My Stepbrother's Regret novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: After Hours

The back door stuck in summer.

I put my shoulder into it the way I did every morning, and it gave all at once.

I stumbled into the dark with Roarke right behind me.

The back room smelled like clock oil and old wood.

I didn't turn on the overhead.

I turned on the lamp at my bench instead, the one with the green shade.

It threw a small warm circle across my tools, my tray, the 1960s dress watch with its new balance staff waiting under a glass dome.

Beyond the circle, the whole back wall was clocks.

They were customer clocks waiting for repair: a schoolhouse regulator, two mantel clocks and a cuckoo with no cuckoo.

There was a brass carriage clock somebody's great-aunt had carried from Ohio.

All of them ticking, none of them together.

Roarke stood just inside the door and listened.

"It sounds like rain," he said.

"It sounds like work. Each one of those is a bill."

"Do you ever turn them off?"

"You don't turn a clock off. You let it run down."

He looked at me across the lamplight.

"That's very dark, Hollyn."

"I'm a very dark person."

"You're four foot nothing with a loupe on a string."

"Five foot two."

"I'll make a note."

Under the clock wall sat the old man's daybed, a cracked brown leather thing he napped on after lunch and swore he didn't.

Roarke's eyes went to it, and back to me.

He didn't move.

He'd stopped at the door.

"We don't have to," he said. "I want to be really clear. I'll sleep in the truck. I've done it."

"I know you have. You told me. Five years of job sites."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

I walked over to him.

I took his left wrist and turned it up into the lamplight.

He'd put the Carrera back on that morning, for the first time since Saturday.

The second hand swept.

Dead on.

"I want this," I said. "You. Here. Tonight. Not because of her, and not to get back at anybody. I just want you."

He looked down at me for a long moment.

His shoulders dropped, all the doubt going out of him.

"Yes," he said. "God, yes."

He reached past me and locked the back door.

I took his hand and led him away from the door, past my bench, into the warm circle of lamplight.

The old leather daybed creaked when I pushed him down onto it.

He went, watching me the whole time, his eyes catching the green light.

"Your move, watchmaker," he said.

"Shut up."

I straddled his lap and started on his shirt buttons.

Top to bottom.

Slow.

He had an old white button-down under his palms and a chest under that.

I pushed the shirt off his shoulders and he let it fall behind him.

His skin was warm.

I put both hands on him and felt him breathe.

"You're shaking," he said.

"Good observation."

"Why?"

I leaned down and bit his collarbone, not hard.

"Because I've wanted this since you dumped my purse on the breakfast table."

"That was five weeks ago."

"I know."

I got his belt open and his jeans undone.

He lifted his hips so I could work them down.

His cock was already hard, thick and flushed, and when I closed my left hand around it he made a sound low in his chest, a groan he tried to swallow.

"Fuck," he said.

"Good."

I worked him in slow, deliberate strokes, my rough fingertips dragging.

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