Chapter 11-4
1933 Words
Perrin looked at Bill over their tea cups and tried to decide just how brave she was feeling. Maria had liked him. She’d liked him a lot. Jo and Cassidy too, which helped, but Maria was the wise one. And she and Bill had talked quietly together through so much of the meal.
She’d done her best to listen to everything, while pretending not to. She’d missed a lot, but had heard Maria admonish Bill that “he already knew about his heart,” he just didn’t know that he did. There was no way to be sure what they were talking about, but there were things Perrin already knew about herself. Really knew. Even if they were scaring the crap out of her.
Bill waited so patiently. He’d said he trusted her. Trusted her more than himself. No man had ever said such a thing. Well, if he was going to trust her, how could she return less?
All it took was being brave, right? She wasn’t very good at brave. She could do it if she hid behind crazy Perrin, because then it was someone else. And it came out as a joke that no one believed. But she couldn’t go there with this man. Not when they sat quietly together in the night. Not when she felt the way she did. She’d have to be her more rational self tonight.
“Okay, do you want the scary question first or the hard one?”
“That’s a choice?” He brushed a hand through his hair and she wished she had the nerve to do the same, but she didn’t dare touch him at the moment. Not for his sake but for her own.
“It is.”
“No third choice? Wild s*x maybe?”
She shook her head. “As wonderful as that sounds, not yet.”
“s**t! Why doesn’t this look good? What the hell. Hard one first.”
Perrin really didn’t know which one was worse, but she wished he hadn’t chosen the hard one.
“First, I want you to know that if you want to walk out the door afterward, I won’t ever blame you.”
She could see that he almost made a joke, then a denial, but finally thought better of it and set aside his tea mug to listen.
Perrin didn’t know how to do this one. Maybe like she’d told Tamara about tearing up the drawings, “You gotta just do it.” Well, she was about to risk tearing up her life, but she saw no other path.
So she just did it.
Perrin told Bill about a father with a taste for young girls. About a mother with a coke habit she supported by selling her daughter to anyone who came to the trailer. Perrin left nothing out, not skipping one sordid detail of eighteen years of hell that had been her childhood.
She told of her arrival at college, an escape she still wasn’t sure how she’d managed, her test scores earning her a full scholarship. And how, after one particularly horrid d**g-laden and abusive affair, it was Cassidy who had taken her own meager savings to fly Perrin home with her. They had gone to her father’s small vineyard just across Puget Sound on Bainbridge Island.
How Cassidy’s father had been kind. Simply kind, expecting nothing in return. She’d never known such a thing was possible. After that, for four years, she’d listened as well as she could to what Jo and Cassidy had told her to do. For four years, she’d slowly left behind a wounded child and invented Perrin Williams. Legally changing her name senior year so that the diploma would bear her “real” name.
She didn’t cry as she told Bill of her true past. Tears were still locked away too deep. She’d often laughed until she cried with Jo and Cassidy. Only once since her early childhood, the first time Mama Maria had said she wished Perrin had been her daughter, had she cried for herself.
But Bill cried for her. Tears ran untended down his face. He tried to reach for her, but she pulled back. Not trusting that she could survive the searing power of his touch and not shatter.
“I haven’t had a panic attack like the one at the dog show in over five years, but I can’t guarantee there won’t be another. So here’s the hard question, Bill. Can you still trust me around your children? Do you want to risk a woman with that past stepping into the mother-role for your children? Because that’s where this might be headed, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
With a shocking abruptness, Bill stood and whirled away, striding out into the living room.
Perrin closed her eyes, wrapped her arms around her belly to hold herself together, and waited for the final judgment and eternal damnation of the front door slamming shut.
But it didn’t happen.
Not even after she waited.
When she dared open her eyes, she could see his back. He stood in the center of her living room facing her couch and the sampler quilt she’d made ages ago to teach herself basic sewing and design skills, her first-ever effort. His arms were crossed so tightly that they were straining the fabric of his shirt.
He didn’t move. She waited five minutes, ten. But still he didn’t move.
She stood and moved into the kitchen doorway. Almost close enough to touch him. But she couldn’t bridge the gap.
“What’s the scary one?” His voice was so harsh, so angry. She’d never heard anything like it, but she now knew better than to fear him. He’d never strike her. Whatever his anger, it wasn’t directed at her.
She’d made it through the hard one, now she had to face the scary one. The one even more likely to send him running down the hall away from her. She swallowed hard before trying to speak through the fear of losing him.
“I love you.”
The words fell into the silence of the room and lay there untended for long enough that her stomach knotted into a hard, snarled ball.
“That’s not a question.” Then he turned to face her. His face was calm, though his cheeks were still wet. He stepped forward, and reaching out very slowly, brought his hands to her shoulders. If she could have stepped back, she would have. But she was too numb, too afraid. Not even for Cassidy had she let her heart out into the world with her words.
He pulled her in, leaving the decision to stop wholly up to her, but she let him do it until she could lay her cheek on his shoulder and he wrapped his arms around her. She couldn’t seem to unlock her own arms from around her midriff, so she simply leaned against him.
Bill rocked her gently, ever so gently. Then he whispered to her.
“Yeah. That’s the same one that’s scaring the s**t out of me too. But it’s not a question. I love you, too. It makes no sense that it could happen so fast or so completely, but I do.”
Some time later, Bill’s slow rocking turned into a slow dance in the middle of her small living room.
Perrin was fairly sure that she was the one who kissed him first, rather than the other way round.
He was definitely the one who swept her up in his arms and proceeded to carry her into the coat closet. She redirected him to the bedroom with giggles for his curses.
Bill set her on the bed, then sat beside her. He brushed his fingertips ever so gently over her cheek.
“Don’t!” Her shout was sharp.
“What?” He jerked his hand back as if she’d burned him.
“Don’t you dare treat me like I’m fragile. I’m not fragile. Earlier this evening you wanted to ravage me. So ravage me. I won’t break!” Perrin was so pissed she wanted to swipe at him.
“Not fragile? Not fragile?!” His voice rose as abruptly as hers had. “Any i***t who thinks you’re fragile needs his goddamn head examined. You lived through… through… ” he pointed helplessly back toward the kitchen. “… that. You’re the goddamn strongest and most amazing woman I’ve ever met. I’m being gentle because I can’t believe what you just told me. That you just told me. That you let me in so far. How can you dare to trust me so much? That’s what I’m trying to understand. I’m in awe of you, Perrin Williams, not afraid I’m going to break you!”
“Oh.” If she’d been gone on him before, she was right off the deep end now. The way he saw her was incredible.
“Oh?” He huffed out a breath. “Is that all you have to say after my whole tirade is, ‘Oh’?”
“Best, I have, Mr. Cullen.”
“s**t!” he cursed. “Where was I?”
She took his hand and placed it against her cheek. “Right here.” Then she closed her eyes and turned her head to rub against his fingertips.
Ever so slowly, he relaxed and began again. He traced the lines of her face. She followed the line of fire as he tested every shape and curve: cheek, chin, eyebrows, lips, and tip of her nose.
She was floating by the time he had moved down her throat. He didn’t hasten his investigation of her body in the slightest as he unbuttoned her blouse, released her b*a, and teased her breasts until the n*****s ached.
When his mouth latched onto her, she hissed at the pleasure so intense it was pain. He knew exactly what to do to drive her upward. No man had ever been so gentle. No man had ever been so intent on giving her pleasure rather than taking his own. She allowed herself to go where he led, to become a conduit of Bill’s touch. Each line he drew, each place he tasted built until she was clothed in nothing but the light and heat he spread over her skin as he went.
He rolled her over until she lay on her stomach, and he continued to clothe her in his gentle brushes and kisses. He turned it into a massage. One that started at her feet and built as it flowed up her legs, over her buttocks, driving her deliciously into the bed, and up over her back and shoulders.
Just as he had made her feel clothed in traceries of light, now he stripped her bare with a deep cleansing touch. She didn’t remember turning onto her back once again, didn’t know when it happened and didn’t care. He suckled her until the waves finally burned through her insides, scorching away the last remnants of darkness trapped inside her.
When he laid his lips between her legs, she exploded. She cried out as a tidal wave of pure pleasure rushed over her. No man had ever touched her like this. None had ever sent her to such places, ones she didn’t even believe existed.
But now she knew.
They did.
When he went to drive her upward again, she managed to flutter her eyes open. He was still fully clothed.
“That was one hell of a ravage, Mr. Cullen.”
“You’re magnificent, Ms. Williams.”
She managed to sit up, despite her muscles all gone to liquid.
Her fingers weren’t working that well with how her nervous system was buzzing, but she managed to unbutton his shirt. His muscles twitched and quivered under her touch.
“That’s a very nice chest, Mr. Cullen.”
“My wife liked—Aw s**t! I’m sorry.” He went to turn away.
She stopped him with a kiss. “Bill. I’m not asking you to push your wife out of your heart to let me in. I know she’s dead or you wouldn’t be here with me. I think it’s nice that you loved her so much. It really shows in Jaspar and Tamara, they’d know if it wasn’t true.”
“But you deserve—”
“Exactly what I’m about to take.” With that she pushed him back on the bed. She dug in a drawer for some protection, then she greedily took all he could give. How many times they made love, how many times the waves rolled through each of them, releasing their bodies and clothing their hearts in such glory, Perrin didn’t know.
But even as they collapsed onto each other and slid into sleep, Perrin knew that however much she’d had, she wanted more.
- Writer
