The Dirty Secret (6 page)

“Where did you learn to do all this stuff?” he asked. “That’s not real Lincrusta in the hallway bathroom, is it? The sculpted flowers? That stuff costs thousands.”

“It’s just paper pulp.” She snagged another mouthful of pizza and left the kitchen again, and he followed her to the utility room to find her bent over, rummaging on a low shelf.

Killian didn’t even make a token attempt to look away from the view. He was being inappropriate, ogling her ass, round and tight and marvelous. He was her supervisor. Or was he her client?

She stood, holding a bag of what looked like laundry lint and a plaster mold.

He took the mold from her hand, and his palm cupped her fingers for the briefest second. She glanced up at him, dark lashes wide. He looked down to the leaf indented in the surface, shiny with a clear coating, a perfect negative to the raised flowers on the washroom wall.

Vessa shooed him back to the kitchen and set the bag on the counter. She scooped a cupful, then ran some water in it, and handed it to him with another spoon. He mixed it obediently.

“My favorite class in school was the faux finish lab. Some of the processes are done by the tools, like a rubber rocker that makes wood grain. Some of it is all in the materials, like crackle lacquer that makes things look chippy and old. A lot of it is technique. Marbling is a bitch to do over large surfaces, and trompe l’oeil, ugh. It’s so fun, but get your shading wrong and instead of a lion’s head fountain, you have a flat yawning vagina with eyes.”

Killian shook his head to clear it of the anatomical visual. Vessa was watching him, and his face grew warm. Did she know what kind of effect she had on him? He felt like he was back in high school, blushing and awkward, not in control of his own body’s reactions.

She pointed to the bowl in his hands. He’d forgotten it. “Pour that into the mold,” she said. “Make it as smooth as possible across the surface.”

He did as he was told, and placed it in the microwave when she gestured. She pressed the defrost setting. He washed the goop from his fingers and fetched his drink. She rinsed a brush, her movements sure, confident.

The silence fell heavy. He sorted through all the unasked questions in his head, hoping to keep her talking about herself in the roundabout way she did. “What’s your favorite decorating technique?” he finally asked.

“Glazing.” She disappeared down the hall yet again and came back with a plastic jug and a small jar of powder. “Working with glaze is like playing with light itself. Transparent washes that cling to the shadows, making everything look rich and three-dimensional. Opaque surface rubs that soften all the glare. Metallics that bounce off the walls.” She poured a milky liquid, thick as paint, from the jug into another plastic cup. “You can tint glaze with anything.”

She tapped the small pot with her finger, like she was sprinkling cinnamon on toast. Killian moved closer. She smelled faintly of balsam and the spiced rum.

“This is the dye on the rug,” she said. “Straight pigment gives a more sheer effect than paint, but a little goes a long way.”

Killian had taken off his socks when he’d come in to feel the wooly rug with his toes. “What color was it originally?”

“White. Well, natural. Undyed.” She poured a drop directly from the jug onto the board she’d just painted, then spread it on two thirds of the wood and blew across the surface.

Killian stared at her mouth, her lips parted and pursed. Was she doing that on purpose? He was half hard from just being in the same room with her.

He downed the rest of his drink. “What about the vine? Was that a stencil?” He pointed to the corner of the dining room, where in lieu of a paper border edging the ceiling, heart-shaped leaves hung from the molding in delicate lines painted in just three tones, like an art print of the Arts and Crafts movement. “It looks like the plant on the patio, only better.”

“Don’t make fun of Jack,” she scolded. “He’s in rehab.”

“Jack?”

“He’s a string-of-hearts plant. Also called a rosary vine. And he was raised by a teenage stoner who probably has more chlorophyll in his skull than brain cells.”

“Did you get it at the hardware store off Route 2?” Killian asked, chuckling.

She nodded, setting her board on the countertop. She pulled a sketch from a stack of books. “He was also quite shy about posing nude.”

“You draw pictures of naked pot-heads?” he teased, wondering how well she actually knew the gardener at the home improvement store.

She glanced up at him with startled eyes, and the sketch slid from her fingers. “No. Not since my sophomore art classes.” She picked up the paper from the floor and handed it to him. The drawn lines of the plant sketch were heavy, deep grooves of graphite on both sides. “This is the template. Can you see the pattern? It’s reversed in places, to look more natural.”

“Yeah. Are the highlights gold leaf?”

She shook her head. “Metallic Sharpie.”

He laughed, drunk on her naked mouth curled with mischief.

She licked her bottom lip and then turned away. She opened the microwave to pull the mold from the rotating plate. “Take it out before it gets too stiff to work with.”

He blinked at the double meaning of her phrase but managed to keep a straight face. The paper leaf peeled out of the plaster in one perfect piece, a newsprint version of the decorations in the bathroom. “Now what?”

“Flatten it out and let it cool, and in a few hours, you can treat it like wood.”

He set it on the counter with the pride of a kid finishing a craft at summer camp.
Look, I made it myself!

Vessa took his empty cup and refreshed both their drinks, sliding from the fridge to the pantry in her socks on the slick kitchen tile. He could have watched her for days. She handed him his drink, her fingertips cool from the ice. Had she touched him deliberately?

She retrieved their board. “It’s still a bit tacky, but it should work.” She brushed it with the green glaze and then immediately wiped it off with a damp paper towel. The tint stayed in the deepest pocks and groves, adding texture and color to the surface.

He leaned in to look, stepping into her personal space. She didn’t move away. He set his hand on her back as he peered over her shoulder, an excuse to touch her. “Better without the middle coat,” she said, not looking up at him, the curve of her cheek tinged with pink.

“Do you want to do it?” he asked.

“Um...” She tensed, eyes wide, and he winced, stepping away.

“I mean the wainscoting. Do you want to finish it? Together?” He shouldn’t take the time. He had a full roll of Bergman’s plans that needed every window respaced before morning, sitting on the passenger seat of his pickup. He’d be up all night, but he didn’t care. He hadn’t had this much fun in ages.

“Sure! The base coat won’t take long to dry at all, if you want to put up the rest of the boards.”

He grabbed his hammer while she poured a larger batch of paint. “Do all set painters study art history, too?” he asked, moving a pile of books out of his way.

“No. That’s my father’s fault,” she said.

Killian squeezed a line from the glue gun onto the back of a board and aligned it with the previous one. She slid a piece of painter’s plastic up to the wall to protect the floor.

“He had custody of me one month every summer, and we’d always go on vacation somewhere. He had no idea what to do with me, so we went to museums.” She brushed the blue paint onto the boards he put up. “Sometimes we’d spend several days in one place seeing the whole thing, like the Smithsonian, and the Modern. And then sometimes we’d just drive to a little town somewhere and find the folk art galleries, or the local painters’ studios.”

“What was your favorite?”

“The Klimt exhibit at the Metropolitan,” she said, her tone wry.

“What’s wrong with Klimt?”

“It’s such a cliché,” she said. “Every freshman art student falls in love with
The Kiss
, or
Judith
, or
Water Serpents
.”

“Why is that?”

“Because it’s usually the first exposure of eroticism as a fine art form. His drawings are pure foreplay, like it’s obvious by the model’s pose that she’s waiting for him to finish drawing her so that they can fuck. Lots of women masturbating.”

“Nice,” he said, trying to be casual. Did she do that? Fuck, he hoped so. He wondered what her face looked like when she came. He set the nails into the board tacked in place by the glue.

“Girls discover him right at the age when they’re figuring out how to do it properly themselves, and that it’s okay and not weird or bad. And everything he did was all so gorgeous and self-indulgent and sexy. Even his landscapes—you know there are two people fucking in that poppy field somewhere—and his portraits—the woman with knowing eyes, even the girl in the innocent white dress, standing with her legs too wide.”

Like you
, Killian didn’t say.
Like this rug I want to lay you down onto, like that bed I want to take you across from behind, like
—He pounded more nails.

“And the way he painted all body types, bony girls and plush ones, older, younger. Every woman can find representation of herself, painted in a way that makes her regal, or sexual, or experienced.”

Vessa could be regal, he supposed, in a modern princess kind of way, with the pearls at her waist. She was definitely sexual, cracking jokes about bathroom fucks and lion vaginas, but she didn’t seem experienced. She was almost skittish, with her quick glances and constant movements, flitting around the house. He finished the boards. She caught up to him and painted over the final slat, moments behind.

“Now the green tint?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “If you paint, it’ll take me no time to do the rag work behind you, and then all that’s left is the chair railing.” She did a dance in her socks, and he felt the same, hyper to see the room fully realized, complete. She slipped on the slick floor, and he caught her, his hand at her waist, and she laughed, her eyes meeting his, then drifting lower. Yeah, she was aware of him, too, staring at his mouth. She licked her bottom lip, a flash of pink tongue, then she skated away, back to the kitchen.

Killian swallowed his frustration and his amusement along with his drink. Donna Edith had told him he would have difficulty keeping his hands off her, and she was right—fuck, she’d practically encouraged him to touch her.

Vessa knelt next to him as he painted, wiping away half the glaze he’d applied, pausing occasionally to rinse her cloth then catching up to him again, bringing her scent of girl and sweet spruce and paint.

“What about you?” she asked, pouring the leftover paint into plastic tubs with lids and labeling each one. “Who was your first favorite architect?”

Killian stepped out and brought the chair railing in from the garage, all the pieces measured, mitered and painted, little numbers marking where each one went. “Frank Lloyd Wright,” he said, sourly. “Like every other architect wannabe on the planet.” He set the first nail and then held a carpenter’s level across the top. “Organic architecture and harmony in the environment, blah, blah, blah.”

Vessa supported the other end. “See? We hate how much we love the cliché. But they exist for a reason.”

He tacked the brads in place then drove them flush with a nail set, while she rolled up the plastic and smoothed the rug back down. They moved a china hutch—an old oak cabinet with green jeweled knobs—against the wall. The room was cool, a muted blue with green and gold details, like a palate cleanser at a fancy meal. Neutral, yet fresh and sparkling, waiting for the next course.

“That’s it,” she said, jumping onto the table to right a crooked link in the chandelier chain. She turned in a circle, examining each wall. “Do you like it?”

“Yeah,” he said, his face, his jaw, his whole body stinging from smiling so hard. He reached up to help her down and she was in his arms, her hands on his shoulders, light and alive and slender and curvy and so, so feminine. Her fingers slid down his upper arms. He bent his neck as her face tilted up, and he paused the briefest second. When she didn’t move away, he kissed her.

She gasped, fingers clutching at him, eyes wide, and he kissed her again, slower, deeper, until her lips parted against his, and she whispered, “Oh.”

He let go of her, forcing his hands to his sides. Her chest rose in a deep breath, then she exhaled. He raked his fingers through his hair, trying to think properly, to break the silence. She hadn’t kissed him back.

“So what now?” he asked. Her eyebrows rose, and he swiped a hand over his idiot mouth. “What room?”
Fuck.
“To work on next?”

“Um. How long will it take to get tile laid in the master bath?” she asked, her toes together, spine straight, like the kiss hadn’t happened. “That’s outside my experience, so it’s got me a little nervous, timing-wise.” Her cheeks were red, and her mouth, too.

Had he fucked things up? Her mouth had been pliant and soft, but she hadn’t reciprocated at all.

“Then let’s do that one next,” he said, matching his tone to hers, ignoring the pulse beating in his palms, the bottom of his feet and his groin. “Give me an idea of what you’d like to do, and I’ll send a job voucher out.”

“Okay. Maybe we could talk about it tomorrow? It’s getting kind of late.” She gestured to the room, avoiding his eyes. “Thank you for your help.”

She was running off. He kicked himself with an imaginary foot for screwing things up. He should have taken what Donna Edith said as a warning, not encouragement.

“Thank
you
. It looks great,” he told Vessa. “And thank you for the pizza, too.” He stood barefoot on the stoop, watching her leave, hoping like hell she would actually come back the next day.

Chapter Six

Master Bathtub

Vessa sat in the empty oval bathtub, eyeing the vanity doors and the commode. She sighed, pulled her hood up over her ears, and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. She picked at a paint drip on the knee of her blue jeans and tried to wake up. Her feet ached from her shift at the restaurant, and her sleep had been tortured by dreams of Killian’s mouth coming down to hers, and she too surprised to kiss him back. She had run back to her apartment, shocked and jittery. She wasn’t ready for this. She was supposed to be building a portfolio, establishing a career and her independence, not getting wrapped up in a guy. Even one with the most enticing mouth, teasing and gentle and why, oh
why
, hadn’t she kissed him back?

“Works a lot better when there’s water in it,” a deep voice said.

She scrambled to her feet, socks sliding on the fiberglass tub. “There’s a big difference in perspective this low.” Her voice came out as rough as she felt.

Killian was dressed for work—black trousers and a tie—his hair mostly tamed. She grabbed at the wall to steady herself as she got out, but he stepped into the tub and sat down.

“Wow,” he said. “The view is pretty dull from here.”

Vessa sat back down, wishing she’d had more caffeine, unable to look away from his mouth. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. They were a tight fit, even for the oversized tub, and her ankles pressed against his.

Her body was ready, so aware of him her skin prickled, even if her brain was not.

“This is awful,” he said. His brows were screwed up in a tragic knot. “I will never again design a tub space with direct frontage to the toilet.”

“You should draw coffeepots, too. Like, directly plumbed in. With motion sensors.”

He smiled, sweet boy, sympathetic. “You know they actually make those?”

“Why don’t we have one?” she asked. Then she cringed as the
we
bounced around the room. Silence filled the bathtub. His eyes met hers and said hi, and hello, and a silvery good morning.

He nudged her foot with his. “About the other night—”

She gripped her knees, an internal alarm going off in her chest. It was too early and she wasn’t ready and she still hadn’t processed his kiss, the first she’d had in two years.

“—I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable,” he continued. “Caught up in the moment, I guess. Rum went to my head. Not that it wasn’t nice, of course.” He looked away, gesturing to the room. “So what are you thinking of doing in here?”

Did he regret kissing her? Vessa forced her brain to follow the abrupt conversation change. She reached over the edge of the tub and pulled her backpack into her lap, rummaging for her sketchbook. She handed him a page. His thumb brushed hers as he took it. “The hex tiles match the ones in the hallway restroom, to give the whole house some continuity.”

“It looks a bit Indian. Like British Empire India.”

“It’s the same time period.”

He tapped the sketch. “What are all these little boxes?”

He’d never lived with a girl, then. Or he’d never shared a bathroom with one. “In any given direction, a woman will have no less than eighty items smaller than her fist in a ten-foot radius from her sink.”

Killian flipped to the next drawing. “What is this one?”

“Just a pipe dream. If we had the time and the money.”

“This is basically a claw foot tub in a tile shower.” His gaze fell from her eyes to her mouth. “I love freestanding tubs.” He knocked the side of the plastic tub-shower insert with his leg. “They’re deeper. I can actually get my entire body submerged.” He looked tired. Not sleepy but weary, long limbs folded up to give her room at the other end of the bathtub. He looked down at the sketch, and then back to her face, his glance pausing on her lips before meeting her eyes.

He still wanted her, and maybe she
was
ready, or maybe it didn’t matter if she was or not. Vessa held his gaze as she kneeled forward and laid her palm on his chest. She leaned in and kissed his mouth. He didn’t move. She kissed him again, lingering before pulling away and settling back in the empty bathtub.

“That sink is just a basin set in a chest of drawers,” she said. She’d drawn one she’d seen at Manny’s, with matching lion’s feet each clutching a ball. “But the modern commode wouldn’t go with it at all.” Two could play the change the subject game.

Killian’s eyes were wide, staring at her. He licked his bottom lip, and then looked down to the drawing pad in his hands. He flipped her notebook to the next blank page. “Would it have to?”

She handed him a pencil, and he graphed in some quick lines, perfect perspective, glancing at her watercolor doodle twice. His whole arm moved as he sketched in two partial walls, separating the commode from the sight lines of the doorway and the tub-shower space. Both were solid four feet up, then glass block to the top of the window. “I was never satisfied with this room.”

“Could you really do it? How much would it cost?”

“It wouldn’t come out of the styling budget,” he said, his focus shifting inward. “And it’s not load-bearing. We wouldn’t even have to put wiring in—”

His gaze fell to hers. Killian reached for her, bending forward, and pushed her hood back. One hand slid into her hair, tilting her face up to his, and he kissed her, carefully, gently, and then not so gently, mouth rough and urgent and consuming. She parted for him and his tongue found hers, a brief taste, heat and morning. She kissed him back, gasping.

“You taste like coffee,” she said.

He pulled away to look at her face, but she wove her fingers into his hair. It was soft as feathers. He made a noise in his throat and kissed her deeper. “Fuck, you taste even better than I dreamed.”

Her nipples hardened in her lace bra, tender skin thrusting at the scratchy fabric of her second-best lingerie, a ribbon rose nestled between the cups. He kissed her cheek, her neck, and she tugged his hair, guiding his mouth back up to hers. She licked the crease down the center of his lower lip, wild for his mouth. She kissed down his jaw, lips catching on stubble he’d missed, kissed down his neck, fingers finding the knot in his tie. He was caffeine, oxygen, the high that would wake her up into herself.

He caught her hands. “I have to get to work.” He kissed each wrist at the base of her palm, and a sigh escaped her mouth with each caress. He let go of her hands and his lips found hers again, tongue and teeth, a sharp nip against her bottom lip. “I don’t want to go,” he said against her skin. “You smell like morning.”

Her breath came out a moan. She pulled away, astonished that he’d taken control of her that easily, that she was this turned on, already swollen and wet in the matching underwear with roses at the hip. He retreated, letting go to lean back in the tub. She followed, pressing up to him, kissing him hard, her tongue in his mouth, wanting more of him, and his low groan sent a spike of desire into her bones.

Killian turned, shifting her over his lap, lips at her earlobe, at her neck. His tongue brushed over her collarbone, fingers following the line of fabric at her neck to the toggle of the zipper, and he drew it down tooth by tooth, giving her every chance to stop him.

“Oh, that’s pretty,” he said. He traced a fingertip over the light blue lace of her bra, then slid under it, circling the tip hidden there while she shivered and squirmed.

He squeezed her nipple, a slow pinch, until her hips bucked. He chuckled, deep in his throat, and spread his hands across her belly, no coy pretenses of where he was going. She didn’t stop him. The zipper to her jeans did not open slowly, and his impatience took her breath. He stroked the scrap of lace hidden between her legs.

“Did you wear these for me?” he whispered in her ear. “Please tell me you wore these for me to find.” And then his hands slid deeper, to the swollen flesh. “Fuck, Vessa, you’re
wet
.”

His fingers curled over the material, stroking her. Her hips flexed with the same slow rhythm he set with his touch.

“How long has it been for you?” he asked, and she didn’t answer, wouldn’t answer, her body already confessing her desperation. “Don’t you touch yourself when you need to? Take care of yourself?”

She writhed against his hand. “Yes.”

“Have you thought of me?” His breath was ragged in her ear, erection straining against her hip. His fingers rubbed her through the satin, delicious hot friction with the perfect pressure.

“Yes,” she said, reveling in the honesty of it, the intimate questions she could answer.

“I’ve thought of you,” he said, his words faster, his fingers faster, tiny circles over swollen flesh. His voice stroked her as much as his hand. “I’m like a teenager, how much I jerk off, thinking of you. Last night I said your name as I came, just thinking about how your lips felt when I kissed you—”

Vessa tensed in his arms as her orgasm crested over her. He watched her face, hand cupping her as she rode it out, his eyes holding her, not letting her look away. Her climax ebbed and she stilled her hips, embarrassed and empty. She’d come too fast, too easy.

But then he kissed her mouth, and she was too boneless to move, the endorphins dancing in her veins.

Killian murmured, “How am I supposed to work, thinking of that all day?” He shifted out from under her and then helped her from the tub, steadying her on her feet. She fixed her jeans and he zipped her hoodie.

“Better?” he asked, like he’d given her an aspirin rather than an orgasm.

She nodded, irritated by the blush on her face. She pulled her hood up over her hair again.

“Say
something
, Vessa. Please.” His tone was tense, almost angry. He turned partially to the side, adjusting his erection in his pants. She wanted to laugh at his modesty, the chivalrous man with the filthy mouth.

“You have very nice hands,” she said. His square fingertips had plucked the pleasure from her better and more easily than she—or anyone else—ever had. “Thank you.”

He shook his head, laughing as he straightened his tie, and ran his fingers through his hair, making it worse. “I really do have to go.”

She nodded again, wanting nothing more than to get back into the tub and sleep, then wake and pet his crazy circus hair and see if all of him was as long and bold as his fingers. And coffee. She wanted coffee, to make sense of this impossible dream.

The architect tapped the drawing. “I’ll talk to Seth about this.”

“Can he put in a coffeepot, too?”

“Bye, Vessa,” he said, backing out of the room.

Her instant response annoyed her, that uncontrolled fluttering clench between her legs when he said her name.

She left the house in search of a coffee shop. The first one she found was an ethnic affair that her mother would love, with Moroccan decor with low couches and a hookah lounge in the back. Behind the bar eddies of coffee dust swirled up from the hopper of beans. The fine powder caught in the sun like a spinning dervish.

Vessa gulped down a cup, scalding her tongue, and opened up the drafting software from her set-design class. She laid in the measurements of the bathroom, adding the new divider that Killian had drawn. The walls sprang up with digitized magic, and she layered in color: brass and copper and rust, the gleaming metals of the magic cappuccino machine—an alchemist’s still, hissing steam and spewing liquid gold.

On the way to the restaurant, she stopped by the printing company detailed in the design packet from Bergman and Bjorn. “You gotta upload all CAD files to our FTP site,” the woman at the counter said. “What’s the address?”

Vessa told her, and the woman showed her how to load the file. A minute later, she came back with printouts of the bathroom from four different perspectives. The pictures looked cool and professional, and Vessa bounced on the balls of her feet as she walked to her car, hyper with caffeine, still feeling the warmth from his hand on her tender places, still hearing his filthy whispers in her ear. She wanted more.

* * *

Another paper clip flew over the partition and hit Killian’s right temple. “Come on,” Bengt said. “I’m starving.”

“You’ve never starved a day in your life.” Killian carried his cold coffee mug back to the break room to refresh it, but the carafe was empty. He set his mug in the microwave, not willing to take the time away from Bergman’s schematics to brew a new pot. If he managed to finish all six designs, he would allow himself to go to the house after work, and maybe she’d be there. He’d driven by the past three evenings, but her car hadn’t been out front. On Thursday, he’d found a bathtub in the garage. She’d painted the claws on the feet gold.

He’d climbed inside, imagining her with him, the way she’d arched in his lap, rising to his touch so quickly, the look of shock in her eyes as she came. He’d been triumphant when he’d found her so wet, that she’d felt it too, this crazy out-of-control thing between them.

He retrieved his coffee, but his good mood fled when he reached his desk. Another addendum had been left on his drafting table, still in its rubber bands. He shoved at the bundled tube of blacklines with a triangle rule until they rolled off the side, landing on the floor with a hollow
thud
.

“Something wrong?” Bengt asked, his tone mild.

“I’ll make you plans for a bondage dungeon if you bring Bergman’s courthouse annex windows to modern building code,” Killian said.

“Fuck that. Let’s go eat.”

“I can’t.” The words came out more tense than he’d intended. He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose and opened the computer program everyone in the entire world used for construction and drafting. Everyone except his boss.

At one o’clock, a paper sack was dropped over his shoulder onto the courthouse plans. The name on the waiting-for slip was FartzRoy, and inside were foam take-out boxes with a hamburger, chicken strips, coleslaw and fries. The fries were still warm.

“Thanks, man,” he said around a mouthful. It was more food than he could eat at one sitting.

Bengt peered at the drawings. “Cripes. Is that a marquis for a horse and buggy?”

“Nope. Just a carport wide enough to house a ‘54 Chrysler Crown Imperial.”