Page 27 of Hold My Heart

Chapter 7

Sometime later, whenher chest finally stopped heaving and she could breathe without gasping like a fish on land, she propped herself up to look at him. “Where do you find the energy?”

“I’ll tell you once I make sure I’m still alive. I’m searching for a pulse. Can’t find it.”

She laughed and pinched him. “Has anyone ever told you you’re incorrigible?”

“Stop talking dirty to me. Those big words...they get me every time. I’m not ready for round two yet.” He drew in a shaky inhale. “I mean, yeah, round two is coming, but I need more than five minutes of turnaround time. I’m still enjoying our last bout.”

It was the strangest sensation, she thought, sprawled on top of him. To have a man with a happy and healthy appreciation for a woman with a sexual appetite. An appetite she’d suppressed for a long time because she thought it wastoomuch. She’d certainly suppressed that part of herself with Dan, because he’d been too stressed with work, too preoccupied with his anxieties to want to make love longer or more often than simple perfunctory physical need. When she dared to ask for more, he called her selfish, unwilling to see things from his perspective. It should have been a warning sign.

No, there was no room for those thoughts anymore. Not here, not now. Not with Harlan.

His eyes were closed but he was smiling. “You wrung me out, woman. Do I look like wet laundry? I feel like it.”

“I didn’t think we would end up here,” she murmured.

He rolled onto his side, trailing a finger down her clavicle between her breasts. “Here...on your bedroom floor? Where exactly did you think we’d end up, the kitchen counter? Although that—”

She punched him playfully. “I let you seduce me. When you kissed me, I think you disconnected my body from my brain and I allowed my vagina to do all the thinking.”

“There is nothing wrong with letting your vagina do the thinking. Especially if it means I get to lavish more attention on these truly wonderful breasts of yours. They’re fabulous.”

“Oh, you like them, do you?” she asked against his lips, unable to stop kissing him.

“I like everything about you.” His answer was another touch, his hand sliding down to her hip this time. “It would be nice if we could stay here for a day or so. Forget about everything, focus on each other.”

She chuckled. “Things like that only happen in movies. It isn’t real life.”

“It could be if we let it.” Her skepticism must have gotten across to him even in the dark because he chuckled too.

“You know, no one has ever brought me to orgasm from sex before.”

His magic fingers stilled against her and she looked at him, wondering why he’d stopped. “What?”

“You must be really good,” she continued, suddenly self-conscious at having given voice to that revelation.

“Your husband, he never...well...he never made sure you got yours from sex?” Harlan’s eyebrow cocked halfway to his hairline in disbelief.

She shook her head and reluctantly slid off, moving to the bed. “No. He tried ahead of time, if you get my meaning, but most days he was simply too busy. Most months, rather, because once a month became our norm before he died. Most of the time I got myself off when he wasn’t around.” And where had she found the courage to reveal that to Harlan?

He rose from the floor and joined her on the bed, cradling her in his arms. “You don’t know how sorry I am to hear that. I hope you’ll let me make it up to you.”

She blinked. “It isn’t your job to make it up to me.”

Whatever else he wanted to say on the matter, he zipped his lips and kept it to himself, shifting the subject seamlessly. They talked to each other for hours until Harlan had recovered the strength to make it up to her. Which he did twice more before five o’clock in the morning. Then Olympia used whatever brain cells hadn’t been burned away to ask him to leave. It was better to have him gone than risk Renee waking up and finding him there.

But the bed felt empty without him. Big and empty and cold. Her body was used and sore in the best ways, and if she didn’t focus on the ache between her legs, she might have wondered if it really happened. Had she really let herself go and spent the night with Harlan Anderson? Harlan, her ward’s manny, the one who made inappropriate jokes and could never be quiet for more than a minute. Harlan, who thought he knew best and didn’t hesitate to let her know when she was being a pill. Who took her shit and dished it back in the nicest of ways.

Yes, yes, she had. It was her first intimate encounter with a man since her husband had died.

---