was Michael, warm and thick and hard. And all I heard was him, telling me how perfect I was, how lucky he felt, how good this was between us.
I arched and pressed and urged him on, both of us straining for a release that if I was honest, had been building for the past seven weeks between us. And when it came, amid Michael’s hard thrusts and my moans and cries as I tried to take more and more of him, it probably scared the ghosts.
My body shot off like a rocket, and the aftereffects went on for what felt like hours, laying there on the dining room table with Michael’s hard body over mine, both of us gasping for breath.
“Holy fuck,” he breathed, rolling to brace his head on one hand, his elbow on the table.
“Mrs. Easter probably never imagined that going on in her dining room,” I said, giggling.
Michael frowned then, and his brow wrinkled as he said, “or you know, maybe she did.”
“What?” I suddenly wondered if he thought Mrs. Easter had used this table the same way.
“All that stuff she said. About the feud ending, about finding the past and the future in the house. Don’t you think she was playing matchmaker?”
“She wanted us to have sex in her house?”
He shrugged, a sleepy smile covering his face. “No, probably not.” He didn’t say anything else, but the thought did echo through my mind. Mrs. Easter been playing matchmaker? Was that what this was really all about?
Eventually, the table began to feel hard and cold beneath me, and we slid from the surface to clean up and pull our clothes back on. When we’d cleaned up the food and the table without speaking, I stopped Michael in the kitchen and pulled him to face me.
“That,” I told him, “was amazing. And you are the sexiest and most impressive man I’ve ever met. So I have no idea what exactly is going to happen here, but don’t let me ever hear you questioning that truth again.”
“If I do though, will you have to teach me another lesson, maybe?” He smiled a wicked smile, and I laughed as we went together upstairs. We brushed our teeth side by side in the bathroom mirror and without a word, we both headed to the master bedroom, where we undressed across from one another and then slid into the soft sheets atop the new mattress and into each other’s arms.
“I might need a lesson or two now, actually,” Michael said, his breath hot in my ear.
And for the rest of the night, I showed him over and over exactly how sexy and competent he was.
25
Babysitter Fantasies
Michael
I could say I’d never imagined I would find myself in bed with Addison Tanner. Only that would be a complete lie. I had imagined it plenty of times, right before telling myself what a ridiculous fantasy it was and how a woman like that would never find herself in that situation with a guy like me.
But here we were.
And it wasn’t just the physical truth of the two of us, waking in the gauzy morning light, pressed against each other’s bodies and exchanging sleepy kisses and whispers. The physical was easy enough to write off—it happened. People made mistakes. Hell, I’d been walking proof of that for more than a decade.
It was the words she’d said the night before. The ones she’d worked so hard to make me hear, to make me believe. That maybe I wasn’t the guy I’d been telling myself I was this whole time. That maybe I did deserve a chance to find happiness for myself. That maybe successfully raising my son wasn’t an all or nothing proposition. There might be room in ensuring his happiness to look after my own. Maybe.
These thoughts were more than I wanted to consider as the shafts of light reached through the room, drifting languid and soft, just like the two of us in the big king bed we’d had installed.
“Good morning,” I said, pulling the woman in my arms closer against me, loving the silky warmth of her skin, the softness of her hair against my cheek.
“Hmm,” she said, wiggling her butt in closer to bend of my hips, putting her smack against my quickly waking morning wood.
“Sleep okay?” I asked. I wanted to roll her over, claim her again, talk to her in a way that showed I knew where we stood, how things were. But I didn’t know. And in the back of