Love Untold

Love Untold: Chapter 19

Love Untold: Chapter 19

Race hefted his bike onto the rack and removed the front wheel.  If felt a little wobbly as he cruised down Taylor Loop that morning.  Sure enough, one of the spokes had bent a little.  Not enough to worry him or put him in any danger, but it never hurts to be extra cautious, even riding a bike.  He worked on replacing the spoke for a while in the back room of his shop, getting frustrated because his hands were sweating and his tools kept slipping in his grasp.

That damn pink striped bag kept staring at him and had been for the past two hours.

“Screw it,” he groaned and threw down a pair of pliers.  He’d only gotten a small peek inside the Victoria’s Secret bag at the mall, not wanting to embarrass himself with all those women around -- he’d been wearing his bike shorts, and those damn things showed every little twitch of his groin if he wasn’t careful.  But now, he just had to take a look.

He glanced out into the shop, saw his employees busy at work, so he closed the door to the work room and locked it.  Who cared what they thought he was doing back here?  It was none of their business.  Besides, they’d never think he was ogling women’s underwear...or would they?  

He’d have to be quick.

Dumping the contents onto a high table, he just stared at all the frothy material jumbled up in a swirl of colors...white, black, pink, blue, yellow with little green flowers dotting the material...

Suddenly, he was very glad to have slipped on a pair of jeans when he arrived at the shop.  Places on him were tightening and growing that had already gone through enough of a workout these last twenty-four hours.  Holding up the blue, satin gown with a wide strip of cream lace edging the hem and bust, he got very hot under his clothes.  Chrissie would look mouthwatering in that one.  The blue was a perfect shade just lighter than her eyes.  

A knock sounded.  Race stuffed everything back into the bag and hid it under the table.  “Yeah,” he asked, opening up to Theo, one of his part-time college employees.

Theo, curious to the marrow inside his bones, darted a look into the work room, obviously wondering why his boss bothered to lock the door when he’d never done it before.  Race swung the door wide to show that he had nothing to hide.  “Your wife’s out front.”

“Chrissie’s here?” he asked, radiant joy coloring his words.  Theo grinned and nodded.  As Race brushed past the twenty-year-old, Theo said, and not in a hushed tone at all, “Did I ever tell you how hot you’re wife is?”

“Can it, Theo,” Race scowled.  Yeah, Theo mentioned that little opinion of his wife every chance he got, and it irritated the crap out of Race.  He liked it when people said how beautiful Chrissie was, made him proud to be the one she chose, but today, he’d prefer to not hear it.  It made him wonder if Chrissie had some guy from her own single-lady memories on her mind.

Chrissie’s eyes flashed as they fell on him.  “Hide me,” she said, rushing up to him, and Race came to a dead stop as a cold chill traveled down his spine.  Those were the exact words she spoke to him the first night they spent together, the night she’d been fleeing her sister’s wrath.  Spooky.

“Did you color your sister’s hair again?” he asked, chuckling to shake off the deja vu sensation.  Chrissie grabbed his arm and dragged him to the back of the store.  She stopped, looked around, and gazed up at him.  “Where’s your office?  You do have an office, right?”

Theo was listening unabashedly to this exchange, and Race wasn’t prepared to explain Chrissie’s erratic behavior to anyone right now.  “We’ll have more privacy in the work room,” he said, directing her that way.

She entered the work room, waited for him to follow, then slammed the door shut and fumbled with the lock.  Finally, her purse and the shopping bags in her arms dropped to the floor, and she slumped against the wall with her eyes closed.  “Thank God!”

“So,” he began in a conversational tone, “how are you?”

She cracked an eye opened and smiled.  That smile turned into a laugh, and Race drank in the sound.  He loved her laugh.  He loved her smile, too.  Hell, he loved everything about her, even the feet stomping and the perfect aim.  He really loved the way she turned green before she found out Ava was his cousin.  She always had this jealousy flare, and he was happy to see it hadn’t changed when she lost her memory of him.  It indicated he meant more to her than she wanted to admit.  So, maybe there wasn’t another man from her displaced memories.

“I’m sorry...I just had to get away from her, and this was the only place I could think of.”

“Get away from whom?”

“God!  My mother!” she puffed, cutely exasperated.  “You have no idea what I’ve been through since you left the mall.”

He grinned and hopped up to sit on the edge of a work table.  “This I’d like to hear.  Where is your mother now?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Chrissie said, moving to plop down on a stool.  She kicked off a pair of red sandals, the kind with that giant cork wedge for a heel that Race thought looked like torture devices, and rubbed her feet up and down the leg of her pants.  He noticed that still hadn’t returned her wedding ring to her finger, but she did wear her birthday present, so he felt cherished in that respect.  

“I’ll owe Dena big time for this.  She saved me by locking Mom in the bathroom at Baby’s R Us, and told me to run.  I flagged a cab and came straight here.”

He knew where this story was going.  “Baby’s R Us?”

Chrissie glared at his jovial tone.  “When we left the mall, I thought we were going over to JCPenney’s, but noooo...Mom went straight to Baby’s R Us, and proceeded to load down a whole cart full of nursery bedding and baby clothes!   The woman has gone psycho!  I’ve been trying to tell her all morning that I don’t remember you, I don’t remember our marriage, and I don’t think we’ll be fertilizing any eggs anytime soon.”  

The pain from her words was there, but he didn’t let it get to him.  He kept his face calm and let her rant, somewhat giddy that she was actually sharing this with him when she burst out in anger yesterday and claimed to hate him.  “And do you know what she said?” Chrissie screeched.

“What did she say?” he replied, smiling with more joy than he should be feeling.

“She said that it didn’t matter,” Chrissie answered, wide-eyed and flushed with fury and amazement.  “It didn’t matter!  She said she knew the name of a very good fertility clinic, and all we had to do was supply the--”  Chrissie paused to hold up imaginary quotation marks with her fingers.  “‘Sap and berry,’ and the clinic would take care of the rest.”

Race tossed his head back and roared with laughter.  “Sap and berry...I don’t think I’ve ever heard it put that way.”

“Oh, my God,” Chrissie cried.  “It was awful!  By the time she finished explaining how to make babies without the actual making part, I felt like my head was going to explode.  I’m thirty years old, and my mother just gave me the ‘Birds and Bees’ speech while comparing the pros and cons of every breast pump in the store!”

Race wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes.  “And what did Dena say?”

“Oh!”  Chrissie shouted, holding up her hand.  “That’s the best part!  My sister asked if Sap and Berry came in a margarita flavor, and if we could stop off at Los Amigos to grab a couple of tamales for our...”  Chrissie waved her hand between the two of them, him and her.  “...noche de amor!”

“Our what?” Race laughed.

“Night...of...love...” she spit out.  “I could just strangle her!  Dena even went so far as to ask the sale’s clerk if they had a copy of Kama Sutra, to which Mom asked, ‘What is that, dear?’  And they actually had a copy!  Well, not Kama Sutra, but this pregnancy manual that had all these diagrams on the prime sexual positions for conception.  Can you believe that?”

Race’s stomach was hurting from the riotous convulsions of his muscles.  He held an arm to his front and bowed over it, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe either.  

Chrissie grunted.  “Oh, I’m not done.  You have to hear what she did with the book.”

He waved a weak hand at her, choking on his mirth.  “Please...stop...can’t...breathe...”  He heard her get up and walk across the room, her bare feet coming to a stop in front of him.  Something wet and cold pressed against his cheek.

“Here, drink some water,” she said, a lighthearted resonance flowing out with her words.  He took the bottle from her, unscrewed it and drank deeply.  When he lowered the bottle and opened his eyes, she stood so very close to him, almost nestled between his legs as he sat on the table.  Her solid blue eyes lapped up every inch of his face, and his smile slipped from his face.

Instead of reaching for her to pull her closer to him, he gripped the edge of the table and asked, “What did your mother do with the book?”

In a voice, thick with an emotion he’d be better off not thinking about, she said, “She showed me the position I was conceived in.”  The corners of her lips tugged upward, but her gaze never left his face.  “Then proceeded to go around the store and all those poor women in there -- some of them were old enough to have great-grandchildren -- and get a tally on which positions received the most successful conceptions.”

He raised an eyebrow, wondering why she stood so close to him, and hoping she’d stay there just a little bit longer.  “Oh, really?  And what was the winning position?”

Her breathing increased, and the pulse in the hollow of her neck jumped.  He could see the vein dancing against her skin, and feel the extra warmth billowing out from her like a cloud.  And still her eyes stayed locked onto his.  There was some serious electricity happening between them, and Race prayed for strength to keep his promise.  He wouldn’t touch her without her permission, so he also prayed that she’d grant him permission.

“You’ll laugh if I tell you,” she said, finally breaking eye contact and the trance she held him in, and moved back to her stool.

“I doubt it can be any funnier that what you’ve already told me,” he replied, taking another sip from the water bottle to extinguish the furnace roaring inside him.

Her quirky smile trapped him.  The bottle froze on his lips, water pooled on his tongue.  He’d seen that smile before...many, many times, right before she seduced him.

“The Slippery Nipple,” she blurted out, tipping her chin up a notch.  

Water sprayed out of his mouth, slithered down the wrong pipe, causing him to choke, and trickled up and out of his nose as he sputtered to clear his air passages.  Chrissie started laughing.

“Are you okay?” she asked, getting up to grab some paper towels by the utility sink.

“Oh, yeah,” he gasped, using his shirt to wipe his mouth.  “I didn’t get you, did I?”

“No, I’m fine.”  She got down on all fours to wipe up the splatter of water on the cement floor, and Race tilted his head to ogle at her rear end as she scooted around below him.  Whatever the Slippery Nipple comprised of, he had his own favorite sexual position -- any that allowed him to look into her eyes as he made love to her -- but this one was good, too.  His jeans got excruciatingly tight all of a sudden.  

He hopped off the table, throwing the water bottle in a recycling bin as an excuse to turn away from her and adjust himself.  Though she said she didn’t approve of him hiding his bodily reactions from her, he just didn’t have it in him to flaunt it either.  “So...you came straight here,” he mused, thinking they needed to talk about something else, and quickly.  “Not that I’m trying to start another argument or anything, how did you find my shop?  Dena?”

She peeked over her shoulder, puffing hair out of her face as she looked long and hard at him.  “Changing the subject?” she asked with a quirk of a smile tugging on her lips.

He grinned.  “Yeah, I am.  Sorry, but between the talk of sex and you kneeling down like that...”  He shrugged.  She wanted honesty.  He hoped she was prepared to hear it.

Chrissie scrambled up off the floor, glowing pink in the cheeks.  “Sorry.  I wasn’t thinking.  Mom has got me all scatterbrained right now.”  She heaved out a woeful sigh and resumed her perch on the stool, digging her cell phone out of her pocket as she explained, “Technology.”  She waved the contraption, and then glared at it.  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?  Just type in wherever you need to go, and it gives you directions.  Too bad it can’t tell you how to write a decent letter.”  

“A letter?”

She looked up.  ‘Oh...um, never mind.”  Her gaze skirted around his work room, taking in the bike parts and tools, and she said, “So, this is where you work...”

“Yup,” he said, about to go into a detailed recount of the why’s and how’s of him buying a bike shop -- since she wouldn’t remember any of it -- but she gasped and jumped up.  His wife stomped over to him, and he almost step back.  Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets and gave her the most charming, I-didn’t-do-it smile he had.  There was that look in her eyes, and it usually spelled trouble for him.

However, her goal wasn’t him.  She shoved him aside and snatched the lingerie bag from under the table.  “I swear that woman...!”

Race wrangled the bag away from her before she could do more than reach her hand into it.  “Give that back!” she demanded, but he only shook his head and held it out of her reach, using his body as a barrier.  She placed a hand on his shoulder for leverage as she raised up on tip-toes and pressed against him, trying her best to get a finger-hold on the dreaded sack.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked, slapping her grasping hand away with his free one.

“I’m going to take it all back,” she answered frantically.  “How dare she try to...to...”

“To get babies out of you?” he offered cheerfully.

“Exactly!  Now, give it to me!”

“Only if you make me one promise,” he said softly.  Their eyes met, and she realized their faces were only inches away from each other.  Chrissie stumbled backward.

“What?”

Keeping one eye on her in case she made another mad dash for the bag, he slowly lowered it and felt inside for the blue nightgown.  As he withdrew the gown, he handed over the bag with the rest of the contents.  “Keep this one.”  He held it up by the straps, displaying the Caribbean blue satin and cream lace for her inspection.  

Her eyes narrowed.  “Why that one?”

Race hitched a shoulder.  “I like it.”

Her eyes narrowed further, but impishly.  “It’ll look good on you.”

Race hitched the other shoulder, nonplussed.  “It’ll look better on you.”

Chrissie set the bag on the table, and reached out to take the blue gown.  Race twitched it away from her slightly, cocking an eyebrow at her.  She huffed.  “Fine.  I’ll keep it.”  He let her have it.  She shot him another glance before studying the garment.  Her frown told him that she actually loved it, but didn’t want to say it.  And when she held it up to her body for a quick fitting, his breath caught.

Oh, yeah...mouthwatering and sexy...