Matt took a step towards the hall, intending on finding something dry to wear, but Mom stopped him with a short, sharp noise of distress. All four men watched her warily.
"
Not
on my clean floors, Buster," she muttered dangerously. "Vi, quit staring at Adam and go upstairs to your room. Lilly, can you please find everyone a dry set of clothes? Adam can wear something of Chuck's.
"The rest of you," she turned her gaze to the men dripping rainwater and muck all over her kitchen floor, "
strip
! And try not to get any more mud on my floor than you already have."
Matt and Chuck laughed in tandem, Vi grumbled mutinously, Adam looked surprised at the order but not brave enough to argue, and Dad remained stoic as always.
The sight of Adam, my Dad, and my brothers, each well over six feet tall, obediently stripping down to their boxers while little Mom glared threateningly at them is not something I'm liable to forget any time soon. I laughed all the way upstairs, herding a grumbling Vi ahead of me as I went.
********
It was strange sleeping in my old room again - not that I managed to fall asleep. From the other side of the room Vi breathed softly and slowly while around me the old house creaked and groaned under the force of the storm. I lay awake and thought about Adam. Beside me the clock ticked endlessly, sluggishly on.
It had been a pleasant evening. With Joe away the atmosphere had lightened up; we'd finished our dessert, the men clad in dry, warm changes of clothing. Dad walloped Adam at checkers most of the night, although I couldn't shake the feeling that perhaps Adam hadn't played his best.
I sat across the room with Mom and Vi and watched the two of them knit; Mom was working on yet another pair of socks for Dad in sturdy grey wool, Violet was knitting something shapeless in fluorescent green fuzz. The conversations flowed over me, punctuated by sly, sexy little glances from Adam, who seemed to be enjoying himself a great deal.
Still there was an undercurrent of unease I couldn't quite quantify or even really pin-point the source of. Dad seemed to be doing his best to get to know Adam, asking him quiet questions about his job and his opinion on a variety of mostly harmless subject; religion and politics were left out.
Matt and Chuck clearly were taken with Adam, interrupting his conversation with Dad at intervals to talk further about the bike. I caught Mom shooting Adam the occasional reassuring smile and she'd given him the largest slice of pie after dinner, a sure sign he was in her good graces. There was very little question of where Adam stood with Vi, she watched him hungrily, like a kitten who's just noticed a big ball of string for the first time in her life and wasn't quite sure of what to do with it.
Bringing Adam home had been interesting. It was a premature test of his mettle and something I wasn't going to do again for a long time. No matter how splendidly Adam had handled it, my nerves just weren't up to a repeat performance any time soon. I'd been happy to see bedtime arrive, to watch as Mom made up the sofa in the front room for Adam before shooing the rest of us upstairs. It meant I only had to force myself to get a few hours sleep and survive breakfast before Adam and I escaped again to the city.
But I couldn't sleep. The rain beat relentlessly against the sloped ceiling just above my head and the sounds of the old farmhouse in the dead of night were familiar yet alien at the same time. It wasn't my bed I was sleeping in and sleep didn't come easy.
1:52
. I glared at the alarm clock beside me and sighed, rolling on to my back in hopes of finding a more comfortable position. Two minutes crawled by before I gave up, sat upright, and slipped from the bed. I told myself I was just going to check on Adam, to see if he was able to sleep comfortably in a strange place. I was just being a courteous hostess.
It amazed me how easily creeping through my parents' house in the dark came back to me. I avoided every creaky floor board and trick step in my descent to the first floor as effortlessly as I had in my teenage years. Adam was bunking on the sofa in the front room but it was too dark to tell if he was awake when I stood in the doorway. I took several steps closer to the blanket covered lump on the sofa.
"Lilly," Adam chided quietly. "What are you doing?"
I jumped at the deep timbre of his voice and tried my hardest not to laugh. "Checking on you. I wanted to know if you were asleep."
Adam laughed lowly. "I guess not, huh?"
I laughed along with him. "It's weird, isn't it? Sleeping in someone else's house."
"A little," Adam admitted. "Come here."
I hesitated, able to see Adam's outstretched hand as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. "That's probably not a good idea," I said in a whisper. "My parents are right upstairs and..."
"I'm not going to jump you," Adam promised good-naturedly. "I thought we could talk."
Talk. That sounded promising. The long list of questions which I'd been compiling over the course of the day came back to me with a rush. There was a lot I didn't know about Adam.
I took a few steps towards Adam and let him take my hand and pull me down onto the couch until I was spooned with my back against him. Beneath the blankets his chest was bare and the thin fabric of his boxers did little to shield me from the hard heat of his body and if I nestled into the welcoming warmth of him with a little too much enthusiasm it was purely accidental.
Adam grabbed my hip and stilled my movements. "Lilly," he murmured in my ear. "Lie still. You're going to cause trouble if you keep that up."
I laughed and tried to keep perfectly immobile, but it was difficult to resist the urge to melt into him. Adam snaked one tattooed arm around my waist, smoothed down my hair with the other, and rested his chin against the top of my head. We fit together perfectly.
"What did you want to talk about?" I asked over the frantic beating of my heart.
"Well, I thought perhaps we could get to know each other a little," Adam suggested.
He had a point. It had been a whirlwind 48 hours together and there had been little time for talking between us. "Okay," I agreed with a smile into the darkness. "What do you want to know?"
Adam paused and although my back was to him I could perfectly picture the look of silent concentration on his handsome face. "What's your favorite color?" he asked after a time.
I giggled. "That's your most pressing question about me? What's my favorite color?"
Adam tightened his grip around my waist and laughed against my hair. "I'm working my way up to the more important stuff, bear with me."
I nodded. "Green," I replied, thinking of the seemingly endless stretches of verdant rolling hills I'd been surrounded by as a child. "What's yours?"
"Blue," Adam responded quickly. "Like the ocean this afternoon."
"My turn?" I asked. Adam nodded. "What's your middle name?"
Silence. "Adam?" I prompted.
Adam cleared his throat. "Well... it sort of ruins my tough guy image, you see."
I laughed. "I think the flowered apron you wore tonight might have shot the 'tough guy' thing down already. Come on, spit it out."
He paused for a moment. "Reginald," Adam said softly. "And don't laugh!"
I smothered my giggles into the sofa. "Reginald? Adam Reginald Brooks? Good Lord, that sounds pretentious."
"Thanks," Adam said bitterly. "I was named after my grandfather."
"I'm sorry," I spit out when the laughter subsided. "It's not that bad, really."
"What's yours?" Adam asked. There was a faint hint of laughter in his voice, just enough to let me know he had a sense of humor about his middle name.
I froze.
"Lilly," he reprimanded with a laugh. "Come on, I told you mine."
"Frances," I muttered softly.
Adam snorted with laughter. "We're quite the pair, huh?"
"Yeah, Frances and Reginald. We sound like characters in a bad historical romance novel." I giggled, liking the way the rumble of laughter in his chest felt against my back. "Your turn."
"Favorite food?"
"Macaroni and cheese. Not the fluorescent orange boxed stuff, but real honest-to-goodness homemade Mac n' Cheese swimming in calories. You?"
Adam was quiet for a moment. "Your Mom's apple pie rates pretty highly," he confessed. "I've eaten in some of the best restaurants in the world and her pastry could shame them all."
I smiled into the night. "You should tell her that, she'd like to hear it."
Adam nodded against the top of my head before dropping a small kiss there. "Your turn."
I thought carefully. "Are you really thirty-two?"
Adam chuckled. "Yeah, does that bother you?"
"No," I replied quickly. "You're only a few years older than me."
"How many?" Adam moved his hand slowly from its resting place around my waist to the curved underside of my breast. His first caress was so soft I almost didn't feel it. Instantly the heat lit fiercely in my insides and I knew I should discourage him, but the gentle touch felt wonderful.
"Five," I said huskily, feeling my breath catch in my throat as he found my nipple through the fabric of my pajamas.
"When's your birthday?" Adam ignored my small mew of protest as his touch grew more fervent.
"September 12. Yours?" I closed my eyes against the darkness of the room and concentrated on the delicate sensation of his fingers. My breathing increased.
"July 9." Adam undid a few buttons of my pajama top and slipped his hand inside, cupping my breast. The contact of skin on skin made me jump and moan simultaneously.
"Adam," I reprimanded with a sharp whisper. "I thought you weren't going to jump me."
"It's not 'jumping'," Adam pointed out with a laugh. "Now what's your next question?"
My brain was fogged by the insistent brush of his thumb against my nipple. "What was in France?"
Adam paused his stroking. "Pardon?"
"Last night you said you got your tattoos when you came home from France, as a celebration. I was just wondering what was in France."
Adam chuckled into my hair. "Cooking school. I studied cooking there for a few years, worked in a few restaurants. But I missed home too much to stay."
"Why'd you become a chef?" I asked.
Adam shook his head. "It's my turn to ask a question, Lilly."
I pouted and made a small noise of protest. Adam laughed.
"Alright," he conceded, pinching my nipple as retribution, laughing again when I arched against him as sparks of arousal shot straight to my toes. "I started working in a restaurant when I was a teenager, washing dishes. Eventually I made my way up to cooking on the line. I liked it and I was good at it, so I took off to France when I was twenty to see if I really could make it."
"How long were you there?" I purred as Adam rolled my nipple between thumb and finger. I could feel the wetness between my legs begin.
"Three years," Adam said softly. There was an echo of hurt in his words which he didn't try to hide.
"And you've been working in restaurants ever since?" I prompted, trying to distract him from the topic of France, which obviously wasn't an easy one.
"Pretty much," Adam said sharply. The cutting tone hurt me a little; I drew back from his touch to the edge of the sofa and turned to face him. A million more questions bloomed instantly in my mind, but I could see the faint outline of Adam's profile in the darkness and the hardness of it silenced me. The first thing I learned as a journalist was when to ask questions; the second thing I learned was when to stop. I stopped.
"Your turn," I said with a small, wobbly smile. I could see the whites of Adam's eyes in the darkness, but couldn't read what was reflected in them.
"Why do you separate yourself from your family?"
Adam's question hit me hard and made my mind reel.
"That's not fair," I muttered mutinously, pushing away Adam's hand as it travelled back to my breast. "You don't really know anything about me or my family."
"I'm trying to," Adam said earnestly, grabbing my arm as I attempted to rise from the sofa. "Lilly," he wrapped his arm back around my waist before brushing my hair from my eyes. "They're a cool bunch of people, I don't get it."
I snorted. "You wouldn't," I muttered. "On the outside I'm sure everything looks peachy. But unless you grew up in a large family you can't understand it. Nothing was ever enough to please my father. Joe was always watching me, judging me. Mom and Dad are team, Joe stands alone, Matt and Chuck are practically twins they spend so much time together, and Vi was the perfect, darling little after-thought that completed my parents' happiness. I was just Lilly: awkward, dumpy, not quite clever enough Lilly. Never noticed except when I failed to live up to someone's expectations."
Adam was silent for a moment while he considered me. "You know, growing up I would have killed for a big family, a family like yours filled with love and craziness. It was just me and Kat when we were kids. My parents were divorced and we were shunted back and forth between the two of them for years.
"Then one weekend Dad didn't show up to take us for a visit and we never saw him again. Mom didn't care and when I was in high school she got remarried. That was the summer both Kat and I moved away from home. She went to Montreal; I went wherever I could get work until I left for France. I haven't spoken to my Mother in a decade and I don't even know where my Dad is.