"Everything else aside," Oliver agreed. "So maybe we should just get rid of the clothes the old-fashioned way?"
"Yes. Well." Tiffany nuzzled his mouth, suddenly hungry for a kiss. "Well, if you want to know the absolute truth of the matter…"
"I do." Ollie lifted his hands from around her waist to her face, meeting her mouth with his. More an offer than taking control, Tiffany thought, and remembered, with a vivid flash, that he'd promised to do anything she wanted him to, or something enough like that to count. She slid her hands to his face in turn, deepening the kiss, feeling him shiver and relax beneath her, accepting her desire as his own. When she had him gasping and lifting his hips beneath hers, she smiled against his mouth.
"The truth is that I wasn't really planning on taking many clothes off in the first place. Can't have public indecency in a nice town like Virtue, right?" Tiffany slid her hand between their bodies, finding the fastener for his slacks.
Ollie's hips rose again and a thrill of excitement set Tiffany's entire body alight with need and desire. He whispered, "There's no public here," hopefully, and she nipped at his lower lip, still smiling.
"No, but we're pretending. So we have to be discreet." She unzipped his fly and explored his underwear with her fingertips, making him gasp and throw his head back with hopeful excitement. Tiffany kissed his throat, then pushed aside both his underwear and her own so she could claim him with the slick heat of her body. Ollie cried out, trying to muffle the sound, and she covered his mouth with another kiss, listening to his gasps and feeling the desperate strength of his hands on her hips as they moved together with increasing urgency.
They were both laughing with the desperation to remain quiet as their pleasure crested together, arms wrapped tightly around each other as if they were promising one another that they would never let go. Tiffany felt as if she floated in a haven of safety, completely happy and sure of herself, of him, of everything in her world. She mumbled, "Perfect," against Ollie's skin, and for a while, was happy to drift there.
Then her knee started to ache from being crammed into the back corner of a bulldozer's seat, and, with another soft laugh, she kissed Ollie again and whispered, "Come on. I bet we can find somewhere more comfortable to spend the rest of the night."
"I think that's an amazing idea." Ollie sounded like he, too, was floating. "As long as it'syourroom, because my entire family knowsmyroom number."
Tiffany fought off laughing out loud, and brought him back to her room for the night.
When her alarmwent off at 5:30 a.m., Tiffany could in no way realistically pretend she'd slept.Napped, maybe. She wasn't sure if it counted as a nap, exactly, when it happened between twoand five in the morning, but given how groggy she felt, she was absolutely confident it couldn't be counted assleep.
Ollie, who had obviously not had even one minute more sleep than she had, made a sad bewildered sound when her alarm went off and she rolled out of bed. Tiffany bounced off a wall on her way to the bathroom, grunted an agreement to his sadness, and sat on the toilet much longer than she needed to because she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do next. She was almost certain she knew this one. She did it every day. Get up, go to the bathroom…
Shower! Right. Showering. That was important. Tiffany was almost sure she hadn't fallen asleep on the toilet while trying to figure that out. Ollie, from the bed, croaked, "Is there areasonyou're up at dawn?"
"Uh-huh." It took two tries to remember how to turn the hotel shower on, and a blast of cold water narrowly missed Tiffany's head when she finally managed it. "Thingy. Inspection. Gazebo." She didn't even know if Ollie could hear her over the shower, but she crawled into it anyway and mashed her face against the wall, leaning and letting the hot water slowly wake her up.
The scent of coffee met her when she turned the water off several minutes later. Her heart actually leaped, and she emerged from the bathroom with more enthusiasm than she'd imagined possible. "Did you makecoffee? You're myhero!"
Ollie was sitting cross-legged in rumpled bedclothes, shirtless and curled around a cup of coffee, himself. His hair was a disheveled mess, and because his glasses were on the bedside table, he gave her a sleepy, squinting smile. "It's terrible. Instant stuff. But it is caffeinated."
Tiffany picked up her cup, took a sip, and, with genuine sincerity, said, "This might be the best cup of coffee I've ever had." It was all right, as far as instant coffee went, but he'dgotten up and made it for her, which made it better than ambrosia. "Thank you. Why are you drinking caffeine at this hour?Youcould go back to sleep."
"It takes more than half a cup of instant coffee to keep an Australian from going back to sleep," Ollie promised. "We like our coffeestrong. Although I'm supposed to be up by seven for the wedding breakfast anyway."
"Who does a wedding breakfast? Especially after how much food there was last night?" Tiffany felt herself waking up by the sip, and when she'd finished the coffee, came over to kiss Ollie. "Thank you. I think I can function now. Tell Charlee we'll have the whole thing ready for her by noon, or I'll…I don't know. Eat my hat, or something."
"Your hat is hard," Ollie said in dismay. "You'd break your teeth."
Tiffany laughed. "Then we better get the job done."
She wasn't actually surprised,fifteen minutes later, to find that the bulk of the repairs had been completed the night before. She was almost certain her crewhadknocked off at sunset, like they'd been told. But that had given them another four hours or so to work after she'd left, and the truth was, in the grand scheme of things, rebuilding a gazebo wasn'thard.
All that was really left was some minor feature work and repainting the whole thing. Tiffany crawled around all the scaffolding, checking the work but smiling the whole time. They'd done good work, which she'd expected, but which still pleased her. Shedidtake a minute to go wipe down the bulldozer's seat, and by the time her crew showed up at seven, she'd hand-cut a bunch of trim and beveling, and was back onthe scaffolding, nailing pieces into place. "Sure,nowyou show up," she called. "Here I am, working my fingers to the bone from dawn, and you lazy guys just wander inhourslater…!"
That got exactly the kind of mock-offended "Andwholeft early last night?" kinds of responses she was hoping for, and everybody was in great spirits even before Ollie showed up at a quarter after eight with another dozen coffees to hand out to the team.
They were taking the scaffolding down by then. Eric and Parker had already started the new paint job on the far side of the gazebo, where they hadn't smashed it, but everybody stopped to come have coffee, and Pauline eyed where the guys had started painting. "Do we have to repaint thewholething?"
"Obviously." Eric sounded shocked. "If we don't, the side with the new paint will be much brighter and newer than the other side, and that won't be any good at all."
"I'm just sayin' it better be the fastest-drying paint known to man," Pauline muttered.
"We don't have to do the floor or most of the railings right now," Eric argued over his coffee. "It'll be touch-dry for the wedding, and nobody's going to be walking on the new paint. It'll be fine, and we can finish it later and then we can put safety fencing up around the gazebo for a couple weeks while it finishes curing."
Pauline looked faintly annoyed, as if this was all an excellent argument that she hadn't considered, and she hated being wrong or caught out about things. Tiffany laughed. "No fighting, kids. Thank Ollie for the coffee, instead."
A dozen people said, "Thank you, Ollie," politely, and Tiffany grinned at him. "Thanks, yes. I didn't expect coffee today."
