Stay (Dunham series #2) (40 page)

“Vanessa,” he whispered into her mouth. She opened
her eyes and pulled away just slightly. “I could kiss you
forever.”

She began to smile.

“But I can’t kiss you and ride roller coasters at
the same time.”

She laughed and turned, tugging at his hand. “Then
let’s get that done so we can go back to kissing.”

They reached the entrance of the amusement park, and
she stopped. Looked around, as if seeing the world for the first
time. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Eric watched her
enjoy the sweet Ozark air and the feel of having no responsibility
for the day, her body relaxed if not because of his massage, then
because he’d given her permission to have fun with no purpose.

She opened her turquoise eyes and smiled at him, the
corners of her eyes crinkling. “Thank you, Eric,” she whispered.
“This is the nicest thing anybody’s ever done for me. Well, you
know,” she amended with a laugh, “except for Knox rescuing me from
LaVon and giving me a life.”

He grinned, and lifted her hand to his mouth for a
kiss.

They walked into the park, and once Eric looked
around to see exactly what Silver Dollar City was, he sighed.
Knott’s Berry Farm all over again, with its 1800s Ozarks hillbilly
feel, log buildings, period dress, train around the park, stores
and stores of handicrafts—and very few rides. He hated parks like
this, but it was the only thing he could think of on short notice
when he didn’t know the area. On the other hand . . .

She
was having a blast.

Eric watched Vanessa soak it up, every detail, her
grin wide, her eyes crinkling. He loved her crinkly eyes.

“I’m hungry,” he announced.

“I’ve heard good things about that restaurant right
there,” she said, pointing to what seemed a decent place to eat. “I
mean, you know, for a place that serves regular food.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

She laughed.

The day passed in a blur for Eric, not because he
wasn’t having fun, but because he spent it watching Vanessa do
exactly what he had wanted to see her do, what he had brought her
here to do. They stood in line for the saloon show and she tucked
herself in his arms. “Have I adequately demonstrated a willingness
to have fun yet?”

He burst out laughing. “Are you trying to fake me
out?”

“Oh, no, I’m having fun. I just want to know what
your standard is so I know what I have to look forward to
tonight.”

“Eh, I told you. It’s not always about the sex.”

She harrumphed. “That’s supposed to be the girl’s
line, isn’t it?”

A costumed saloon dancer pranced by, in deep purple
satin and black lace, hollering at the crowd to get everyone
excited. “I could see you in that dress.”

“Not in purple, you can’t.”

“Okay, pink.”

“That’s more like it. Maybe I’ll have one made for
the masquerades this year.”

“Mmmm, I want to see that. So what’s with all the
pink?”

“Do you remember how Laura hated the pink ribbons?
How she wanted to wear the blue ones Mary got to wear?”

“Yes.”

“I have brown hair. Like Laura. So I wear pink. Like
Laura. Whether she wanted to or not is irrelevant. She wore it and
I like it.”

Vanessa had to sample food from every booth and
restaurant and shop. She took one look at a kiosk tucked into a
corner of a garden and said, “Stay here.” He watched her jog toward
it, pick out several pieces of what looked like jerky, pay, then
trot right back.

“Try this,” she said, and shoved a stick of it in
his hand. He looked at it warily; something about beige jerky
didn’t seem kosher to him.

“What is it?”

“Try it.” She proceeded to bite off a huge chunk of
hers and closed her eyes, chewed slowly, sighed in
over-enthusiastic ecstasy.

But he took a bite of his. Chewed. Wondered what the
fuss was about. “It tastes like spices and . . . something chewy.
This could be tofu for all I can taste anything.”

She opened her eyes, scowled at him, and took a bite
of his. She blinked. “Oh, you’re right. Too bad, too. Interesting
concept.”

“Well?”

“Yours is kangaroo. Mine’s crocodile.”

Eric gaped. “I ate a kangaroo?”

“No! You ate a
bite
of kangaroo.” She offered
him hers. “Want a taste?”

“Fuck no, Vanessa. I don’t have a cast-iron
stomach.”

Vanessa laughed wickedly and said, “Want to know
what’s on the menu tonight?”

He rolled his eyes. “Rattlesnake.”

“How did you know?”

“Are you serious?”

“And cottonmouth. With an apricot glaze. Over native
rice. Served with a Caesar salad, ho hum, but it goes well.”

“How do you make that sound halfway decent?”

“It’s my job.”

She ordered quantities of jarred preserves and fruit
butters, marmalades and pickled everything. Every time she arranged
for shipment to Whittaker House, the clerks got stars in their
eyes. One chef came out of his kitchen to speak with her and she
was as gracious as she ever was.

More than a few of the park’s guests recognized her.
The first time she dug a Sharpie out of her little purse to sign
autographs, Eric started.

“I don’t go anywhere without a couple of these,” she
muttered once the little crowd dispersed.

“You’re not supposed to be working,” he
grumbled.

She shrugged. “I’m not going to be rude to people;
it’s just not good business. And I like food. I like to eat. I
can’t sample every single thing right here, right now. When I get
home, I’ll sift through it all and see what I can use and what I
can better and what I can’t stand.”

“Why’d you become a chef?”

“You read my
Esquire
interview. You know
why.” He stared at her and her mouth twitched. “It’s not the
right
question.”

For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what the
right question was.

She pursed her lips and drew in a deep breath. “I
was starving to death by the time Knox rescued me. I weighed maybe
sixty, seventy pounds tops. LaVon spent her time sitting in the
diner smoking and eating. I guess it didn’t occur to her that if
she wanted me to get my own food, she should probably go shopping
for some. I was grubbing around in trash cans at night, when no one
would see me, and the bad part was that my father made a good
living. It wasn’t like we didn’t have money.

“Pops was at work at the GM plant in Fairfax, so he
ate there and by the time he got home, he was too beat to notice
what wasn’t happening in the kitchen. He must have assumed LaVon
had taken care of dinner. Simone— Well, Simone had the survival
instincts of a tomcat. Sometimes Dirk’s mother would notice me and
get me to stay for dinner, but I was proud and refused more often
than not—until I got so hungry I couldn’t say no.”

Eric shook his head. No matter how crappy his life
had been, he had never starved.

“Anyway, after the first time Knox fed me, I
determined I would never go hungry again. Like Scarlet. I didn’t
have any pride left. I was too hungry and I would’ve gone to Dirk’s
mother and begged.”

“So the right question is: Why did you decide to
specialize in cooking weeds and roadkill?”

Her eyes crinkled. “No matter what happens, I can go
into the woods and have a decent meal.”

“
Esquire
asked you that, too, and you just
said you wanted to be unique.”

She shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”

“So that’s also why you learned how to butcher
animals. But you don’t hunt.”

“I
can
hunt, and I can fish with my bare
hands. I just don’t like to. Anybody can kill the animal.
Butchering it’s, well, it’s an art.”

“And what you love most about cooking.”

“Yes.”

They strolled along, still holding hands, but Eric
knew where he wanted to go next.

“Pink,” he said as he handed her a saloon girl
outfit at the tintype shop. “Not that anybody’ll be able to tell
what color it is.”

He watched her shimmy the outfit over her blouse and
shorts, then put her hair up with the pins provided and slide a
large feather into it. Instant hard-on. Eric loved undressing her,
seeing her bare body, but it was when she dressed provocatively
that he could barely resist her. The painting. The
Maxim
and
Esquire
covers. When he’d dressed her three weeks ago.

That costume had him straining against his fly—and
she was fully clothed underneath it!

He chose the piano player costume and they posed for
the camera in classic cheesy Americana nostalgia: he sitting on a
chair and her standing beside him, her knee up, her booted foot on
the chair between his legs.

“Hold on,” Vanessa said abruptly and put her foot
down on the floor. In front of the line of people behind them, she
ripped open Eric’s fly and pulled out part of his shirttail, then
rumpled his costume a bit more. She took the bowler hat off him,
mussed his hair—

—and all the while the people in the line behind
them began to hoot.

Eric rolled his eyes when she chuckled.

“Okay,” she muttered as she arranged herself on his
knee, spreading her legs wide and hiking her skirt almost to her
torso. She chucked her neckline down until all that gorgeous golden
skin was exposed almost to her nipples, then grasped Eric’s hand
and drew it over her shoulder. “Here you go,” she breathed, sliding
his hand into her bodice until she had it curled around her breast,
her nipple nudging his thumb.

“Uh, Vanessa . . . ”

“I told you I was an exhibitionist,” she whispered
and wiggled her butt against his hard-on. “Play along. You know you
want to.”

The photographer whistled as he waited for Vanessa
to finish, and Eric really didn’t mind so much that she took his
other hand and wrapped it high around the inside of her thigh. She
draped the skirt fabric over his hand and he used the opportunity
to slide it all the way up and inside her shorts and panties. She
gasped and she looked at him, wide-eyed.

Choked when he slipped his fingers up inside her,
but then she regained some measure of composure.

He looked straight back at her and raised an
eyebrow.

Smirked.

The people in line hooted louder.

“Turnabout, et cetera,” he purred, thinking there
were worse kinks than this.

She huffed and grasped his crotch, then looked at
the photographer.

“Ready now.”

The wolf-whistling and hooting crowd had attracted
even more attention and by the time Eric dragged Vanessa out of the
shop, each with their digital “tintypes” in hand, he couldn’t think
of much else but getting inside her.

“Okay, you’ve adequately demonstrated your
willingness to have fun,” he muttered. “Find me a place to fuck you
silly where we won’t get arrested.”

“Oh, no!” Vanessa squealed, laughing as she danced
out of his reach. “Payback is hell,
bad boy
. Weren’t you the
one all proud of your ability to control yourself?”

“Yeah, that was before I found out my girlfriend was
about to come in the middle of an amusement park while twenty
people watched me finger-fuck her.”

She stilled and her smile melted a little.

Oh, shit.

She tilted her head a bit. “Girlfriend?” she asked
softly.

Hard-on gone. Just like that. He looked at her. “I’d
like to be able to say that about you, yes,” he answered carefully.
“I thought we covered this out in the parking lot.”

“Oh,” she breathed, as if it hadn’t occurred to her
that if
he
was
her
boyfriend,
she
was
his
girlfriend. “Um . . . ”

“Look, Vanessa,” he said matter-of-factly, “the only
evidence anybody has that you slept with Sebastian is that painting
and he’s not admitting anything. Even if he did, it could be
chalked up to a figment of his imagination. Loads of plausible
deniability. Nobody knows about Piper except me because if they
did, it would’ve been in the tabloids long before he left.

“You’re here, with me, in public. You haven’t made
any effort to hide me and we practically had sex in your dining
room, where anybody could have walked in. Everybody at Whittaker
House knows where I sleep when I’m here,
including
Knox and
Justice
and
Vachel. If I didn’t mean something more to you,
you’d have tucked me away somehow, minimized me to some secret
little tryst the way you did Sebastian and Piper.”

She opened her mouth, but he held up a hand and she
snapped it shut again. “And I don’t want to hear about whatever
gratitude complex you might think I have.”

Vanessa’s expression hardened with irritation. “I
don’t think that.”

“Are you
sure
?”

She stamped her foot. “Eric, I don’t know that boy.
I don’t know what happened to him. Intellectually, I know you’re
him, but . . . not. You—
You
are real. The more time I spend
with you, the less real that boy is and I don’t care about him
anymore. He’s
gone
. He doesn’t matter because he doesn’t
exist and he may never have existed. Maybe it was a dream I had and
can barely remember now.” Eric heard the urgency in her voice,
watched her grand gestures to emphasize her words, and hope
exploded in his chest.

“And I’m not that little girl anymore, either, with
a crush on the big badass of Chouteau High. I’m a woman, spending
time with this, this wonderful man. But it . . . with
you
and
me
—because everything I have is because of you and
everything you have is because of me—it feels different than I
thought it would. It’s just—
Girlfriend
. It’s so . . .
official
. I’ve been a lover and a muse and a friend. I can
maintain my independence. I have never been a girlfriend and I’ve
never been with a man who wanted a girlfriend.”