He Stole My Bill, So I Divorced Him and Outranked His Father novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The First Peach

He bit the first peach of the season over my stomach so that the juice would run.

It fell warm and sweet in a thin line from my navel to my ribs, and I jumped.

"Emilio."

"Hold still, Madam Chief," he said.

I lay naked on my back on the cedar sorting table with my hair spread out on the wood.

It was the last Sunday in May.

Light came through the slats of the packing shed in long gold bars, and dust hung in them.

My father was at church. The sermon would run an hour, and then the coffee would run another.

Bees hummed in the orchard outside, and the shed smelled of ripe fruit and cut wood.

I had my hands above my head, because I had put them there, and I did not mean to take them down.

Emilio stood beside the table in his shirtsleeves.

He bent and put his mouth on the line of juice at my navel.

He licked upward, slow and thorough, with the flat of his tongue.

I felt it all the way down my legs.

"This is the best thing I have ever tasted," he said, against my skin.

"It's a Springprince. They're not even good yet."

"I wasn't talking about the peach."

I laughed, and the laugh broke into a gasp when his mouth closed over my breast.

He had tipped the rest of the peach so that the juice ran over my nipple, and he sucked it clean.

"Mm," he said. "Sweet."

"You're stalling," I said.

"I'm paying attention."

"Pay it faster."

"No, ma'am," he said, serenely. "You're going to have to wait."

I stared at him.

He looked back at me with enormous calm.

He had taken the lead more often in these months, in a hundred small and unhurried ways, and I had let him.

It had changed the whole shape of us.

I was learning that I had never wanted to command a man.

I had wanted to be the one he asked.

"Tell me what you're going to do," I said.

"Everything," Emilio said. "Slowly."

He cut a thin slice of the peach with his pocketknife and held it to my lips.

I took it from his fingers, and the juice ran down my chin, and he caught it with his thumb.

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