To My Romeo, with Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Number
Laurel wakes in her best friend Fraser's bed after their first night; a nurse's call about oncology comes in, he hears it from the doorway, and she tells him last night was a mistake.
The night I finally let Fraser McCracken undress me, I already had a lump above my collarbone and a biopsy result on its way.
I hadn't told him.
I hadn't told anyone.
It was a Saturday in October, and his shop was empty because Teddy had taken the last of the party guests home.
Fraser was upstairs in the apartment over the shop, running water over two mugs.
I stood in his doorway with my cardigan buttoned wrong and my heart going hard.
"You can stop washing those," I said.
He turned around with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.
"They're dirty."
"Romeo."
He set the mug down very slowly.
I'd called him that since I was nine, when he climbed my trellis in the dark with a stolen plum and fell off the top rung.
I had never said it like this.
"Pink," he said, and his voice was rough.
"I want to kiss you," I said. "I want a lot more than that."
His eyes went over my face.
There wasn't one.
I crossed the kitchen and put my hands in his shirt and kissed him.
He made a low sound in his chest and kissed me back.
His beard scratched my chin.
His hands were so big and so careful on my waist that I wanted to scream.
I pulled his flannel off his shoulders and he let me.
He was solid under the T-shirt, broad and warm, and I put my mouth on his throat and tasted sawdust and soap.
"Bedroom," he said against my hair.
"Now."
He lifted me.
I locked my legs around his hips and laughed into his neck, because I am five foot nine and nobody lifts me.
He kicked the bedroom door open with one boot.
He laid me down on the quilt his mother had sewn and stood over me, breathing hard.
"Take your glasses off," I said.
He did.
Without them his eyes were soft and unfocused and wide open.
I sat up and pulled my sweater over my head.
He looked at me in my plain gray bra.
"God, Laurel."
"Touch me."
He did.
His thumbs ran over my ribs and up, and he unhooked the bra with fingers that shook.
When his mouth closed over my nipple, I arched off the quilt and said his name too loud.
He sucked and licked until I was twisting under him.
Then his hand slid down my stomach and into my jeans and found how wet I was.
He groaned.
"You're soaked."
"Because of you," I said. "Only because of you."
He worked the jeans off me and my panties with them, and kissed the inside of my knee, my thigh, higher.
I pushed my hands into his short blond hair.
He licked me slow and deep, and then he found my clit with the flat of his tongue and stayed there.
I came fast and hard with my heels digging into his shoulders.
He didn't stop until I was shaking.
When he crawled back up, his beard was wet and his eyes were wild.
I shoved at his jeans, and he kicked them off.
His cock was thick and hard against my hip, and I wrapped my hand around it and watched his jaw go tight.
"Laurel. I can't last if you do that."
"Then don't last," I said. "I want you in me."
I rolled him onto his back and climbed over him.
I held him at my entrance and sank down an inch, and his hands clamped my thighs.
It was a stretch and a burn and so good I forgot to breathe.
I took him all the way and stayed there, full, with my forehead on his.
"You feel perfect," he said. "You feel like home."
I started to ride him.
Slow at first, then harder, with his hands on my ass pulling me down onto every thrust.
The bed knocked the wall.
He sat up so we were chest to chest and kissed me while I moved.
I felt the next one building low in my belly, tighter than the first.
"Come with me," I said into his mouth.
He slid a hand between us and rubbed my clit in quick circles.
I broke, crying out, clenching around him.
He thrust up twice and came with a shout, deep inside me, holding me so hard it almost hurt.
We lay in a tangle for a long time afterward.
He kissed my shoulder, my temple, the corner of my mouth.
For the first time in three weeks, I wasn't afraid.
I fell asleep with his arm across my ribs.
The phone woke me at ten past seven.
It was mine, buzzing on his nightstand, with a number I'd saved on Thursday.
Fraser's side of the bed was empty, and I could hear him on the stairs.
I answered it under the quilt.
"Ms. Pinkney? This is the nurse from the oncology office at Wornall Cancer Center."
My whole body went cold.
"The doctor would like to see you Monday at eight. Please bring someone with you."
"Is it bad?" I whispered.
"She'll go over everything in person. I'm sorry, I can't say more on the phone."
She said the word "oncology" twice before she hung up.
I sat there holding the phone.
My mother had heard that word at forty-four.
She had been dead before I was seventeen.
The bedroom door opened.
Fraser stood in the doorway with two coffees and no shirt and his glasses crooked.
He stood there one second too long.
I thought he was just looking at me.
"Who was that?" he said.
"Wrong number," I said. "Some robocall."
He nodded and came in and set a coffee on the nightstand.
His hand touched my hair.
"Stay today," he said. "I'll make pancakes. Then I want to take you to dinner, an actual dinner, with a tablecloth. I've been wanting to say something to you for a while, Pink."
I looked at his open face, and at the hand he'd put on my hair.
I remembered my father in the garage for four years after the funeral, sanding the same board.
I could not do that to this man.
I put the coffee down and pulled the quilt up.
"Fraser, last night was a mistake."
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