The Locket Read online

  By the time Robert came into the room, the flock of nervous butterflies in her belly had morphed into mutant pterodactyls. Funny how it only took one roving pass of his warm brown eyes and then one soft smile for all that nervous energy to be dispelled.

  “Hi,” she said, before the silence could become too overpowering.

  “Hi, yourself.” He sat down next to her feet to remove his shoes and socks. “Nervous?”

  Holding up two fingers a scant inch or so apart, she said, “Maybe just a little.”

  He stood up to pull the tails of his shirt out of his jeans, unbuttoning the front before he stripped it from his shoulders. The play of muscles, bunching and rolling beneath the surface of his skin as he draped his clothes one piece at a time over the footboard, left her mouth a little dry. Soon he was down to only his jeans. She liked watching him take off his belt when she knew it wasn’t about to be put to an alternate use. He draped that, too, over the footboard before coming down the length of the bed to the oil lamp on the bedside table. Again he stopped and just looked at her, smiling softly until she started to feel a little silly for just sitting there, swaddled in blankets nearly up to her chin.

  Gathering the top of the quilt in her hands, she pushed it down to her waist, baring her chest to his appreciative gaze. She gestured to herself, laughing a little as she said, “Ta dah.”

  Boobies.

  His smile widened and his eyes warmed even more. Reaching down, he also hooked the edge of the quilt and lifted it up and over her, laying it aside. For the longest time, he didn’t move; he simply drank in his fill, his smile never wavering, caressing her with a roving gaze that she could almost physically feel.

  “Ta dah,” she repeated weakly, her voice slightly trembling. She was slightly trembling pretty much everywhere.

  “You’re beautiful,” Robert finally said. And then he bent over and blew out the light.

  She listened to the soft rustle of his pants sliding to the floor, halfway thinking it rather unfair that he got to see her starkers and yet didn’t return the favor. But then his hand found her hip in the darkness.

  It was a long time after that before she had the presence of mind to think anything more.

  * * * * *

  Kylie awoke the next morning with the glare of a beautiful sunrise shining through an unfamiliar window and directly across her face. She opened her eyes slowly, taking in the difference of the window curtain billowing gently around the open glass pane, and smiled. It hadn’t been a dream, then. She was still naked, lying on her stomach with her head cushioned on her arms because somebody was a pillow hog in his sleep. Sometime during the night, the quilt had been kicked clean off the bed, leaving only a tangled strip of sheet twined partially around her middle. She was instead covered mostly by Robert. His hairy leg was hooked over one of hers, his arm around her waist held her tucked up against his side, and his morning-bristled chin was balanced on her shoulder. Which angled his deep, slumbering snores right into her ear.

  Kylie raised her head far enough to twist back and look at him. Although she hadn’t meant to, even that slight movement was enough to wake him. His eyes fluttered open, then focused on her.

  “Good morning,” she said softly.

  “Coffee,” he groaned in reply. He nudged her hip, strongly implying that she be the one to get up and get it, and closed his eyes again.

  Content where she was, Kylie watched him drowse until, without opening his eyes, he prodded her hip again. She shook her head, chuckling. “I’m fine where I am. You want coffee, you go get it. Besides, after last night, I think I’m entitled to an early morning show.”

  His hand shifted from her hip, angling down until it wedged between her thighs.

  “Oh yeah,” she sighed. “That’s really going to get me out of bed, all right.”

  Except that it did, especially when he started pinching. Kylie erupted in a fit of giggles and flailing limbs, kicking the sheet flying as she more fell off the bed than climbed out of it.

  “All right, all right!” she laughed, slapping at his nipping fingers.

  “Feel free to wander about naked,” he said, rolling onto his back so he could watch her.

  Kylie crawled back into her dress again anyway. “Sorry. No peek shows for pinchers.”

  A slow smile crawled across his lips and, coffee or not, somehow he suddenly didn’t look quite so sleepy anymore. “You forget, woman. One of the cardinal rules to living with me…”

  “The one who spanks makes the rules,” she guessed, lightly trailing her hand along the footboard as she circled around the end of the bed.

  “I was going to say ‘I always get what I want,’ but I like your interpretation, too.” He crossed his hands behind his head, watching her with that heated stare. The tent that had developed beneath the thin layer of sheet had grown even more prominent, suggesting that he might have just changed his mind regarding the coffee when he beckoned to her. “How about we put that theory into practice? Come here, woman. Prove your obedience and give your future husband a kiss good morning.”

  “My future husband,” she echoed silkily. “The lord of my manor. King of my castle.”

  “I could get to liking that.” He held out his hand as she came around the footboard toward him.

  She slid the tips of her fingers over the top of his foot, trailing two lightly over his skin until she reached his shin, just below where his knee disappeared beneath that thin strip of barely concealing sheet. “You’re going to have to learn a few things about wives.”

  She slipped her hand beneath the sheet, lightly tickling up the inside of his sparsely hairy thigh, and her voice dipped sultrily lower even as she bent to press the softest kiss to the hard, chiseled plane of his stomach. His muscles flinched beneath that touch; a light of hunger began to grow in his dark eyes.

  “You think so, huh?”

  “I do, and about your future wife in particular.” In which direction to trail her good morning kisses: up, across the breadth of his chest or down, to more interesting locations significantly below it? Decisions, decisions…

  “I’m listening,” he said huskily. He combed his fingers through her hair, and with the slightest of nudging caresses, helped her pick a path.

  “We have our own cardinal rules.”

  “Oh?” His breathing had quickened just a bit.

  “Mm hm.” Down she went, the tip of her tongue dipping out to flick at his navel as she lay her kisses all the way south, following a thin strip of soft hair until her lips found the sheet barricade lying across his hips. Glancing up the length of him, she laughed softly when she saw his hungry eyes locked on her, smoky, burning. Waiting. She grinned and tickled the inner slope of his tense thigh before taking hold of the sheet. “Would you like to know what that first rule is?”

  “Educate me,” he rumbled, combing his fingers back through her hair again, his thumb caressing the curve of her cheek.

  “Never obey if you don’t have to.” Snatching the sheet from both him and the bed, Kylie sprang for the door, shrieking laughter when she heard his feet hit the floorboards behind her.

  “One lesson in obedience, coming right up!” he threatened playfully.

  She all but flew down the stairs with him bumping into the wall and grabbing at the banister not six feet behind her. She reached the front door ahead of him, but only just barely got it open in time. She felt the swish of his grabbing hand brushing her shoulder and hair as she dashed outside, letting the bright sunshine wash over her and waving her fistful of bedsheet over her head. The long white folds streamed behind her, flapping and snapping like a flag of surrender until she finally stopped running, finding safety not more than a dozen steps from the porch stairs in the broad, open, public domain of the front yard.

  “Ha ha!” she crowed, as she turned to mock him. Paused at the threshold, he was using the door to shield his nakedness while poking his head out just far enough to glare at her through narrowed, laughing eyes. “How’s that lesso
n feeling to you now, huh?”

  His smile widened, but his eyes narrowed even further. He leaned further out to see down that empty stretch of highway road behind her, and then he fixed his attention back on her.

  “Uh oh,” she had time enough to say, and then she was off and running again, as fast as her legs could carry her. Past the fruit stand and across the yard, she raced for the orchard with a very naked and rapidly gaining on her Robert not that far behind.

  She had only just burst through the first row of apple trees when an arm like a band of steel wrapped around her waist and pulled her straight up off the ground.

  “Got you!”

  Kylie dropped the sheet. Shrieking and laughing so hard she could barely breathe, she grabbed for Robert’s bare shoulder as he swung her around in the air, and down to the ground they tumbled.

  Wrestling her thrashing limbs into compliance, he quickly gained the upper hand. With katydids and grasshoppers a hidden summer chorus, it was shades of their first meeting all over again. Once more she was belly down in the warm grass with him kneeling over her, methodically pinning her wrists behind her back. And yet at the same time, there was a whole world of differences between then and now. Like…well, Robert’s complete nakedness was a pretty big difference, and in all the varied nuances of the word. But then, she was also laughing, and so was he, particularly now that she was caught. Even when he yanked the hem of her dress up her bare legs, exposing the swells of her pale buttocks to the rising of the sun, scared was the last thing she felt.

  “How’s this lesson feeling to you now?” Robert countered, his palm launching a crisp attack all over her bucking nates.

  To get away was the last thing she wanted, but holding still quickly proved impossible when that hot, familiar sting erupted behind her. Thank goodness it didn’t last long, or her yelps and laughing pleas for cessation might have turned real. As it was, by the time he flipped her onto her back in the tall grass and dropped down to cover her, that fire had begun to outwarm the sun. It was hard to hold her bottom still. She wiggled and squirmed, alternately grinding her ass against the ground and lifting her hips to ease the instant flare of discomfort that created.

  “Are we repentant yet?” Robert asked, grinning.

  “Never!”

  His knee swept her legs apart and the hard weight of his hips bore hers straight down into the rough prickle of the dried grass crushed beneath them. She wanted to rub, not so much to soothe away the searing ache, but to feel the fire of it before time stole the sensation away. But Robert had different ideas. He recaptured her hands, pinning them in the weeds above her, while his dropped to grasp her thigh, hooking the back of her knee and hiking her leg all the way up to his waist.

  “How about this lesson?” he demanded, moving against her until she felt the full and heavy jut of his cock press into the cradle of her thighs. She gasped when he pumped his hips, letting the hard, sinewy shaft rock along the folds of her sex, growing slick as it rubbed. “A daily dose of both should make you meek and biddable.”

  “You don’t want me to be either,” she sighed, needing no other encouragement to wrap her legs around his hips, pulling him deeply into her. Thick and hard, satin wrapping strength, she could feel his pulse as he filled her.

  “No,” he moaned, his lips only inches from hers, his heart a steady beat beneath her hands and between her legs, the pulse melding harmoniously with the languid throbbing in her bottom.

  She clung to him, her eyes closing, tipping up her face into the light as her whole body rocked, her hips chasing his when he withdrew, retreating only inches before thrusting again. “Let’s try it…ah!…anyway.”

  “See if it works,” he agreed, his breath a soft expulsion against the base of her throat. He moved, reaching down to cup her bottom as he began a slow and steady rhythm. The muscles of his back bunched and rippled as she wrapped him in her arms and simply felt. The prickle of the grass beneath her, the hard angles of him riding with increasing urgency above. Talking got very hard after that. Her body coiled and tensed, winding each time his hips struck hers, fanning the fire in her bottom until it began to spread. Growing molten. Rolling in languid liquid waves as he pressed deeper and deeper with each driving thrust.

  He stole the moans from her lips with searing kisses, relentlessly winding that coil deep inside her until she felt the pull of those tightening strings beginning to fray. Kylie came beautifully apart, shuddering on tidal pulls that rolled through every part of her from the tips of her fingers to the curls of her toes. In some small part of her, she thought she heard him laughing. In some very small part, she realized he had covered her mouth with his hand. Until then, she hadn’t been aware that she was making noises.

  “Shh,” he whispered against her ear. “There’s a car.”

  She never heard it. Everything she was was fixated on the pulse of him, slick and hot inside her, riding in command of those waves, still poised on the verge of something cataclysmic if only he would move. Except that he wasn’t. He held his hand over her mouth, still so hard and so full and so incredibly deep inside her, so that every gasp she brought in around his fingers and every twitchy pulse of his cock as he held himself immobile, made the lack of motion even more intense. It sharpened the waves. It honed the coils of pleasure into hovering knifepoints. One more thrust was all it would take. Just one more slow circling stroke sliding along the molten walls of her sex…

  Her legs trembling around him; her hips tilted, struggling under his restraining weight to buck upward and let those coils snap free.

  “Shh,” Robert both groaned and whispered, laughing under his breath as he felt her body locking all around him, trembling. Moving or not, she shuddered under him, the muscles of her sex clenching tight around him and letting the waves bring her to completion without him.

  He pressed his head to her shoulder, swearing softly but holding himself tautly still, waiting until he heard the slam of a car door from the fruit stand behind him, followed a few seconds later by the coughing sputter of an engine coming back to life. The sound helped to cover Kylie’s ragged cry when he swept his hand from her mouth and reclaimed her lips in a hungry kiss. The waves were softly ebbing when he began to move again, surging up and over her, hooking his arms under her knees and folding her legs back nearly onto her chest to deepen his strokes. He rode her hard, driving the waves back into a pounding fury, staving off that pleasant exhaustion that was trying to settle in her limbs and forcing that myriad of strings inside her to tighten all over again.

  He brought her quickly back up to that sharpened peak, that finely honed edge of sensation where the intensity fractured pleasure until it was almost an agony. Where all the world fell away, leaving her clinging to him for dear life, unable to feel anything but the long, deep strokes as he rode her hard and fast. This time he didn’t stop when those long shudders began to tumble through her. He kept the waves rocking, so strong and fierce that every muscle clenched and shook as she came. And this time he didn’t stop until the wracking force of it had consumed them both.

  * * * * *

  Kylie’s legs were sunburned from her knees straight on down to her toes. Even on the soles of her feet. From the way Robert was walking, she could tell their early morning frolic in the sunshine hadn’t allowed his butt to fare much better.

  Sitting on the front porch with a pair of pliers in her hand, she smiled as she watched him limp across the yard, trying to walk without his sore flesh scraping against the denim of his jeans. Lugging two heavy buckets for another round of applesauce and pies, as he drew nearer their eyes met and he answered her rueful smile with one of his own. When his gaze warmed, dipping somewhat south of her face, she bowed her head back over the task at hand. She was tender enough as it was, and besides, there was a whole lot of work that wouldn’t be getting done if they spent the day playing in the grass.

  Like the cider press. She’d been here almost two weeks already, and it still wasn’t fixed, but at least she was ma
king progress. So far, she’d fixed half the broken racks. She’d rebuilt the time-worn frames by hand, which hadn’t been too difficult once she discovered the small mountain of wood piled in the back of the loft. The wire, as it turned out, was the biggest time-consuming repair. Use it ‘til it falls apart, as her old Nana had been fond of saying, and fortunately most of what she had to work with looked good enough that she could do just that. Somewhere back down the short line of would-be cider press repairers, someone had replaced the old wire with a fine new mesh that Kylie simply transferred onto her nice new frames. Considering the condition of the two old wire bundles she’d found in the loft, she counted herself incredibly fortunate. With the war on, the likelihood of buying new wire—even if Robert did have the money for it—wasn’t high.

  “How’s it going?” Robert asked when he neared the porch.

  “My pies are gone again. So’s all the apple butter and marmalade. If I weren’t so busy here, I’d seriously consider reopening that old factory down the road. Not only could we make use of all this fruit going to waste, but the whole town could get working again and we’d all make some money.”

  Robert snorted, then chuckled. He bent to drop a quick kiss on top of her head before setting his buckets down near the door.

  Blinking twice, Kylie swiveled in her chair to look after him. “What does that mean?”

  “What does what mean?”

  “That snort and laugh. You don’t think my pies are good enough to market? I could call myself Mrs. Smith and take the country by storm.”

  “You’d be sued,” he said evenly. “And everybody loves your pies. That’s why there’s never any on the fruit stand.”

  “Then why the laugh?” She hadn’t been serious when she’d made that offhand comment, so there was really no reason why she should feel this offended by his reaction. And yet it stung. She supposed it wasn’t his fault. Robert was, after all, a product of the times in which she was now forced to live. She could remember Nana saying how she used to have a teaching degree, and yet her husband hadn’t let her work. Not even during the Great Depression. Yes, women were doing more out of the home now, but only because all the men were off fighting the Germans. The war effort had coaxed them out of the kitchen and onto the assembly lines making pots and planes and bullets and bombs, but they didn’t run the factories. Even if she did have a useable ID and collateral, she doubted any local bank would be ‘new age’ enough to consider her ‘loan’ material.