Page 33 of Letting Go

"I like sex-talk. I'm not a prude."

"Oh, that's perfectly clear," I say and kiss her on the mouth, slowly, long, inviting sighs and sweet touches along my jaw. I feel a fluttering around my dick. Damn this girl is killing me. We break apart but are still linked pelvis to pelvis.

"I think I need proof, young lady."

Her forehead wrinkles up with a question.

I use my investigator's voice. "That you like sex-talk."

She lifts her head to my ear and her breath stirs the hair on my neck as she whispers, "I love it…when your cock is deep inside me."

I love she thinks this is sex talk.

When she pulls back, there's a smile on her lips that is so free, so beautiful, I hold her, the length of her, in every way I can.

"Why don't you buy this and finish fixing it up?"

We are out on the wide front porch, it's three and I am trying so hard not to worry about time. But Portland looms.

"Oh, God. Property here is so expensive. I couldn't afford this," she shakes her head. "There's no way."

"If you had the down payment, you could rent it in the summer and live at The Inn and it would pay for itself."

Chloe is wearing my Oxford shirt, with the sleeves rolled up which seems charmingly old school and very sexy. She's braless but is back in her jeans and the shirt wafts around her. It's adorable.

"Ooh, that's an idea!" She snaps her fingers to mock me. "But oh yeah," she cocks her head, "I don’t have the cash to put down."

I wish I could help her. I would just give her the money. Fistfuls of it. She's just wrong though. She does have cash, not a lot, but a chunk. "You'll have some."

"What? Oh, you mean the tree farm money?"

When Finn had first bought Echo Bay Inn, he tried to squeeze Claire out of the veterinary practice next door. He planned to rent the building as a house and use the property as a garden for people who had lost children. He wanted to turn it into a park.

First, she wouldn't sell, then he didn’t want it, then they fell in love. But Finn had found another parcel of land that their father had left for them. An acre of land had been planted with excellent quality fur trees. Christmas trees. This fall they were looking at $100,000 worth of trees and five heirs to the small fortune.

"That's a chunk, but not enough to buy this place."

"Does it come with land?"

She shakes her head. "Don’t know. I've never looked into it." She pauses and crosses her legs. "When we played house we'd all have little bags of food or apples shoved up our sleeves, a knot of salami and juice boxes. That was part of the excitement, sneaking away. Looking back, I'm sure our parents knew what we were doing. We'd play here all day, pretending we were, you know, fighting storms, hiding from killers, or one of us would be the 'feral child,' and the rest of us had to do the Pygmalion thing."

I have to laugh. "Feral child?'"

"Well that," she stretches her legs out and flexes her feet, "or the imaginary old woman who'd come over and we'd teach her to read."

"Really? Who was the old woman."

"In the end it was Travis. Whoever was the youngest."

"You're like a mastermind of gaming. Claire told me how you'd collect the icicles from the porch roof and then tell the rest of them how they were really unicorn horns."

She shrugs. "I loved pretending. I just loved it. I could make stories up, whole plots, talk to imaginary beings. The entire time Mom was pregnant with Laurel I pretended I had a pet bear." Glancing over at me she finishes with, "But pretending isn’t a great asset as an adult."

"There are uses for it. What about acting or teaching?"

"Well, not in my line of work then. Plus, I think it gets me into trouble once in a while."

"How?"