Page 37

“Actually, I came in here to see if we have any lanterns,” I say.

“Lanterns?” he questions.

“Uh, yeah. The board dinner at the downtown library is in two weeks, and they want an old-timey bookish look.”

“Old-timey bookish,” he echoes.

“You’re starting to sound like a broken record,” I tell him, and he deadpans me. Then his lips tick upward slightly.

“I suppose the theme would make sense for a library,” he says.

“Exactly,” I say.

“So where would these lanterns be?” he asks, and I guide him over to a storage closet disguised as a wall separating the showcases.

I open the door, flipping on the light and revealing stacks and stacks of labeled boxes.

“Jesus,” Marcus lets out. “You’d need a forklift to get to some of those.”

“You know how to run a forklift?” I ask, my eyes drawing up to his.

“Where are the lanterns?” he asks, dodging the question and making me laugh.

“Luckily, not at the top. I think they’re over here,” I point. “Behind those boxes.”

“Alright,” he says, shedding his jacket and undoing his cufflinks.

I blink. “You’re serious?” I ask.

“About helping you? Yes,” he answers. He rolls up his sleeves to just below the elbows, and seeing him like that makes my nipples instantaneously hard. Thank God for bra padding. “I never say things I don’t mean. You should know that about me by now.”

“I mean, I thought I knew you. A little anyways,” I say as I continue to watch him. “I just never took you for a manual labor kind of guy.”

“Moving a couple of boxes is hardly manual labor,” he says with a grunt. His forearms are flexing against the weight of whatever is in the boxes, and I can’t look away. I’m delighted those boxes are as heavy as they are, cause they certainly don’t look it. “I can think of a few things that could be considered manual labor.”

I swallow hard.

“I should be helping you,” I say, hurrying over to make myself busy.

And so we do this strange dance of Marcus grabbing a box, moving around me, then me grabbing a box and moving around him. As fluid as it has the potential to be, it’s not. I keep bumping into him; he keeps standing in my way. I can’t figure out if we are doing it on purpose, at least subconsciously. Maybe it’s just awkward because we are moving boxes in a room designed to look like someone’s kitchen.

“What’s in these?” he asks.

“China?” I say, and I know only because I am looking at the label.

“Ah,” he says as he sets a box down. I lift another and head in his direction, but he deposits his and turns back around again faster than I expect and bumps into me. I nearly drop the box I’m holding, and he reaches out to brace it, bracing me in the process. “I got it,” he says, taking the box from me, and for whatever reason, I just stand there.

He sets it on top of the others, dusts off his hands that, if I had to guess, aren’t the most calloused men’s hands, and then looks at me again. And we just stand there. Until our eyes meet, which is very dangerous for us based on past encounters. And then he takes a step closer. And despite the growing danger, I take a step toward him. The next thing we both know, we are standing right against each other and his hands are toying with my hair and touching my collarbone and grazing the swell of my breasts and sliding over the edge of my bra.

My hands find him, first his forearms which are smooth and hard. I run my palms over them before sliding up to his toned shoulders and around his back as far as I can reach while standing in front of him in mid-height heels.

I clasp his shoulders in my hands, and his fingertips brush against my breasts inside my bra. He’s close enough to my nipples to electrify my skin, but not enough to make me gasp. My hands slide down the front of his shoulders, over his hard pecs and lower to his washboard abs. When I reach his waist, I hook my fingers inside his belt and tug him even closer.

Marcus tugs my shirt down. My red, sleeveless sweater shows only a small amount of cleavage, and I'm thankful it’s stretchy enough to expose my black push-up bra. It does not hook in the front, so he will have to unlatch it from the back.

And he does with two fingers and very little effort on the first try. It bounces open, and he pushes it out of the way. I do the girl thing and slide my arms out of the straps, and the straps of the sweater yanking the bra off entirely. I toss it behind me, where it lands skillfully on the door handle to the storage space (by luck, not talent).

Then, I grab him hungrily by the pants again, pulling him towards me. I can feel him hard and erect inside his slacks, and everything inside me aches for him. I want him. I need him. But we can’t. We can’t…