1
HOT. SO VERY HOT …
She lay against the picnic blanket and restlessly watched as he fanned his hand across her trembling belly, taking in her nakedness after he’d popped the buttons down the front of her dress. The material glided from her skin. She wasn’t wearing a bra, which left him to concentrate on the scrap of pink cotton that kept her from being completely at the mercy of his hungry gaze. He slid his thumbs under the thin straps at her hips, slowly, ever so slowly, sliding her panties down until she was finally free from them. She moved to close her legs and he made a small sound of objection, instead coaxing her to open to him. She wriggled as the summer sun and his attention warmed her delicate flesh.
Then he was touching her …
Fingers stroked, probed, invaded, bringing her a pleasure that surely couldn’t be real …
He leaned in, covering her mouth with his.
Too wet … too cloying …
She turned her head and he licked her ear instead.
No, no, she wanted to whisper. Down … there …
Penelope Weaver awakened with a start. Panting. Only it wasn’t she who was out of breath. Or even the man that had been featured in her dream, as he was so often lately.
Instead, she stared at the blurry outline of her golden retriever/border collie mix and blanched away from his awful breath.
“Thor!”
Penelope sat up. It took a few moments to gather her wits about her. She wasn’t lying on a picnic blanket in Old Man Benson’s field just outside town, but was rather in her own bed in her room in the house on Maple Street. The summer sun cut a path across her body, but it was early evening and she was fully dressed.
And the too wet kiss hadn’t come from her fantasy man, but rather her eight-year-old dog.
Bleech.
She picked up the wind-up alarm clock from the nightstand. Just after 7:00 p.m.
Just after seven!
Barnaby Jones would be there to pick her up any minute.
She sprung from the bed and rushed to the shared bathroom in the hall. She must have fallen asleep when she’d gone in to stretch out on the bed. It had been a long day at the small café she owned and ran on Main Street and she’d needed to rest her feet for just a few moments.
The café. Even now it seemed odd to refer to her shop as such. She’d originally opened the place to sell her tapestries and called it Penelope’s Possessions, but when the lumber mill had closed down four years ago it had taken much of what made downtown Earnest a draw for visitors with it. Businesses had closed, storefronts were empty. She’d adapted, offering her wares on the internet, but the shop itself had gradually become a coffee shop. Not a difficult transition seeing as she’d always made a good cup of coffee and thanks to her grandmother and great-aunt, there was an endless supply of baked goodies.
Now it was simply known as Penelope’s.
She considered her curly dark hair in the mirror, fluffing the flattened back, and checking the liner around her brown eyes. Aside from a slight crease in her right cheek, she didn’t look any the worse for wear. She took a deep breath and straightened the front of the dress she had on. A dress not unlike the one featured in her picnic dream. Only it really hadn’t been a dream, had it? It was a memory. A recollection of a time that had passed long ago. Yet still had the power to steal her breath away.
She turned to hurry back out into the hall and nearly tripped over Thor.
“You’re going to be the death of us both,” she murmured, edging around him.
Of course, the reason he was shadowing her every move was because there was no one else home to bother. The quiet was almost deafening. She walked into the living room, where the only sound was the hum of the laptop her grandmother had left on in the corner. The house’s silence reminded her that the reason why no one was home was that the other inhabitants hoped she would get laid tonight.
Penelope groaned inwardly. Her grandmother and great-aunt were her roomies as well as two busybody, interfering old women whose sex lives were far more interesting than hers.
Interesting? That would require that she actually had a sex life to be uninteresting. But she hadn’t had one of those since …
She swallowed hard. Well, since around about the time of the dream she’d just had.
With quick jerks, she powered down the computer and closed the offending monitor, smoothing her hand over the top where it sat on an antique, accordion-front desk. From inkwells to laptops. There was a story in there somewhere. Perhaps on the different mediums meddling family members employed when trying to matchmake for younger family members.
It was summer in Earnest, Washington, and the sun wouldn’t fully set for another two hours or so, but the mature trees that surrounded the quaint Victorian house filtered the light, making the house dim. She switched on a lamp and then moved back toward the hall and the kitchen, incapable of sitting to wait for the man who would arrive to take her out for their fifth date.
She frowned as she checked the dishwasher. Barnaby Jones wasn’t so bad. He was even cute in a Vince Vaughn kind of way. Tall, broad-shouldered, easy going. But the town sheriff had yet to make her feel a twinge of what her dream had conjured up. There was a time or two when she’d actually orgasmed while asleep, the memories were so powerful.
Either that, or she was an inexcusably sorry individual.
At any rate, the good-night kiss Barnaby had given her at the end of the past two dates had left her feeling curiously … sisterly to him. And not in the Nietzsche way, either.
She hated to break it to her grandma Agatha and her great-aunt Irene, but there wasn’t going to be any sex had in this house tonight, no matter how quiet and available.
She did appreciate the clean set of sheets Aggie had put on her bed in preparation for “the big event,” however. The fresh scent of line-dried cotton was likely responsible for her drifting off.
As for the dream …
Well, she wasn’t going to think about that now. Or connect the current frequency of them to the fact that the man in question had been spotted back in town. And forget his possible nearness having anything to do with her mixed feelings about Barnaby. She hadn’t seen him in nearly fifteen years. He no longer influenced anything she did or thought or felt.
Thor whined at her feet.
Penelope twisted her lips. “What is it, boy? You have water. Food …”
Probably he wanted to go outside.
She glanced at her watch. It wasn’t such a bad idea. She could check her roses and the vegetable garden while she was out there with him.
She opened the back screen door with a muted squeak and Thor bounded out, her following on his heels. The door clapped shut and she stood looking at a garden that had changed very little in the thirty years she’d lived there. Oh, the trees might have grown a little taller,
