Page 8 of A Little Love

Picking up his mess under and around the sink, he ran a hand over the new black and white marbled granite countertops without really seeing them. What if he had misread things? What if she chose…

The click of the front door opening pricked his ears. The even softer click as it closed again felt like a hammer’s blow to the middle of his chest.

For almost three full minutes, Nolan stood in his kitchen without moving. So. Hehadmisread the situation.

Fuck.

Gripping the edge of the sink, Nolan bent. He breathed deep, shaking his head once at his own stupidity. That was an army man for you—always all or nothing. A bull in a china shop. Never doing anything by halves, even when halves was the smartest course of action. He should have asked her out for dinner first, taken her to the movies or dancing or something. But no, he’d stuck her in the corner on the Naughty Stool and, instead of taking it slow, told her he wanted to be her Daddy. He should have waited, been patient, done a better job at determining whether she was really interested or whether she was (as had just become painfully obvious) just trying to be nice to the new guy on the block.

Well, great. This was going to make living next to her for the next forty years of his life somewhat awkward.

He had no idea how long he stood there, staring at his brand new sink and the old ratty linoleum between his equally ratty work shoes, before a soft rap on the front door broke him from his dismal thoughts. Four light raps. Probably the delivery driver with his new hardwood flooring and deep blue bedroom carpets.

“Idiot,” he accused himself and shoved back from the sink. Feeling every inch the fool, he went to answer the door, andfor the second time felt that hammer slam into his chest. Tricia hadn’t used her standard knock, but there she stood anyway, having apparently gone home long enough to change her clothes. She stood before him, nervously tapping her fingers, still in her sneakers but no longer wearing jeans. It was mid-June and ninety-eight degrees in the shade and yet, here she was, wearing a thigh-length black trench coat, belted at the waist, with the skirt flaring out from her hips like a dress.

She took a deep breath of her own, bending her head a moment as she took cautious hold of her coat’s belt and timidly untied it. Her fingers trembled, fumbling just a little as she opened both halves of the trench coat to show him the baby-doll dress she wore underneath. It was frilly, pink and white cotton, with lacey hems and a Victorian-style apron decorated with assorted Disney princesses—Cinderella, Snow White, a smiling Beauty without her Beast, and Ariel with legs instead of flippers. She’d put her hair up too—twin pigtails gathered high on top of her head, the hair ties crowned with sparkling, blue-glittered marbles. The curling tips of her hair just barely came down far enough to tickle at her shoulders.

“Would…” Tricia hesitated, her grey eyes full of uncertainty. “Would it be very wrong of me if I-I said I’ve been thinking about it ever since you asked if I was married?”

“No.” For the first time, some of that tension melted out of his chest. “But I do think that dress is far too pretty for helping Daddy paint his new kitchen.” Stepping back, he held the door a little wider for her. “Come on. Let’s see if we can’t find a grubby t-shirt you can wear.”

Nervousness giving way to a tentative smile, Tricia came in off the porch.

And Nolan realized the truth behind that old adage: Things worth having are things worth working for. From here on out, he was going to take it slow.

Chapter Four

“Remind me why we’re doing this again,” Tricia panted.

“Sex swing,” Nolan grunted back.

“Since that implies at some point we might actuallyhavesex, I won’t complain too much,” she good-naturedly complained. “What I don’t understand is why we can’t put it in the living room.”

“Sex swings belong in dungeons.” He marked the wall with two red X’s, one for each of them, about shoulder high. “Dungeons belong in basements.”

“So do spiders.”

“We’re putting it in the basement.”

“Fine.” She scrubbed a wrist across her brow, leaving a swath of clean through the thin layer of dirt that covered her face. Grimy or not, it was still a lovely face.

It had taken two days for the brand new sump pump to empty all the water out of the basement. Three industrial high-powered fans running three days straight had dried things out enough for him to dig—quite literally, he’d bought a wide-mouthed snow shovel for the job—the basement out from under a good inch of the residual muck that more than a year’s worth of flooding had deposited. And throughout it all, Tricia had been there.

She was a trooper; he’d give her that. As a realtor, her hours were rarely ever set, but when she wasn’t working, she was right at his side, painting walls, scrubbing floors, shoveling mud and condoms and broken floor tiles into five gallon buckets, which he’d then trudge up the stairs, out the side door, and out to the dumpster taking up all the extra parking space in his driveway. And she would have a new bucket full by the time he got back downstairs. She was, in a word, the sexiest woman he’d ever seen, streaked in dirt and sweat, dressed in her grubbiest grubbies, puffing and panting and swiping at her brow as she continued to shovel her way through the mud and the filth, with a smile and a joke never far from her lips.

Like now.

“Just remember,” she quipped as she watched him mark the wall. “If a spider crawls on me and I wig out completely, I won’t care if we’re having the greatest sex on the planet. I don’t do the nasty with spiders in the house. So, you were warned.”

“Duly noted.” He smirked, her fear of spiders having been very well established when, two days into their Daddy/Little girl relationship he’d awakened at one in the morning to find her not just in his house, but standing anxiously over him.

“There’s a spider in my bed,” she’d said, in full-blown worried Little mode, albeit one tinged by embarrassment.

Not a big fan of spiders himself, Nolan got out of bed, pulled his pants on and walked next door to deal with the crisis. While she waited on the front porch, he’d searched her bed until hefound it. That he’d been dragged out of bed at 1:00 a.m. to deal with a baby Daddy Longlegs no bigger than his thumbnail never once crossed his lips. Neither did he recount the one time in Iraq when he awoke to the prickly sensation of all ten camel spider’s legs clinging to the side of his head like a giant Alien Face-Hugger. He simply caught the Daddy Longlegs in the folds of a tissue, released it outside in her front flowerbed, and then firmly resisted the urge to invite her back to spend the rest of the night in Daddy’s bed with him.

In a mood then to do anything but sleep, it had taken every ounce of self-control he’d had to tuck Tricia back into her bed with nothing more than a soft goodnight and even softer kiss upon her brow. It took the ardent attentions of Rosy Palm and her Four Sisters before he found sleep again and when he did, his dreams were haunted by big grey eyes and soft pink lips and the flush of Little cheeks that gave way to the deeper, rosier stain of Big desire as he bent her low over the footboard of his bed. He could all but feel the silken slide of his fingers invading her princess parts, winning that first mewling gasp and squirm as her body released a flood of such wanton feminine desire that, when he next awoke, he had a raging hard-on and could swear he still felt her cumming gush of heated liquid spilling over his fingers and taste the salty-sweetness of it still in his hungry mouth.

The slow thrum of heated arousal began to pulse low in his belly, stirring his cock. He did his best to squash the feeling before he ended up needing to excuse himself for a cold shower.

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