Prayer (27 page)

But they’d had some pretty rough spots in their short time together, and in the end, what she’d said was just words. He had to be sure she wasn’t holding back. He needed to protect himself a little bit, too.

He ran a finger along the curve of her lower lip, loving the way her little underbite tugged downward on her mouth. “I love you, Katrynn. But I guess I need to build up some trust myself. I’m not ready to make plans like that until I know for sure that you believe in us.”

Her hopeful expression faltered, and he felt her lip tremble under his finger. But she said, “I understand. Can we—can we be as we’ve been, and when you’re ready, you can ask me? I promise I’ll say yes.”

This time, when he kissed her, he meant it as a yes.

~oOo~

John led Katrynn up to his loft and turned to take her into his arms, but, with a sly grin he hadn’t seen before, she put her hands on his chest and pushed him backward until his legs hit the end of his bed. Then, still smiling like the Sphinx, she began to undo the buttons of his shirt.

Katrynn had only made the first move between them once, and she rarely took the lead at all. He understood her insecurities and, though he sometimes felt some insecurities himself, didn’t mind being the lead.

But it sure as fuck was hot when she took charge.

She pushed his open shirt off his shoulders and leaned in to kiss his chest. His skin contracted under the velvet press of her lips. She moved to his nipple and swirled her tongue around it as she unbuckled his belt and worked the buttons on his jeans.

“God, baby.” He gathered her hair, like liquid silk, into his hands and wrapped the coil around one fist. “God.”

Pushing his jeans and underwear from his hips, Katrynn kissed her way from his chest downward until she was kneeling before him and his clothes were at his ankles. Her hair still wrapped around his fist, he set his other hand on her head and stepped out of the knot of denim.

She kissed him low on his belly, just above his straining cock. John expected her to take hold of him, but instead, she put her hands on his belly and pushed until he sat. Then she unwound her hair from his grip, stood and, slowly, her eyes never leaving his, stripped for him. It seemed ages before she was naked, too, but each second had been a sex act of its very own.

Then she knelt again and picked up one of his feet. She kissed her way from his ankle to his knee, her lips and tongue moving through the hair on his legs and making it stand on end, then back to his ankle and over to the other leg. When she got to that knee, she leaned in and made her way up his inner thigh, stopping millimeters from where he most wanted her to be, and then worked her way back and over to the other leg.

His cock wept with need. His balls were knotted against his body, and his hands had huge wads of comforter clenched in their grip. His stomach ached with the need to feel her body clenched around him. “Katrynn,” he gasped.

“Shhhh.” Her breath skimmed over his cock, and his whole body jerked in response to that scant stimulation. Fuck, she was so close to what he wanted.

Instead, she continued her trail of torturous kisses up his side, over his chest, down his arm, and back up again. Her body loomed over his, and he lifted his hips for at least that contact. He tried to hold her and move her, but she feinted from his reach and gave him that new smirk again.

She kissed his neck. His ear. His jaw—and finally his mouth.

He grabbed her head and held on, trying to take over, too turned on and needy after this emotional boomerang of a day to be patient, but she pulled back and said, “Let me do this.”

“I need you. I don’t want to play. Not now.” Even knowing that she might not take this kind of charge again, John needed it to stop now. It was just too fucking much. He needed to be closer. He needed to get hold of her.

They stared, their eyes caught together, for a timeless second, and then Katrynn nodded and straddled him. Before she could settle herself on his cock, he grabbed her and rolled them over. “I need to be closer than that. I need to hold on.”

Fuck, his voice had broken over the last word.

Nodding, she wrapped her legs and arms around his back, hooking her hands over his shoulders. John fed himself into her and, with one hard, determined thrust, pushed deep, making her cry out.

Then he wrapped his arms around her, holding her body as close to his as he could get her, and fucked her in a desperate frenzy. He tucked his head against her neck, breathed in her sultry scent, and gave over control to his love and need.

At some point, at a distance, he felt the fluid tension of her body in his arms as she came, heard the stifled sound that would have been a scream if she could have let it go. Her orgasm crested, and her pussy began to spasm around him, milking his release from him as well.

He had no qualms about the sounds of his pleasure, and he lifted his head and roared into the rafters.

~ 18 ~

Katrynn leaned her shoulder against the end case of the Memoir & Autobiography row and listened to Theo read from
Violets in Spring
, his latest memoir, this one about marrying and becoming a father again. It was his third memoir, following
Orchids in Autumn
and
Lavender in Summer
. The morbid Pagano family joke was that he had only one more season to write about, so he’d better be careful he didn’t run out of life when he ran out of titles.

This was his third reading of
Violets
, which had been released in the fall. Tonight, he planned to read from his work in progress as well: a collection of poems. He was a poet first, but his success had come from writing memoir, so he’d become a slave to reader expectation. It was kind of a shame; Katrynn thought his poetry was really beautiful.

Theo was kind of a celebrity in Quiet Cove, as far as celebrities went. He wasn’t precisely a
famous
author, but he was a highly esteemed one, with a pile of awards, including the National Book Award, and he’d been published several times in
The New Yorker
and
The Atlantic
. He was, in short, the kind of writer that the summer people of the Cove—those who, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, settled into the big houses on the beach—liked.

Theo joked that the people who attended his readings here probably read the poems and musings he published in
The New Yorker
while they sat on their toilets in the professionally decorated, beachy-chic master bathrooms of their summer homes.

But attend they did. They had a full house for this reading. The readings and signings at Cover to Cover during the summer always drew well, they made their year in the summer, but Theo drew best. Part of that was because he was almost considered a local now. He had lots of friends among the true residents, and there were plenty of familiar faces sitting before him. Often, people walking by came in for a reading because they saw the crowd, noshing on canapés and wine, and figured something good was happening.

Carmen and Teresa sat up front tonight, as usual, and Theo mostly read to them. Most of the Paganos were there, which also contributed to the impressive attendance. Nick and Bev had stayed home; baby Ren was due in less than three weeks, and Nick had practically set up a perimeter around their house. Family was invited to visit, including Katrynn and a couple other of Bev’s friends, but Bev only left the house for doctor’s appointments and church. Katrynn thought often of “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” despite her friend’s apparently improved mental state.

Apart from the prominent absence of the owner of the bookshop, the rest of the Paganos were there, even Manny, and the shop was near capacity. When that family showed up anywhere en masse, they made an impact.

That family. More and more, it was becoming
her
family.

In the seven years that Katrynn had lived in Quiet Cove and managed Cover to Cover, she had grown close to Bev and Nick and their girls. Through that connection, she had gotten to know all of the other Paganos, but she wouldn’t have said she was close to any of them. They’d been people she’d said ‘hi’ to in the market, people she’d seen in the shop, people she’d occasionally chatted with at parties and functions at Bev and Nick’s.

Of all of them, until this year, she’d known Luca best, since he’d spent several months helping her and Bev learn about the financial elements of running a business.

From the sidelines, she’d seen a big, full family that did everything together, a tight group, lively to the point of chaos, whose love and respect for each other pulsed out into the atmosphere around them. She’d also seen rambunctious arguments and a few physical fights among the brothers. It was a family unlike anything in her experience, and she’d always been a little envious.

But since she and John had been together, she’d been folded easily into their huddle. All the brothers looked out for her, and the sisters and wives pulled her into their family talk. Katrynn didn’t know if they’d been like this with all of John’s girlfriends or if they saw her as special, but she felt special. Like they thought she was there to stay.

In the month or so since her birthday, she was feeling more comfortable with the idea that she was there to stay. It was certainly what she wanted, and she had come to understand how much she’d been letting fear fuck with a good thing, and how patient John had been with her while she’d struggled to find a balance.

John hadn’t yet asked her to marry him, and sometimes she felt a little insecure about that, but these weeks had been good between them. More than that, they’d been calm and easy. Katrynn supposed that Giada The Italian Tart was in the US, but John hadn’t seen her. He’d called her—not Skype, just a regular phone call—and had told her that he wouldn’t see her. There had been yelling, in both English and Italian, but then that had been the end of it.

Never once, in the drama on her birthday or in their talks about The Tart afterward, had John brought up the fact that Katrynn had snooped in his phone. That part still ate at her a bit—things wouldn’t have blown up at all if she’d respected his privacy. Not only had she snooped, but she’d thought the worst of him without hesitation.

That part, he had called her on. More than once. But the snooping he’d simply let slide, and she hadn’t brought it up, either. She thought—hoped—that part just wasn’t a big deal to him. His family got up in each other’s business routinely, and John was as nosy as any of them. Maybe he just assumed that she would do something like check his phone. Maybe he didn’t mind because he didn’t have anything to hide.

She wouldn’t snoop, though. Not anymore. She was still afraid, but that was her problem, and she was working on it. She had to trust him. She had to believe.

Because John was The One. He was perfect for her, and she’d almost ruined everything. So if he needed to believe in her belief, then she would be patient until he did. He had certainly earned her patience.

Theo finished, and his audience gave him the polite applause patrons of an event like this gave. Katrynn hurried up and swung around the crowd to make sure that the refreshment table had been restocked and that Grace and Jamie were ready to organize people into a line for the signing.

She caught John’s eye as she moved past the guests, and he smiled. He’d been to a few of these readings this summer, and he understood that unless she asked, his best help was to stay out of her way.

It was nice, though, to seek him out and find his eyes on her.

He could make a simple smile feel like a caress.

~oOo~

“You did good, baby.” John unzipped the back of Katrynn’s wetsuit, and she wiggled her upper body out of it.

“Don’t humor me. I sucked.”

“No, you didn’t.” He racked the boards on his porch and turned his own wetsuit down to his waist. Katrynn was distracted from her lingering humiliation by the sight of him—tan and chiseled, glistening in the morning sun. His body had always been good, but it had gotten even better in the five months she’d been seeing a lot of it.

She looked down at her Speedo. Carmen wore bikinis under her suit when she surfed, but Katrynn felt naked in a bikini under any circumstances. But her plain black suit was not exactly alluring. She felt like a charwoman standing at the David’s feet.

The clumsy charwoman who couldn’t get to her feet on a surfboard.

She didn’t actually want to surf. It scared her. She liked to body board, when she wasn’t adding gravity to the list of factors that could hurt her. But she wanted to go out in the mornings with John. Every morning, with the dawn, he was either on a surfboard or running a billion miles. If the weather was bad, he went to the gym and lifted.

Surfing scared her, running bored her silly, and the gym was smelly and loud. She was more of a walker. That was about her speed.

Which was why he looked like Michelangelo had carved him from marble, and she looked like the clumsy charwoman.

He grabbed the wad of wetsuit at her hips and pulled her close. “You don’t suck. You’re better each time. You got to your knees, right?”

She rolled her eyes. “Big whoop.”

“You don’t like surfing.” An observation, not a question. He knew she didn’t.

The words that she intended to say—‘I will when I get better’—got stuck. No, she didn’t like it. She wanted to like it, to share this with him, but she didn’t. At all. She’d be much happier sitting at the fire ring with a cup of coffee, watching him behave like a hyper dolphin.

“You’ve got to stop doing that, Katrynn. Don’t pretend.”

“I wasn’t pretending. I was trying something new.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Okay. I was pretending a little. But I started out wanting to try something you like. And you were excited about it, so I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“Newsflash: it’s not that much fun surfing with somebody who looks like their fingernails are being removed every time they paddle out.”

“Oh. Am I being a drag?” She’d been trying hard to fake it and be brave, but the scariest part was facing the next attempt.

“We don’t have to like all the same things. Surfing is not a requirement for admittance to the Pagano family. Sabina doesn’t surf. Manny doesn’t. Rosa hasn’t surfed for a long time. Theo doesn’t. Joey doesn’t anymore. You can just say no.”

“Okay. No.”

He laughed and kissed her. “I love
you
, Katrynn Page.
You
. Not who you think I want you to be. The you I’ve wanted to be close to for years, and the you I’ve gotten close to this year. I love your boot addiction and your need to go through your magazines chronologically. I love the way you talk back to NPR, and that it takes you a week to eat a pint of ice cream. I love playing music with you. I love watching movies with you. I love talking with you. I love sleeping with you. I love loving you.”

His smile faded, and he brushed his knuckles over her cheek. “But I don’t love it when you think I can’t tell that you’re faking. And I don’t love the faking. Be real with me, Katrynn.”

She put her arms over his shoulders and fed her fingers into his wet hair. “I am real with you. Even with the surfing, I’m not trying to fake. I’m honestly trying to be good with it. But old habits die hard, I guess, and I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“That habit needs to die in a fire, baby. Promise me you’ll be straight about today. I’m glad you’re going, but if you don’t like it, you don’t need to go every week. Manny only goes for holidays and family stuff, and Theo outright refuses to go except for family events. If it’s not for you, no sweat.”

John was taking her to church. He had asked her to go, but this wasn’t the first time he’d said that he didn’t expect her to make a habit of it.

Katrynn didn’t have a strong feeling either way about God or religion. Like everything else about her childhood, religious concepts had been offered on a sporadic and senseless basis, so other than the World Religions 101 class she’d taken in college, which had given her some general understanding of the history and culture of the major religions and faiths, she had no foundation for believing in anything.

“I promise. If it’s not for me, I’ll say so.”

“Thank you.” He kissed her, and his hands slid into her wetsuit and grabbed her ass, and they were very nearly late for church.

~oOo~

With the exceptions of Nick and Bev’s wedding and the baptisms of their daughters, Katrynn had never been to a Catholic service. She liked Christ the King Church; it seemed what a Catholic church should be, with high, sweeping, raftered ceilings, and tall, beautiful stained glass, with a gallery in a loft at the back, and a big organ at the front. It smelled of rich incense and wood polish, and she’d felt peaceful, even cozy, in the sanctuary the few times she’d been there.