Blueprints: A Novel (34 page)

When he muttered, “I need to touch you,” she went up in flames.

She couldn’t find breath enough to speak, she was shaking so inside. The best she could do was to lean that little distance closer until skin met skin.

Moaning, he shot her a sizzling look, then hollered at the boys, “Anyone in that sandbox hungry?”

“Me!” shouted Buddy and scrambled out of the sand. Tad imitated both the shout and the scrambling exit.

“Is pizza pickup on the way home okay?” Chip asked Jamie.

“Perfect.” Anything would be. She was so not thinking about food, but there were the boys to consider, and Chip was much better than she was that way.

She followed the Honda to the pizza shop, then to his house. Once inside, she helped set out plates, napkins, and glasses—tonight Fred and Barney for the boys, no choices there. Other than catching the pocket of her shorts on a drawer pull, which she couldn’t have done a second time if she’d tried, she breezed around his kitchen. Working together, they quickly joined the boys in the breakfast nook.

Did Jamie know what she ate? No. Nor did she know what she said, though she kept up her part, dovetailing with Chip through a running conversation designed to include the boys. All the while, if she wasn’t looking at Chip’s hands, she was looking at his mouth, or his once-broken nose, or the shadow on his jaw. Everything about him was forcefully male, including, once dinner was done, the commanding voice that got the boys into the living room to watch Diego rescue dinosaurs.

“You guys stay here while Jamie and I clean up,” he said with commendable nonchalance and, returning to the kitchen, promptly backed Jamie up to the sink. Framing her face with both hands, he tipped it up and held it steady, and a good thing that was. His kiss was hungry, slanting one way, then the other, using tongue, teeth, and lips in the undisciplined way of the starving—until Jamie was wild with need.

“Okay?” he whispered against her mouth. She had barely begun to nod when his hands were under her tee, and while he pushed up her bra and thumbed her nipples, he kissed her again. This time it was all tongue, provocative and deep.

Jamie had been fisting his shirt, then rubbing her palms over his chest, but she needed more. The thrust of his hips drove her. Frantic, she breached the waist of his sports shorts and found him with both hands. He was so magnificently erect that she gasped.

“Nnnnnn,” he groaned into her mouth. Then he bodily lifted her, guiding her legs around his waist, so that he was right where she needed him to be, or almost. Having clothes in the way didn’t work.

Breathing hard, he put his forehead to hers. “Buddy has a bunk bed. Can Tad sleep on the bottom?”

“He’ll have to,” Jamie said with a low laugh, because there was no way she was returning to her condo without having Chip inside her first, and there was no way that could happen until the boys were down for the night.

“Okay.” He seemed in pain. “Okay.” He sounded determined. “I’m a lousy dad for having pizza too often and for not knowing what in the hell we were saying to them at dinner and for sticking them in front of the TV while we do this, but right now I’m going to redeem myself by cleaning up here and then running their bath.”

With measured movements, he set her on the counter. Determined to be similarly disciplined, she slid forward and promptly overshot the edge. She would have tumbled if he hadn’t caught her, but he was kind enough not to say that. Without a word, he crushed the empty pizza box and put it aside, then began to load the dishwasher as she ferried things from table to sink.

“Do you think it’s okay for Tad to be sleeping somewhere different again?” she whispered as they corralled the boys upstairs for a bath.

He began filling the tub. “I don’t know, but I can’t think of another option.”

She couldn’t either, and Lord knew she had tried to find one. She tried once more as she retrieved Moose and the diaper bag from downstairs, but she didn’t have a sitter who would come instantly and stay late on a Thursday night, and she certainly couldn’t ask Caroline. Caroline would talk about caution, but Jamie’s body wouldn’t listen.

“Let’s see how he does,” Chip said when she returned. “We’ll only be two doors down.”

Two doors down. In his bedroom. In his bed. Naked.

Hit with another flare of heat in her belly, she rocked lightly back and forth as she knelt by the tub, and though there was some foreplay—
way
wrong word—with a dozen rubber dinosaurs, they quickly got down to soaping the boys. She did Tad. Chip did Buddy. There was conversation in which Jamie did participate, though she didn’t retain any more of what was said than Chip claimed to have taken in at supper. She did read the boys a story. It seemed only right to do that. She sat on the lower bunk with Tad tucked against her from the start, and though Buddy kept an initial distance, by the time Peter Pan backed Captain Hook off the plank and into the water, where the tick-tocking croc awaited, he was sitting nearly as close as Tad.

Chip sat cross-legged on the floor, a distraction there. But he got to his feet—bare, lean, masculine feet—as soon as the story was done, nixed Buddy’s request for a second, and hoisted him up over the safety rail and into the top bunk. There were kisses, instructions, promises, and good nights. Moments later, Jamie and Chip stood with their backs to the wall just outside the room.

Chip whispered, “He’ll come down the ladder at least once for another animal.” He took her hand. She could barely think over the thunder of her pulse and the pooling of heat in her body, certainly couldn’t make out the low murmuring in the bedroom, but Chip did. “Giving Tad something,” he whispered. “Likely a teddy.”

Jamie wanted to say what a sweet child Buddy was, but Chip had swung around to press her into the wall and capture her mouth. Clearly still listening, he kissed her quietly, lips sliding along her neck and down to her chest. He paused when a sound came from the boys. Jamie felt his ragged breath and tried to tame the thud of her heart, but forget that. His mouth was warm on her skin and so close to her breasts that her insides sizzled.

She dragged him up by the hair. “I
need,
” she whispered in desperation, and still he waited another one, two, three minutes, rubbing against her in the most subtle undulation as those blue eyes seared hers. When no further sound came, he lifted her as he had done in the kitchen and carried her into his bedroom with her legs wrapped around his waist.

Freeing one hand to close the door, he lowered her to the bed and followed her down, and, that quickly, restraint vanished. His hands were everywhere, fighting with hers to remove clothes, touch what was bared, and see each part between kisses. It was frenzied, but not without care. As awed as she was by his size and by the rough texture of his skin, there was an answering wonder in his hands as they moved over her body.

His gentleness undid her. She was so ready for him that her body was weeping with need, but when he rose above her and thrust deep, she cried out. The fullness was beyond anything she had ever known, a sense of completion that brought even greater hunger. In a tangle of arms and legs, they rolled over, then over again, seeming to share the same need to feel more, deeper,
harder,
and when they came, it was in quick succession, overlapping, endless.

He landed on top, but when he made to roll off, she held him still. “Don’t.”

“I’m too heavy.”

“You feel good.” She loved his solidity, loved the musky scent of his skin and the way the late-day sun glanced off one broad shoulder. As her breathing leveled, though, a germ of responsibility returned and, conscience-stricken, she sought his eyes—blue eyes that looked down at her with satisfaction, admiration, and such incredible warmth that she forgot what she was going to say.

“Taddy,” he prompted gently.

“He’s not used to a bed,” she said in a rush before she lost it again. They had padded the floor with cushions, but still he was used to having sides and would be afraid if he fell. “Will we hear if he cries?”

Holding her gaze, he stretched one long arm toward the nightstand. There was a click, then the whispery static of a monitor. When that long arm returned, it began to explore—and, oh, she’d been wrong about not wanting him to move. When he slid lower, his mouth did things to her she hadn’t dreamed it could. And how his hands held her? And his words of arousal and praise? The pleasure was unfathomable. When she came, she sobbed with the intensity of it. She might have been embarrassed if his throaty cry hadn’t quickly followed. He had waited for her, she realized. Both times, he had needed her to climax first.

It was a while before her body calmed, and even then, with his arms locking her to his side, she couldn’t move far, not that she wanted to. There was too much to see. In the dying sun, he was positively golden—strong facial planes, wide shoulders tapering over a firm chest to a lean waist. He was athletic, but nowhere near as bulky as he must have been once. She trailed a hand through the whorls of dark hair that spread wide before arrowing down his torso to his groin.

He caught her hand and, carrying it to his mouth, opened her fingers and slowly kissed her palm. The gesture was unbelievably sweet, particularly when he flattened her hand over his heart and said in a voice that was husky and real, “You are my dream.”

Her heart caught. “I’d say you’re mine, too,” she whispered, “only I didn’t know I
could
dream this. It’s crazy.”

“Not crazy.” The clarity of his eyes swore to it. “Just sudden. Let’s get married.”

She grinned. “Okay. When?”

“This weekend.”

“Perfect,” she said. “Makes total sense.” It was way
way
crazy. “We’ve never been to a restaurant together, never celebrated a holiday together, never talked about what we want for our boys in two or five or eight years, never discussed work, like what we do in a day, never even met each other’s families—”

He stopped her mouth with gentle-giant fingers. “Don’t overintellectualize this, honey. Just feel.”

Intellectualizing versus feeling. It was a potent choice for someone whose life had been dominated by deliberate thought—at least, before Chip. Since meeting him, it seemed, feeling had been major. Still, she heard her father’s words and felt chastened.

“I’m trying to think like a grown-up.”

“We are,” he said in a measured voice. “But things happen—like death, like instant parenthood. I’m thirty-three. There are times when my knees don’t work and my past makes me old, but I
see
better than I ever did, and I know what I want. Besides”—he gave a half-smile—“I did meet your father, more than once. He used to come up to me at Fiona’s to talk sports. I’m sorry he’s dead, Jamie.”

“So am I.” With each day that passed, she remembered more of the good and less of the bad. “There is an irony, you know.” When he raised questioning brows, she said, “If it hadn’t been for that car accident, we wouldn’t be here now. If I hadn’t inherited Tad, I wouldn’t have been a basket case at the playground that day, you wouldn’t have rescued me, we wouldn’t have shared the parent thing and dealt with lice and had sex.” She considered. “Dad would like you.”

He made a dry sound. “You think? Talking sports with an ex-jock is one thing, letting one marry your daughter is something else.”

She studied his face. “Are you serious about that?”

“Getting married? Completely.”

“How can we? We just met.”

“Only in the most narrow sense. Big picture, we’ve known each other for years. We’re both Williston—grew up here, went to school here. We work here, shop in the same stores, know the same people.”

Jamie was desperate enough to rationalize along with him. “Maybe we were totally aware of each other in high school and didn’t know it. Maybe we were attracted back then. Maybe we were imaginary lovers. Did you dream about me back then?”

“I didn’t dare. You were a MacAfee. Did you dream about me?”

“I didn’t dare. You were too cool. I’m not sure I’d have known what to say to you if we’d ever come face-to-face. I don’t even know what to call you now. I can’t get used to Charlie.”

His handsome mouth curved up. “Chip is fine.”

Distracted, she touched a tiny white scar at the corner of his upper lip. “You don’t have many of these. Aren’t hockey players supposed to be missing teeth?”

He chuckled. “Face masks and mouth guards work when you use them. I got this baby playing street hockey when I was eight.”

“Was it fun, playing street hockey?”

“Very. There was a whole group of us. I still see a lot of the guys.”

“I’m envious. Tennis was solitary. But I can’t call you Chip. You hate that name.”

“It’s different coming from you. Kind of unites past and present.”

He was so easygoing, so sensible. She might have remarked on that if the monitor hadn’t made a sudden noise. She froze, listening.

“It’s Buddy,” Chip murmured. “He’s a noisy sleeper. Give him a minute.”

That was exactly how long it took for silence to return, but for Jamie, the brush with reality lingered. “Being responsible for a child is huge. Whatever we do, it isn’t just us.” Caroline had said that, but Jamie felt it firsthand now. Marrying Chip on impulse was totally off the wall, even more frightening than stashing Tad in a strange bed so that she could have sex.

Have sex? Make love? If she was
feeling,
as Chip wanted, given the richness and depth of what they had just done, it was the latter. Still. “I’ve never been as impulsive as this.”

“Me neither.”

She felt a stab of self-doubt. “You’ve been with ten times as many women as I’ve ever had as friends.”

“
Big
exaggeration.”

“You know what I mean. Women chase professional athletes.”

“They’re called puck bunnies, and there weren’t that many for me. For the record, I’ve never been with a woman like this.”

“You mean totally crazy with two children down the hall?”

“I mean
meaningful
. I mean thinking about what I’m feeling and being humbled by it. Are you on birth control?”