The Marine Makes Amends, page 17
“Are you going to be ready for that soon?”
He let out a worried sounding laugh. “I hope so. We’re working hard to be.”
“But you’re still experimenting with the flavored stouts. And we never got to the tasting you wanted me to do last night.”
“That’s okay. The first launch is just for the plain ones, anyway. The flavored ones will be a second wave so they can get highlighted on their own. And you can do the tasting tomorrow.” He raised the index finger that was near her shoulder and tapped her. “That reporter loved your cupcakes, too,” he reminded.
“She bought a whole dozen,” Lexie said, having been pleased by that. The food festival had been one big reunion, bringing out a constant stream of familiar faces. And while Lexie hoped those familiar faces had purchased the cupcakes because they wanted to, and given compliments they meant, it was a little hard to know for sure. Friends and acquaintances of hers, of Micah’s, of her parents’, of Gertie’s might have just been buying and complimenting out of kindness. But she could rely on the opinion of a network news reporter who was a complete stranger.
“And her photographer bought another dozen, didn’t he?” Micah added.
“Along with two cases of beer,” Lexie pointed out.
Micah’s grin showed how happy that had made him. “I think we both did okay,” he concluded.
Since he seemed ready for a change of subject Lexie nodded at his clean-shaven face and then at his chest stretching the knit of his T-shirt. “And then there was you... No beard and all dressed up in clothes that weren’t military issue?”
His grin this time showed some humility. “I told you I shaved so I’d look more businesslike. And I sank every penny I have into the brewery when I got out of the Marines. I couldn’t spare much for civvies so my closet is all military issue until I’m making some money. Those pants and that shirt were an investment for me.”
“Well, it payed off—you looked great all business-manned-up.”
His eyes dropped for a mere second to what she was wearing and he said somewhat under his breath, “And you look great right now...”
“Did I look bad all day?” she asked in mock offense.
“No, you looked good then, too. And every other day...”
So maybe he was starting things again?
If he was, Lexie wasn’t sure she was ready for it. Instead, she said, “So your plain stouts are ready to go, your flavored stouts aren’t far behind, your brewery is up and running and now you’ve had your soft launch with publicity already started for the formal launch... You’re on your way. What does your life look like in five years?”
He laughed wryly. “I haven’t thought much beyond any of that.”
But he looked off into the distance and seemed to give some thought to it now in order to answer her question.
After a moment, he said, “I’m in Merritt to stay. I like the brewery being out Gertie’s back door and having her input, so as long as she’ll have me and I can meet the demands of the superstores with this setup, I’d like to stay here.”
He paused and seemed to be thinking more before he went on. “And I want to get married, have a family, build the kind of life I’ve seen people around here have.”
After seeing his sorrow over almost becoming a father, that made sense. Plus, now that he’d left the Marines and had his life’s goal underway, he was at that point in his timetable that allowed for it.
He looked back at her then. “What about you? What’s your five-year plan?”
She laughed. “I have the plan for next week that I told you about—right now I’m just proud of that!”
He smiled but didn’t push her for more. Instead, he changed the subject again. “I couldn’t believe Gertie came out today.”
“With poor Mary pushing that wheelchair! I don’t know if that was a good idea. I was glad when you offered to push it back to the apartment.”
“After Mary had made the rounds to all the other booths and scored enough samples and tasters for two days,” he said with another laugh. “Gertie said on the way back that they thought the wheelchair was actually going to be a help, making it easier to transport things home so they could really load up.”
“I told them when I was there this morning before the festival started that I’d bring them whatever they wanted.”
“They were afraid the elk chili would all be gone before you could score some. And they also wanted to get out and have a little while at the festival,” Micah said.
“Against doctor’s orders.”
“Gertie didn’t seem the worse for wear when I got her back.”
Lexie could confirm that that was true because she had spent one of her early evening breaks at the apartment.
“Nobody’s gonna keep her down, not even you,” Micah warned.
“Or broken bones,” Lexie said wryly.
“You gotta love her,” was Micah’s amused comment on that.
“I do. I just worry about her, too.”
He nodded his understanding. “And how’s Jill? The two of you were deep into talking about something...”
You...
Lexie decided to tell him, wanting to gauge his reaction. “She’s wondering about you and me...wondering if you’re playing out a teenage fantasy...”
He made an unpleasant face. “That’s a revolting idea. And just FYI—the fantasies I’m having about you now are all brand spanking new.” Then he seemed to think twice and said, “Is that why you’re giving me a little of the cold shoulder tonight?”
“I’m not,” she protested.
“A little,” he persisted.
Because she hadn’t flirted back with him a few minutes earlier? Or had something changed in her behavior toward him?
“You know,” Micah said then, “puberty hormones are a funny thing. For me, they cropped up, aimed in one direction—at you—and after that... Will it piss you off if I say after that nothing mattered, not even you as a person?”
“Are you saying that I became a piece of meat to you?”
“That sounds bad! And no, that’s not exactly what I’m saying. I’m saying that you became something I just had to have and it wouldn’t have mattered if you robbed banks or kicked dogs or took candy from babies because it was an obsession. Like those weird red boots you wanted when we were sophomores—remember those?”
Lexie grimaced. “They were so horrible!”
“No argument here,” he agreed. “They were some kind of cross between a cowboy boot and a combat boot—shiny red leather, pointy steal-tipped toes, studs up the sides, those soles—”
“Patent leather platforms,” she named them for him.
“I always thought they should have come with a whip,” he said, laughing.
Lexie made another face.
“But nothing any of us said about them changed your mind—you had to have them. You worked yourself to the bone flipping burgers, you nearly flunked biology because you were working too many hours to get homework done or study for tests. You spent a fortune on those damn things...”
All true. And yes, she remembered her obsession with them.
“You told us more than once how you saw yourself in those boots, walking down the halls of school in them—your Power Boots, you called them... You had some kind of fantasy about those boots, about yourself when you wore them, didn’t you?”
She had, but she only acknowledged it with a raise of her chin.
“That was a teenage obsession, right?”
Another raise of her chin.
“And now? Are any of those fantasies about those red boots still alive and thriving in you?”
She didn’t even like remembering those awful boots. “No,” she admitted.
“So why would any fantasies I had then be any more long-lived than that? Believe me, I didn’t set eyes on you at the airport and think, Maybe now’s my chance,” he said facetiously. “At first, when you got back to Merritt, you were just a bad page out of my past. If not for Gertie and what had happened here with the damage to the houses, I would have given you a wide berth.”
Lexie recalled that he’d been more patient and friendly toward her than she’d been toward him at the start but she had to admit that there hadn’t been anything that made her think he was angling for a second chance.
“Things just...developed from there,” he went on. “You’re different than who you were growing up, too. We’re both whole human beings now—”
“As opposed to?”
“As opposed to two teenagers who were still figuring themselves out. What’s on my mind about you now has nothing to do with anything then.”
“What is on your mind about me now?”
His smile was lopsided and sweet. “What I liked about you when we were kids is still there—your sense of humor, your boldness, that you never shrink from giving me a hard time. But now, I also see that you’ve suffered your own wounds and risen out of them. That you know your own mind. That you’ve circled back around to find a new place in Merritt the same way I have. That the things that are important to me are important to you, too.”
She hadn’t expected such a long list.
Then he paused, a flicker of wickedness coming into his eyes as he added. “And you’re so damn beautiful I can’t get enough of looking at you, and my hands are literally itching to run all over that body...”
And yet rather than reach for her he actually leaned slightly farther back, putting a few inches of distance from where his hand had been near enough to her shoulder to tap it earlier.
Then, without any guile or flirtation or insinuation at all, he said, “But...”
“But?” Lexie prompted when he didn’t elaborate.
“Everything I said at the end of last night stands.”
She knew what he meant. Last night he’d said he wouldn’t go any further until she was certain that it was what she wanted, too. And unless she convinced him of that, she knew he wouldn’t make another move.
Since talking to Jill, she had thought more clearly. But as she took a long look at him, she went over it in her mind again just to be sure.
She thought about his first response to the suggestion that he might be acting on some long-ago fantasies—that it was revolting—and realized that that response had had the ring of truth to it.
She thought about those horrible red boots of hers, how much they’d dominated her image of herself and how far she’d come from what had definitely been a teenage obsession.
She thought about the fact that she was no longer the girl who young Micah had had a crush on—the girl who had been more outlandish, more outrageous just for the sake of getting noticed, of showing off.
None of that was a part of her now and she had to think that that teenage bravado in her had likely had a role in what the push-the-limits Micah had found appealing.
Of course, she couldn’t know without a doubt what was in Micah’s mind. She could only trust him—and herself. And when she analyzed what her instincts were telling her, she had her answer.
“What were your teenage fantasies about me?” she asked, letting a hint of flirtation seep into her tone.
He raised an eyebrow at her as if asking if she really wanted to know that. When she held her ground he said, “Actually they were almost more about me than you—I was pure ego then, you know? They were about me being your hero, rushing in to save you from peril, and you not being able to resist me from that minute on. Me strolling in in a new jacket that made me look like a tough guy and you getting turned on because I had so much more edge than nice-guy Jason...” He smiled at what he seemed to be recalling. “Me beating up some jerk for making fun of you in those red boots, you trading up to the stud who could take down guys like that for you. That kind of thing.”
Lexie doubted those examples covered everything but she only said, “I think the red boots are still in Gram’s attic—you want me to put them on, see if we can get someone to make fun of me so you can beat them up?”
He made two fists. “These are lethal weapons—I’d end up in jail,” he joked.
But looking at the size of those fists, Lexie thought they probably could be lethal weapons.
And still all she really wanted was to have his hands doing more of what they’d done the night before. She snaked her fingers into his fists, between his fingers, and pressed her palms to his.
“Before I talked to Jill, I still wasn’t thinking with a cool head,” Lexie confessed quietly.
“But after?” he asked, tightening his grip on her hands.
“A whole lot cooler.”
He nodded in a reserved way that told her that if she was telling him no, he would accept it.
“How about you?” she asked then. “Your head seemed pretty cool all day.”
“Don’t be fooled—things are still sizzling inside of me.”
“That sounds painful,” she joked with a smile she hoped was as wicked as his had been a moment earlier. Wicked and alluring...
“If you’re not feeling the pain, too, I’m not budging,” he challenged.
Knowing what she was starting here sent a shiver of anticipation through her. “I wouldn’t call it pain exactly...” she mused. “But I do need something done about it...”
“Is that so?” he said with a deep chuckle.
“Any ideas?”
“A few,” he tempted, using their entangled hands to pull her toward him.
Lexie thought he’d done it to kiss her but instead, with her face close to his, he looked intently into her eyes.
He must have been reassured by what he saw because his own eyelids lowered to half-mast and the smile that came along was happy and full of the promise of delight.
Then his supple lips parted, his head tilted and he kissed her. Chastely, tentatively, invitingly, but as if he were giving her the opportunity to still step away.
Which Lexie had no intention of doing.
She proved that by escalating their kiss, sending her tongue to do a little audacious flirting of its own.
She felt him smile at that. He let go of her hands and cupped both sides of her face as the kiss became open-mouthed and very, very steamy.
Her hands dropped to his thighs where she felt the massive muscles she’d only ogled in the past, working them just a little and thinking about that other part of him not so much farther up, raising her own desire another notch.
They went on kissing, mouths opening wider, tongues going from cat-and-mouse to thrust-and-parry. But hands stayed where they were, even though Lexie’s need to feel those hands of his everywhere else grew and grew.
Micah ended the kiss and looked into her eyes again.
“You’re sure about this?” he asked in a gravelly voice.
“I am. Are you?”
He laughed. “Yeah, pretty sure...” he understated, taking one of her hands in his and pulling her with him off the sofa.
“Upstairs or down?” he said.
“Upstairs but... I don’t have any...”
“I put a few in my pocket earlier.”
A few?
Oh...
“Then upstairs,” she said with some laughter in her voice.
That’s where he took her, leading her into her bedroom with moonlight’s glow to brighten the space with a milky illumination.
It was enough to glisten off his dark hair and highlight that sculpted face when he spun her around into another kiss—this one sensual enough to keep her mouth captive and his hands free.
Hers went to his chest and his clamped around her upper arms, giving a massage similar to what she’d done to his thighs.
Then it was her shoulders he cupped and squeezed, her shoulder blades, lower on her back, lower still to her derriere...
His big hands were doing such wonderful things but as good as they felt right where they were, she wished he were doing those same things to breasts that were straining for him.
But in the meantime, she decided to satisfy another hunger and slipped her hands under his T-shirt to again lay her palms to his sleek skin, this time caressing the pectorals that had fed her own fantasies.
The problem with those tightly fitting T-shirts was that they were too constrictive and Lexie wanted him freed from that particular one.
So she raised her hands up to his broad shoulders, taking the shirt with them—breaking away from that kiss to pull it over his head.
She kissed him again, but not on the mouth. Instead, she pressed her lips to one of those pectorals before she veered back just enough to finally see his bare chest.
His oh-so-grand bare chest...
Micah used that opportunity to reach for the hem of her T-shirt and roll it upward, taking it off to drop to the floor with his.
With that gone, his hands came to her sides, the heels of them just barely riding the outer swells of her breasts. But tonight, it wasn’t about needing encouragement. Instead, it was as if he were savoring every step, every moment on the way to the next.
And in the next moment, both of his hands cupped her breasts.
She wished she’d gone braless. Even the demi-cups felt like too much in the way of nipples that were screaming for the feel of his palms, for his fingers working her pliable flesh.
Then he abandoned her breasts altogether to unhook her bra and she got her wish.
Leaving one hand splayed against her back, his other returned to her breasts until her knees were weak.
He stopped then, scooped her up and laid her on the bed, leaning over to kiss her again while he slipped her shorts off and unfastened his jeans.
But he didn’t remove them and Lexie wasn’t letting that go on. She sat up enough to grasp his waistband.
Micah stopped her long enough to take protection from his jeans pocket and toss the packets on the bed before he let her dispose of the only thing he was wearing on the bottom.
