scary there was a part of me that found it exhilarating. I wasn’t anything special, and I had never believed myself capable of inspiring that kind of feeling in anybody—certainly not a man like Dr. Sanders.

And the excitement wasn’t simply mental. My body had reacted as well, my nipples crinkling hard until they ached and down between my legs I was so slick that my panties were moist. All that from just a look?

This was just crazy. Unlike some of Brynn’s other friends I had never crushed on her dad or even fantasized about him. Yeah, he was as hot as they come, but I had never thought of him that way. I was pretty sure he had never thought anything of me before, either. It had taken me all of about thirty seconds to catch on to Hank’s leering, and there was simply no way I could have spent all that time around Dr. Sanders for years without noticing something—a glance, a comment, a touch,
something
to give him away. But I never had.

The simplest explanation was of course that I had imagined it. I had been startled out of a deep sleep and my mind was still foggy and what I had seen was simply a trick of the light. That had to be it. As I turned off the television and padded up the creaky stairs to my room I said it over and over again hoping that eventually I’d believe it. I tried really hard not to think about my physical reaction, though, because then I would have had to admit that I probably would have been in less trouble if I had been woken up by an intruder instead of Jonathan.

When I woke up again later that morning I felt better. The whole thing seemed ridiculous in the light of day. Loneliness and an overactive imagination were to blame, that was all. Still, I was a smidge nervous as I made my way downstairs to see what I could turn up for breakfast. I mean, what if I hadn’t imagined it?
Awkward!

I was sitting in the kitchen’s breakfast nook working on my second cinnamon roll when Dr. Sanders came in from his morning run. Black Lycra running shorts clung like a second skin to the slab-like muscles of his thighs, and the thin cotton of his gray t-shirt fit almost as tightly to his toned upper body. Something very primal stirred in my core—I had an almost irresistible compulsion to press myself against him and bury my fingers in his wind-ruffled hair, then peel off that shirt and run my fingers all over those sweaty, rippling muscles. All of a sudden the room was uncomfortably warm and didn’t seem to have enough air in it anymore and I swallowed hard—then had to cough when a piece of cinnamon roll tried to go down the wrong way. Classy.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” he sang out.

As he opened the fridge and bent to dig around in the back he gave me a front-row-center view of his firm butt in those tight shorts and the temperature in the room shot up another twenty degrees. I felt lightheaded, couldn’t quite catch my breath, and desperately needed something to fan myself with before I melted into a puddle right there on his kitchen floor.

“You’re awfully chipper after coming in so late,” I blurted.

His fingers gripped a bottle of water and he turned back to me. “I actually managed to get caught up on my sleep while I was in College Station. But don’t worry; I’ll be back to my normal, grouchy self in no time.”