Her Naughty Holiday

3

DON’T PANIC, CLOVER told herself. Then she told herself that again. It wasn’t working. She was panicking.

She stood in the middle of her living room and glanced around at her house. No denying, she had a cute house. Not big. Perfect size for a woman who lived alone. Living room, office and kitchen downstairs. Master bedroom and guest bedroom upstairs. Half bath by the kitchen. Full bath by the master. Bamboo floors covered in woven rugs. Walls painted a rustic red downstairs and a pretty lake blue upstairs. Plants were everywhere, of course—ferns, ficus and flowers. She hoped Erick wasn’t allergic to flowers. This slumber party would be over before it started if he was. Ruthie had worked for her nearly a year and Erick picked his daughter up all the time. Had she ever seen him sneeze around the plants? Not that she recalled, but then again that would be a really bizarre thing to remember. She was freaking out and she knew it.

“Calm down, Clover,” she told herself.

“I am calm,” she said but she knew she wasn’t. She hadn’t been expecting company tonight. Certainly not tall, handsome, male company. She was torn between excitement and panic.

“Priorities, Clover. First things first. Man coming over...spending the night. What do I do? Clean stuff. What stuff? All the stuff.”

She’d fallen asleep on the sofa last night reading and the throw pillows and blankets were still a mess. She straightened the pillows and folded the blanket neatly. But it was a throw blanket and didn’t look right in a neat rectangle so she tossed it over the back instead. It ended up looking nearly identical to how it looked before but at least it was purposefully messy and not accidentally messy.

All the dishes in the kitchen sink she crammed into the dishwasher and started it running. She put the basket of her yet-to-be-folded socks and underwear in the laundry room, draping a clean towel over the piles of panties on top. She dug through the linen closet upstairs for clean sheets. Currently on her bed was red and blue flannel. She liked a cold house to sleep in at night with warm blankets piled high. Sometimes she even slept with the window cracked to let in the cold night air. She lived near Lost Lake and the air was as clean and fresh as anyone could ever want, and it seemed a shame to not have some of that crisp clean air in her house. If she remembered correctly, men tended to be warmer than women. Maybe no flannel sheets, then. She found her summer sheets, plain blue cotton, and stripped the white-and-blue-checkered quilt off her bed. She replaced the sheets and fluffed the pillows. Then she had to decide—did she want to remake the bed? Hadn’t she already told Erick she had to change the sheets? Would he think she was some kind of freak if she made the bed all of an hour before unmaking it to sleep? Was she overthinking this? Yes, she was overthinking this.

“You’re overthinking this, Clover. Stop it.”

She stopped it and just made the bed, anyway. She liked made beds. The room looked more inviting when the bed was made. On the bedside table was a little milk glass lamp that she switched on, flooding the room with low gentle light. Clover stepped back and took in the effect. Nice. Her small bedroom looked almost...romantic? Like a room at a cozy inn. Rustic but pretty.

What else? Bathroom. Oh, yeah, she better clean the bathroom. Erick had said with Ruthie gone he looked forward to using a clean bathroom all week. Clover wiped down the sink and the tile counter, wiped the toothpaste spots off the mirror, opened the drawer and slid into it everything from the counter. When that was done she heaved a sigh of relief. Then she saw herself in the mirror.

While frantically cleaning, she’d gotten a little sweaty and her hair was matted down on her forehead and what little of her makeup she’d still been wearing when she’d arrived home half an hour ago was now gone. She undressed fast and hopped into the shower. That morning she’d washed her hair so she didn’t do that again but she managed to soap up and shave her legs in a record time of seven minutes. Wearing only her towel, she brushed her hair again and pulled it into a neat ponytail. She put on a fresh coat of mascara and lip gloss and found her nicest pair of normal underwear—white cotton boy shorts—and put those on. The question was, what to wear over them. Put on her jeans again? She had some cute Christmas pajamas somewhere—shorts and a tank top—but it wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet. And those did show a lot of skin. She didn’t want Erick to think she was trying to seduce him. She wasn’t. Was she? No, of course not. They’d already talked about it. No sex tonight. Just a sleepover. Of course then he’d joked about buying condoms and she’d told him about her latex allergy, which sort of kind of maybe made it sound like she did want to have sex with him. Or maybe—

“Stop it, Clover. You’re thirty, not fifteen.” Truth. But she felt nervous as a teenager for some reason. She knew the reason. She hadn’t told Erick the reason but she would. Or maybe not. She’d simply tell him she was out of practice.

“Now you are acting like a kid,” she told herself. “Grow up.”

Clover pulled a nightgown from off a hanger in the back of her closet. This was what she wore on the coldest nights, ankle-length with full sleeves. A very pretty nightgown if somewhat old-fashioned. Maybe too old-fashioned? The doorbell rang. Too late to change. Clover threw on her pale yellow bathrobe and walked down the steps to the front door. Erick stood on her front porch with a black gym duffel bag over his shoulder and a smile on his face.

“Nice house,” he said as she let him in. “Didn’t know you lived on Lost Lake. You like it out here?

“Love it,” she said. “Did you have trouble finding it? The roads can be a little winding.”

“A little?” He dropped his duffel on the floor by the door and started untying the laces on his work boots. “I swear David Bowie wearing a giant codpiece gave me directions, that’s how winding they are.”

“Never figured you for a Labyrinth fan. Isn’t that kind of a girl movie?” she teased.

“It’s a Ruthie movie, which means I’ve seen it approximately...” He yanked one boot off. “One million...” He yanked the second boot off. “One hundred thousand...” He pulled his coat off. “Times.”

He hung his coat on the coatrack and turned to look her in the face. Not knowing what else to do she just stood there with her hands in her robe pockets trying to look casual when she felt anything but.

“Did you really get lost finding the house?” she asked, feeling bad she hadn’t given him better directions.

“Nah. I was just out here last month putting cedar siding on one of the new Lost Lake rental houses. I know these roads pretty well.”

“That cedar cabin down the road?” she asked.

“That’s the one. Chris Steffensen hired me to do the job. Although I think I did too good of a job. He and his girlfriend are living in it now. They were supposed to rent it out.”

“It did turn out great. I came this close to offering to buy it from him.”

“Why? This place is great.”

“Feels too big, I guess,” she said. “You know, since I live alone and...”

“Hold still,” he said.

“Why?”

“I’m going to kiss you before we get weird and awkward around each other. You good with that?” he asked. She was already feeling both weird and awkward so she was glad he mentioned it.

“Oh. Okay. Good idea.”

“Also I’m going to kiss you because I want to kiss you.”

“Even better idea.”

He put his hands on her waist and she placed hers on his shoulders. She imagined they looked like models on a How to Kiss Like Reasonable Adults public service poster. This was easily the strangest fake relationship she’d ever been in.

But.

Strange as it was, as soon as Erick’s lips met hers and she relaxed enough to enjoy the kiss, well...she enjoyed the kiss. He tasted like toothpaste, which made her smile against his mouth. She’d brushed her teeth, too, in anticipation of more and deeper kissing. And the more and deeper he kissed, the more and deeper she wanted him to kiss her. Erick knew how to kiss. He could teach classes on it. She hoped she was making the grade. When he stepped closer and slid his hands from her waist to the back of her neck and the curve of her hip, she had a feeling she was at least passing this test.

“Well...” he said against her lips. “What do you think? Still weird and awkward?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “But less weird and awkward now.”

“Hmm...a little kissing made it a little less weird. You think a lot of kissing will make it a lot less weird?”

“Stands to reason,” she said. “I mean, if you run the numbers, that adds up.”

“So we should probably kiss some more, right?”

“We should. Definitely.”

“Definitely, she says. I like a definite woman.” He reached for her again but she stepped back, suddenly awkward again. She couldn’t get over thinking that this was Ruthie’s dad. Ruthie’s insanely sexy dad. Why did Ruthie have such a sexy dad? Work was going to be weird as heck next week.

“Let me show you around the house first,” she said. “You know, since you’re supposed to be my boyfriend, you should probably know where the bathroom is.”

“For a lot of reasons.”

She showed him the living room and he admired the layout and the finish on her bamboo floors. In the kitchen he admired her box window. She would have showed him the deck but it was already pitch-black out and raining. That could wait until tomorrow. He liked the bathroom for the paint color and the nice fixtures. He actually said that—“nice fixtures.”

“No one has complimented my fixtures before,” she said. “This is new.”

“I like a lady who knows how to pick a faucet.”

“Chrome is so dated,” she said. “Copper is classic.”

“You are speaking my language. What’s upstairs?” he asked. His question sounded so innocent but something in his eyes looked quite devilish. She liked devilish.

“Oh, another bathroom. Guest room. My bedroom.”

“You have copper fixtures upstairs, too?” he asked.

“Of course. I designed the whole place myself.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing the upstairs. You know, for the fixtures,” he said.

“Right. The fixtures.”

Clover took him up the steps—which he also admired for the fine grain of the cedar—and showed him her bathroom. He approved. She showed him the guest room. He also approved of that.

“And here’s my room,” she said. “Kind of a small bed. Hope that’s okay. I can sleep in the guest—”

Erick had walked to the bed while she was chatting away nervously and before she could get any more words out he’d turned around and fallen onto the bed on his back.

Her full-size bed suddenly looked like a twin with Erick on it. He wallowed a little on the quilt, rolled left and rolled right, bounced once or twice, then sat up on his elbows and looked at her. She liked the look he gave her.

“Comfy,” he said.

“Good. As I was saying...you’re sort of, you know, big—”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Stop. You know what I mean. You are tall and this is a small bed.”

“I like small beds. You can’t hide from me in this bed.”

She tucked a strand of hair that didn’t actually exist behind her ear.

“What makes you think I want to hide from you?”

“You’re wearing a bathrobe over a nightgown that’s got so much material to it I could make a schooner sail out of it. And you’re doing that grandma thing where you’re holding the lapels of your robe together like you’re afraid I’ll see your neck or some other unmentionable part of your body. It’s very cute, this shyness.”

“I really want to be sexy and flirty with you, but if I ever knew how to do that, I’ve forgotten how.”

“You are sexy.”

“Not like you are.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“How am I sexy?” he asked. “And please, be specific.”

“You’re very comfortable with yourself. I like that. I’m not as comfortable with myself.”

“You’re comfortable with yourself at work.”

“I am, but this isn’t work. And I don’t know you very well. Even though I know you really well. That made more sense in my head, I promise.”

“You know me as Ruthie’s dad. That’s how you know me, and as dear old dad, you do know me well. Ruthie’s in LA right now and it’s just you and me. Now you get to know the other side of me that has absolutely nothing to do with my daughter even though it’s the reason she exists.”

“I want to get to know that side of you. I want to get to know that side of me, too. But you know how it is, running your own business.”

“Mine’s nothing like yours. I can pick my jobs, tell people no if they try to book me on a day I need to be at Ruthie’s school or something. Your place is open seven days a week, eight to eight, and I’ve never once gone there to drop off Ruthie or pick her up and not seen you there with your nose in a stack of invoices or with a trowel, a hose and a pair of hedge clippers in your hand. You work your ass off.”

“It’s still there. I think.” She patted her backside. “Yup. I don’t work that hard.”

“How long have you lived in this house?”

“Um, two years and six months,” she said.

“Where is everything?”

“What?”

“Where is everything? You have furniture and you have plants. I saw two books downstairs and those were on gardening. No art on the walls, no pets, no souvenirs from vacations anywhere. This place looks like a bed-and-breakfast. A nice bed-and-breakfast but not a home.”

“I’m not here very often.”

“Your office looks more like home than your home.”

“It is my home.”

“And that’s my point.” He sat up on the edge of the bed. “Your office is lived-in. It’s homey. You have pictures of your family on your desk and a stuffed puppy or something—”

“That is a sock monkey. A pink sock monkey and his name is Alejandro. Your daughter gave him to me.”

“Of course she did. You have a messy office. It looks like someone’s home. This house looks like you bought it yesterday turnkey and just brought a suitcase of clothes with you. Do you even have anything in your nightstand? A book? Chapstick? Vibrator?”