Page 34 of Deserving Lara
Lara swallowed hard. She wanted to believe that. But she was scared.Terrified.
“Trust him,” Reese encouraged.
“I want to, but I don’t know how to let him know I’m interested,” Lara admitted, getting to the real reason she wanted to talk to the women in the first place.
“Kiss him,” Cora said firmly.
“I agree. I don’t think you need a lot of words. All it’s going to take is the slightest indication that you’re interested in him the same way he’s interested in you, and he’ll take things from there,” Alaska said.
“How do you feel about intimacy?” Henley asked gently. “You know, after everything that’s happened recently.”
Lara thought about that for a moment before saying, “If it was anyone but Owl, I’d say that was a hard no. But…Owl won’t hurt me. He’ll go easy.”
Henley nodded approvingly. “He will. But if anything makes you uncomfortable, you need to speak up. If he actually hurt you, even inadvertently, it would destroy him. After what he’s been through, the last thing he’d ever want to do is make you feel uncomfortable.”
Lara nodded.
“With that said…I agree with Cora. Kiss him. I think if you tried totellhim how you feel, that you’re interested, it’s likely that he’d try to talk you out of it because he’d think it was for your own good. That maybe you’re just interested because he helped save you. But if youshowhim your feelings…”
A shiver went through Lara. She could almost feel Owl’s lips on her own. She wasn’t completely convinced she could make such a bold move like her friends were suggesting, but at least if he wasn’t interested, she’d know immediately.
“Hey! We’re having a party and I wasn’t invited?” Jess asked as she entered the kitchen.
Lara smiled. She liked the other woman. She was one of the three housekeepers employed at The Refuge.
“What’re we talking about?” Jess asked.
“Lara was worried she’s been too weird for us, we convinced her otherwise, and she likes Owl and was asking advice on how to let him know,” Cora summed up.
“Cora!” Lara protested.
“What? Just catchin’ her up,” she said innocently.
Most of the time, Lara loved her friend’s blunt personality. But at the moment, she had to admit she was feeling a little embarrassed.
“What’d you tell her to do?” Jess asked, grabbing an apple off the counter and taking a bite.
“Kiss him. I would’ve suggested going into his room at night and crawling into bed…naked, but I figured that was a bit much,” Cora said with a giggle.
“I knew Eric was the man for me the first moment I met him. But he was shy.Reallyshy. I realized things were going to take forever if I didn’t make the first move, because he wasn’t catching on to the little things I said or did to try to encourage him. We’d met to go on a hike just outside of town, and there was a little girl who’d fallen on the trail and skinned her knee. He was so good with her, my ovaries just about exploded.
“After he’d put a Band-Aid on her knee and made her smile, the girl and her mom left. I just couldn’t control myself any longer. I pulled him off the trail, backed him against a tree, took his hand and shoved it under my shirt over my boob and kissed the crap out of him.”
Lara stared at the woman with big eyes.
“Wow! What happened?” Reese asked.
Jess grinned. “He fucked me against that tree, then I spent the night at his house and never left. I’m telling you, the shy ones aremonstersin bed.”
As the other women catcalled and laughed, Lara felt those tingles between her legs once more as she thought about what kind of lover Owl might be. The fact that she wasn’t freaking out over the idea of sex made her feel as if she might actually be healing from her ordeal, more than any other strides she’d made.
Alaska fanned herself with her napkin. “Whew! Is it hot in here?”
“Scorching. I think I need to go find my man,” Henley said.
Everyone laughed again.
“Lara?” Jess said.
