“Yep,” Mary said with a knowing smile. “Some absolutely lovely posh lady.”
“Oh…”
Oh no.
I went all strange and shaky.
Surely not…
Surely she hadn’t…
… had she?
I stood.
And I followed Mary nervously through to the main warehouse floor…
And stopped dead in my tracks, struck dumb.
She stood near the warehouse entrance, gently backlit by the bright sunlight outside; hair a burnished red-gold glory that framed her divine face. Her duck-egg-blue Santa-Barbara-emblazoned tee shirt was skin-tight and ended maybe an inch above the waistline of her rich blue body-sheathing denims, showing her slender midriff and wonderful navel off to the world with careless and almost wanton abandon.
She pushed her sunglasses further back on her head, and sauntered confidently to me, tall and glamorous in the lovely brown leather boots she’d selected that morning.
A tiny part of me noticed that her fingers were bare – she’d shed her rings.
A less tiny, but extremely horrified part of me noticed Mary grinning widely off to one side as Sam wrapped her arms around me and leaned in to kiss me full on the lips – long and slow and sultry and more than enough to turn my legs to jelly and my knickers to a disaster zone.
“Hello you,” my lover breathed when she was done toying with me.
“Um… hi… um… um… how…” I stammered, hot and pink and… aching.
“There aren’t many builder’s yards nearby. I went looking. Yours was fifth on the list of nine.”
“Oh,” I squeaked.
“Go take your lunch break, Willa,” Mary chuckled from the side. “I’ll do mine later. Take your time and don’t hurry back, pet. Enjoy the sunshine, it’s a lovely day outside.”
“Thank you…” I managed, heart clattering around like a crackers horse upending an entire warehouse of pots and pans under my ribs as I stared in complete distraction into Sam’s lovely eyes.
“Come on,” Sam said. “We can picnic on Bertha’s load tray. I brought goodies. Sorry the view will be of the parking lot and timber stacks…”
“Oh my God, Sam… you… you can’t just turn up and…”
“Can’t I?” she whispered, grinning as she pressed herself in against me. “Are these more rules for me? How distressing. Here’s my rebuttal. I missed you last night. I missed you even more this morning when I woke up, cold and horny and so very, very deprived of you…”
“I missed you with every breath of my being, but… but…”
“Your boss doesn’t seem to mind.”
“She’s not my boss. She’s my boss’s boss – his wife. Oh. Oh my God! Sam! You can’t just… just show up here! I’m not out here!”
“Oh,” she said, smile disappearing like smoke. “Oh fuck. Um… I… I didn’t even think…”
I stared at her.
Then I started to laugh. I stood up on my sensibly-shod toes and kissed her soundly, so tall and gorgeous in her fancy-pants boots.
“I guess I am now,” I giggled. “Mary’s the world’s best-natured gossip and that news is going to go through the office like Typhoid in a nunnery. You’ve done for me, Sam. Oh well.”
“Sorry,” she said, clearly mortified. “It… it just seemed like such a natural thing to do to come and find you and…”
“I love it. I… I’m… surprised. I’m staggered. But I love… it.”
I fumbled her hand into mine.
“I hope you brought nice goodies, though,” I added, grinning. “To make up for the absolutely biblical amount of teasing I’m going to get back there when we’re done.”
She was bright pink and so utterly flustered; it really was quite delicious.
“Sam,” I breathed.
“Yeah,” she squeaked.
And I kissed her again, enjoying the little moan she let slip.
Holy God, I loved her to smithereens.
I knotted my fingers into hers.
“So where are you parked? I hope it’s away from prying eyes, because there are going to be lots of them.”
She grinned sheepishly. “I honestly hadn’t thought that far. Just around the corner.”
And she led me back with her and sat me down on a folded wool blanket that she set out on Bertha’s tail gate. She poured me a cup of tea in a battered tin mug, and handed me a plate with sandwiches from a wicker picnic basket she’d strapped to the side of Bertha’s boot.
“I made these,” she said, softly. “With care and affection.”
“That must be why they taste so good,” I mumbled, around half a mouthful.
She smiled, pleased.
“I’m glad you like them. I wasn’t sure… what you would.”
“You could feed me anything and I’d eat it happy in the knowledge that you’d touched it.”
“You’re terrible.”
“Maybe. But I’m being dead serious. Sam… whatever possessed you? To do this?”
“I missed you,” she said, as if she were explaining to me that water was wet.
“I thought you needed to keep me secret.”
“The people I need to keep you secret from don’t come to places like this to mix with people like us; they have people who do that for them while they drink Gin and play Croquet and Badminton.”
“Ah,” I said. “So we’re talking… Horsey people?”
“Many of them are, yes,” she sighed. “So… yes. I need to be…somewhat circumspect, with you. Far more than I want to. And I have to hide you from Mark for now, obviously. But… I…”
“You… what?”
“You’re important to me, Willa,” she said, soft and intent. “I… I need you to believe that, to know it. I don’t want you to feel like you’re an idle bored housewife’s lesbian dalliance. You matter. How you feel… matters. Deeply. Intensely. I want to shout out loud from the mountaintops how gleeful I am now that I’ve found you. And instead I have to whisper it where nobody can hear it. And it sucks. I don’t want this for you. I don’t want this for us.”
Us, part of me echoed…
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.
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