Stay (Dunham series #2) (38 page)

They weren’t Eric.

* * * * *

35: Minutes In Idleness

The warmth of the sun streaming in through her
windows and touching her face awoke her. Vanessa sat up abruptly
and looked beside her to see Eric on his back, asleep, one arm over
his forehead and the other hanging off the bed.

She turned the other way to look at her clock and
she gasped. Eight o’clock! She scrambled to throw off the covers,
but a warm hand wrapped around her wrist and pulled her back in
bed.

“You’re taking the day off,” Eric rumbled from where
he lay, still relaxed, his eyes still closed. “Lie down. Loosen
up.”

“But—”

“Vachel’s in charge today.”

She gaped at him. “You went behind my back!”

“I did.”

Her anger was instant and hot. “Eric—”

“Oh, shut it, Vanessa,” he snapped. “You’re going to
work yourself into an early grave and you know, I don’t want our
whole relationship to be based on your to-do list. I want to have
fun with you, see if we can have fun together— Fuck, if you even
know
how
to have fun.”

Her brow wrinkled. “I have fun every day.”

“Yeah, I know. Maybe it’s time you tried a different
kind of fun. You know, like trying a different food from your
favorites in case you’re missing something.”

The anger gave way slowly, teensy bit by teensy bit,
as she reluctantly opened her mind to the idea of spending the day
with Eric like two normal people involved in some semblance of a
courtship.

“What about your murder one case?”

He shrugged. “It’ll still be there on Monday.” She
stared at him, confused, until he opened his eyes and looked up at
her. “See,
that’s
what you don’t get. Not really. It’ll
still be there.” Then he went in for the kill. “What would Mrs.
Wilder say about your work habits?”

Vanessa glared at him. “Don’t you use her against
me!”

Eric flashed her that pretty, pretty smile that had
always made her want to smile, too. “Which only means you know
exactly what she’d say.” He tugged at her until she reluctantly lay
beside him, his arm around her, holding her close. “C’mon,
Vanessa,” he whispered against her temple, kissing her there.
“Relax. I didn’t get all your knots out last night, but I got a
good start. Don’t waste it.”

She sighed against him, adoring the way his hard,
dark chest felt against her. She ran her fingers through the
dusting of fine black hair and ran her finger around the flat of
his nipple until it puckered for her.

“Deep breath,” he said, “in through the nose, out
through the mouth.”

If Vanessa were honest with herself, she did feel
languid enough now to understand better how tense she’d really
been. She’d never had a massage before; when she’d had the time,
she hadn’t had the money. Once she had money, she hadn’t had
time.

“This feels funny,” she murmured against his skin.
“The way my body feels. I’m not sure if I like it or not.”

“You need to get used to it. For cryin’ out loud,
Vanessa. You built a spa across the street and you don’t use
it?”

She sighed.

“I’m taking you to Silver Dollar City today,” he
said. “And we’re going to hold hands and ride rides and see the
shows and eat cotton candy and funnel cakes and ice cream and hot
dogs. If you have a problem with that, well, that’s just too damned
bad.” Vanessa laughed. Just a little. “Tomorrow,” he continued,
“we’re going to Fantastic Caverns.”

Vanessa started to rise again in protest, but he
tightened his hold. “
Tomorrow?
But—”

“No buts. Look, if I have to call Knox and get him
to come down here, I will.”

“That’s dirty,” she growled.

“I’m playing to win here, Vanessa, and no, I’m not
above playing dirty.”

She huffed.

“And I have no compunction about telling him to dig
in and give you some real help. I have been telling him what to do
for six years. So either come along quietly or I’ll haul out the
handcuffs.”

Her nostrils flared. “I don’t know if I can have a
good time with a blackmailer,” she grumbled, then scowled when Eric
laughed.

“Technically, it’s extortion.”

“Whatever,” she snapped, but couldn’t put any real
emotion into it. Fun. Silver Dollar City. Holding hands and riding
rides and eating cotton candy. “Okay,” she sighed, letting the
whole concept seep into her mind.

Intellectually, she knew she worked too hard, but
she really did enjoy her work, her routine, especially because it
was productive. She didn’t know if she could enjoy herself doing .
. . well, nothing . . . when she could be having fun doing
something
.

“I want to know something,” Eric murmured, his
fingers tracing across her back, making her shiver and sigh.

“What?”

“If you’re—” Vanessa screamed with laughter when his
fingers attacked her ribs. “—ticklish.” She squirmed and rolled
onto her back, trying to curl up, breathless with laughter, but he
followed her. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

But he stopped, kneeled over her, and she looked up
into that handsome face. She laid her palms on either side of his
face and said, “I remember— That day, I wanted you to give me a
little kiss, a peck. On the cheek, maybe on the lips.” His smile
faded and his black eyes glittered when he lowered his face to
hers, barely brushing her lips with his.

“Like that?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she breathed. “It never occurred to me you’d
want to avoid little girls altogether. I’m sorry.”

“We’re here. It’s all good.” Then he bounced off the
bed abruptly and said, “Move it, lady. I’m going to teach you how
to have some good, clean fun.”

She sat up and a pair of white denim shorts smacked
her in the face, then a pink gingham peasant blouse landed on the
top of her head. Vanessa jerked her clothes off her face to see him
disappear into the bathroom. Water began to run in the shower and
the sink, almost simultaneously. “Clean?” she called.

“Clean,” he called back. “No sex for you until you
demonstrate that you know how to have fun.”

She squeaked, at once offended at his audacity, yet
deeply touched. It didn’t take him long to shower, and he came out
with the towel half covering his face as he dried his hair, but
then he stopped short when he saw her.

Vanessa stared at him, eyes narrowed, and defied him
to resist her, the way she had leaned back against the wall, her
knees up and legs wide so he could see her neatly trimmed mons—and
the fact that she had both her hands there, stroking herself.

Eric gulped, riveted at her show. “Oh,
God
,
Vanessa,” he breathed.

“I can have sex if I want to,” she said in her best
nanny-nanny-boo-boo voice. “Even if I have to have it with myself.”
She cast a pointed glance at his rapidly engorging cock. “I dare
you.”

He snapped to, looked in her face, and began to
laugh. “Oh, no. That doesn’t work on me, sweetheart.” Vanessa, at
once aroused and amused and frustrated, watched as he turned to
drop on the side of the bed and start dressing. Boxer briefs over
those long muscular tattooed legs—

“You don’t go commando?”

“Naw,” he muttered, then cast her an ornery glance.
“Sensitive skin.”

Vanessa burst out laughing and gave up. “All right,
all right. You win.”

Eric was fully dressed in a simple tee shirt and
cargo shorts when she came out of the shower. He still sat on the
bed, hunched over his iPhone and, from the looks of it, reading a
book.

She dropped her towel and walked right in front of
him. He looked up at her from under that dark brow, and his mouth
twitched. “You’re beautiful. But you know that already.”

She huffed and grabbed her clothes with feigned
anger. “How can you do that?”

“Do what?”

She sat down on the bed beside him to dress.
Snuggled up to him. “I was masturbating for you and you just . . .
blew it off.”

He chuckled and kissed her cheek. “Along with
everything else I picked up at BYU, I figured out how to control
myself. I had to learn how to have really creative dates without
any expectation of sex, and I dated a
lot
. Had loads of fun
even though I knew I wasn’t going to get laid.”

Vanessa stared at him, dumbfounded. But why should
that surprise her? He’d slept with her nude for a week without sex
. . . “Did you get laid at BYU
at all
?”

“Not much, no,” he said. “Dirk’ll tell you
different, but I exaggerated a lot just to watch his head explode.
He thought I was taking advantage of all the sexually ill-equipped
Mormon girls in Provo. But . . . I did get enough practice to stop
being the selfish asshole I was in high school. Getting a really
skittish girl into bed is mostly more trouble than it’s worth, but
with some— It was frustrating at first, but I learned how. It’s
kind of, well, an art.”

“Like tickling trout.”

He stared at her.

“Tickling trout. You can seduce a trout right out of
the water by hand if you’re patient and you stroke him just right.
Curtis taught me how, taught Vachel. It’s a dying skill.”

“Oh. Well, okay, yeah. So think of it that way.”

“Did you date seriously?”

He nodded. “Even a couple of girls I would have been
willing to wait until marriage for, yeah, but they decided they
couldn’t marry a non-member.”

“So you’ve been engaged before Annie?”

“No, but almost. Thing is, you’re surrounded by a
bunch of girls—
Gorgeous
ones, too. God, Mormon girls are
hot
. Anyway, you’ve acquired a taste for nice girls, so you
know before you even ask one out that she wants to get married,
right? And you know they want to be virgins when they get married,
right? After a while, it doesn’t seem like such a sacrifice. You go
out, you get to know each other, you talk. It turns out not to be
such a bad system and the great thing about it is that you’re
looking at a career in politics, and you’re going to stay squeaky
clean by default.”

“Okay,” she drawled warily, “so what did you
do?”

“I told you. Had fun. Bowling. Mini golf. Regular
golf.” He shrugged. “Karate. Laser shows at the planetarium. Long
weekends in Vegas and L.A. Camping in Yellowstone. Shooting the
Snake River. Skiing. A lot. I miss that. Symphonies, plays,
concerts. And you’re sober the whole time ’cause drinking’s
verboten, so you have fun without alcohol. Without sex. Oh, and
dances— I learned how to dance at BYU. Mormons . . . it’s like . .
. what they do, dance. The hottest girls are in the ballroom dance
classes, so I took one every semester.”

“No, I mean . . . ” She blinked, unable to fathom
what he was telling her, so unable to reconcile this
sensual—
sexual
—man beside her with the visual of a nice boy
dating nice girls.
Ballroom dancing
? “What did you
do
?”

“Oh. Made out.” He smirked. “Necking and petting. I
got laid more in high school than I did at BYU. But don’t tell
Dirk. He’ll laugh at me.”

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened. “You— High school—
You did half the females under age thirty in town.”

“No, more like under age forty.”

“But at BYU— You didn’t—? That—” She pressed her
knuckles against her mouth to try to stave off giggles, but didn’t
succeed. “That’s just so . . .
surreal
.”

He cast her a grin. “You’re going to be an entire
Dalí painting by the time I’m done with you this weekend.”

Snickering, she finished dressing, her body feeling
much lighter than usual, as if she’d just set down a thirty-pound
backpack full of textbooks.

She couldn’t say why.

* * * * *

36: Seven Days Was All She Wrote

It was eighty miles from Mansfield to Branson and it
took Vanessa exactly ten of those to fall asleep. Her rich
turquoise eyes had dimmed as her eyelids drooped, and her smiling
mouth had relaxed. She still smiled in her sleep, but only
faintly.

Eric didn’t mind. She deserved it.

And—surprisingly—she hadn’t put up as much of a fuss
over his commandeering her for the weekend as he’d expected. Was it
possible that she hadn’t been on a
date
before? Or at least
since she’d moved to Mansfield?

Yet there she sat in the deep leather bucket seat
beside him, trusting his driving enough to allow herself to fall
asleep. After the knots he’d worked out of her back and very
delectable ass the night before, he doubted that happened a lot. In
fact, he doubted she ever allowed anyone else to drive her
anywhere.

I’ve never held hands with a boy before.

Twenty-eight, sexually adventurous and completely
uninhibited, but hadn’t held hands? That didn’t scream “boyfriend”
to Eric. About the time Sebastian had hit his third shot of
tequila, he’d started to wax sappy about his wife, recounting his
entire history with her in excruciating detail. Not a word about
Vanessa, even in his blinding intoxication; thus, Eric had had to
concede he had no reason to resent Sebastian.
Wild, Wild
West
was eight years old. Sebastian had married his blonde
bombshell muse, kept her perpetually pregnant, and rarely went
anywhere without his children. Monogamy and fatherhood definitely
agreed with the man.

Nash Piper had thrown Eric for a loop, but when one
man cheerfully and immediately steps aside in deference to another
man, the relationship has to be considered a wash. Considering
Piper’s destination, mode of transportation, and his apparent goal
of removing the “ex” from “wife” once he got there, Eric knew that
man had no lingering interest in Vanessa whatsoever.

The possibility that Vanessa’s relationships with
them hadn’t been . . . well,
relationships
. . . hadn’t
occurred to him. Eric had met very few women who didn’t equate sex
with love, at least for a little while, or who didn’t use sex to
earn love. After Heather’s library-only companionship, the girls
who knew the score held less and less appeal for Eric and the girls
who didn’t were sitting ducks for a man of Eric’s prowess. He’d
grown uneasy with that kind of power imbalance, so he’d been fairly
careful in the girls he’d chosen to have sex with—and had had to
learn how to seduce with patience and care and strategy, acquiring
what he considered to be a valuable skill. As for the girls he’d
dated seriously and long-term without sex, well, he liked that for
what it was: a real chance to get to know a woman without sex to
disguise incompatibilities.