Page 15 of Working for Keeps

“Yes.” He takes a step forward and traps me against the edge of the desk. “I’ve been losing it for three years. Do you have any idea what it was like? Walking into that cabin every night and finding nothing but silence, knowing you were in some city living a life that didn’t include me?”

“You think I was happy?” The tears come but I don’t stop them. I grab his collar with both hands and pull him down until his face is inches from mine. “Every night in that apartment was a prison sentence. Nobody looked at me the way you do. Nobody knew who I was. I’ve been screaming into a vacuum for three years, and the second you touched me last night, I came back to life. So don’t you dare tell me I didn’t suffer.”

Mick freezes. The fight goes out of him in one exhale and leaves a want so plain on him it makes my whole body ache.

“Vera.”

“Shut up, Mick,” I say, and pull him down by the collar.

Our mouths collide hard enough to click my teeth.

There’s no finess in it but I don’t want any. His hand comes up the back of my neck and into the knot of my hair, the pins giving and going somewhere on the linoleum. His hands in my hair, he turns my head where he wants it, and the sound I make into his mouth is one I haven’t made in three years.

He lifts me onto the edge of the desk and papers scatter and a stack of folders goes to the floor but neither of us cares.

I wrap my legs around his hips and pull him flush against me. He’s hard exactly where I need him, and I gasp into his mouth.

My hands are on his belt buckle before I’ve decided to move them. Nine years of never once letting my hands get out ahead of my head and here they are, the leather of his belt warm from his body and the tongue refusing to come out of the keeper.

Mick doesn’t help me. He puts his mouth on my throat instead and works down, and my head goes back on its own. The buckle finally gives under my thumb before he takes my wrists and sets them on the desk behind me.

“Not yet.”

“Mick…”

“Three years.” He opens the top button of my blouse with two fingers. “You’re going to give me a minute.”

He opens the next one and the next, but he doesn’t take the blouse off me, just parts of the silk and pushes it off my shoulders far enough.

“Say something,” I whisper as his thumb comes up and settles in the hollow of my throat, on the pulse, and stays there.

“That.” His voice is hoarse. “First day, standing in my office lying to me about margins with your whole neck going like a bird. It’s the only part of you that’s ever told me the truth.”

Then his mouth is on it.

I’ve been audited by three regional directors and a federal inspector and none of them ever found one thing on me, and this man has had my number since Monday, and I have to put a hand back on the desk to hold myself up.

He gets his arm around my waist and drags me forward to the very edge, and I come off the laminate an inch, and he holds me there.

“Now,” I say. “Mick, now.”

He hooks his fingers into my waistband and drags my trousers down over my hips, my underwear with them, and throws them into the corner.

“I need you,” he says against my throat, his stubble scraping my skin.

“Now. Please.” I claw at the hem of his henley and he tears it over his head.

The union pin goes with it. I hear it hit the linoleum and roll, and neither of us looks. The steward of Halvorsen Works, stripped down to a man in a locked trailer, breathing hard between my knees.

He gets his belt out of the loops one-handed and drops it, the buckle cracking against the floor.

His hands come down on my bare thighs, the calluses catching, leaving smudges of carbon on the warm brown of them as his fingers part my legs wider.

He looks down and takes his time about it.

“Don’t you dare stop,” I say.

“I’m not stopping.” His voice has gone low. “Three years I’ve had you in my head exactly like this. I got it wrong every single time.”