We Are Made of Stardust - Peaches Monroe #1 (16 page)

The flirting continued through dinner, with both of us making inappropriate faces and jokes about everything going in our mouths.

As we ate dinner, he moaned and rolled his eyes up, enjoying the forbidden carbohydrates. He was a manly-looking guy, with his square chin and muscled arms, which only made it more funny that he was showing the kind of high-calorie reverence Shayla and I have for the Lemon Meringue Mile-High* at Chloe’s Pie Shack.

*The meringue isn’t a mile high, but it’s damn close. You have to tilt your head sideways to get it in your mouth. Think about
that
lemony goodness for a minute and tell me if your mouth doesn’t water.

“Did you ever work here?” Dalton asked as we were finishing up our last bites.

“No, but my best friend did for a bit. She manages a different restaurant now. Why do you ask?”

“You seemed rather attached to the old tablecloths. The red-checked ones.”

I squirmed in my seat, feeling silly. “My parents took me here for my birthday dinner every year since I turned five. We sat at different tables, but the pictures always turned out the same, because of the decorations.”

Dalton crossed his arms and rested his chin on one hand. “Now I’ve brought this movie here and turned your whole world upside-down.”

“In more ways than one, yes.”

“Are you afraid?”

I gave him a long look, not sure how to answer that.

He cleaned up a bit of sauce on his plate with his thumb and licked it clean.

He explained, “Most people won’t admit they’re scared, but with admitting something comes great peace. For example, I’m scared about the damage this movie is doing to me.”

“You’re doing your own stunts?”

He poured out the last bit of wine evenly between our glasses, looking very serious and sad.

“The damage is emotional, or psychological, I guess. Have you done any acting?”

“Sometimes at the bookstore, I act like I’m not bored senseless when I am.”

“Imagine acting like you’ve just walked away from a horrific car accident, and your small children didn’t survive.”

I imagined Kyle being hurt, and the pain was so strong, it manifested as physical pain in my guts.

“That’s horrible,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t say crap like that or you’ll give me nightmares.”

“That’s what acting is like. You can’t avoid the darkness. You have to embrace it to deliver a believable appearance. If you aren’t suffering, the audience won’t connect.”

“Can’t you just say the words and pretend?”

“That’s pretty much
all
you can do. Sounds simple enough, except there’s a part of your brain that doesn’t know it’s pretend. Your ears hear the words in your voice, and you believe it. Your soul believes it.”

I frowned and played around with the silverware before me.

“You seem to be having fun, though. As Drake, the vampire. You’re always grinning and having a blast.”

“True. But this movie I’m doing is different. It wears on me.”

I glanced up, catching his gaze. “Sucky.”

He blinked, and then his mouth turned up at the corners. “Sucky!” He sat up straight, looking more vital than ever. “I love how you put things in perspective. You have a real gift for stating the obvious, exactly when I need to hear it. You’re right. Embracing a dark role is
sucky
. But it’s also a challenge, and it’s what I desperately wanted, so why the fuck am I complaining?”

I shrugged, returning his smile. “I don’t know why you’re so miserable. It’s like all those carbohydrates sent you over the edge into a shame spiral.”

“Blame it on the pasta,” he said.

“Evil, evil pasta. Can you imagine if we’d ordered the deep-fried ravioli starters? They come with a sour cream dip. The mayor threatened to outlaw them.”

“The horror!” He jumped up from his chair. “You wait here. I’ll be back in a sec.”

I sat alone at the table, carefully folding my cloth napkin into a swan shape. It’s just something I like to do, whether the napkin was originally a swan or not. I find a comfort in folding napkins that doesn’t translate to paper origami, though I don’t know why. Perhaps a fear of paper cuts?

Dalton returned, a white box in his hand. “I got dessert to go.” He stood behind my chair, leaned down, and murmured in my ear. “Actually, this is second dessert, for after the first dessert, which is—”

I twisted around and pressed my finger to his lips. “Don’t say peaches.”

“Are you shushing me?”

Remembering our first fight on my lawn, I yanked my hand back quickly.

“That wasn’t a shush,” I said, backpedaling. “I didn’t say the word
shush
, so it wasn’t one.”

Some of the other people dining in the thinning-out restaurant were staring in our direction, with all the fuss we were making.

Dalton grabbed my hand and hauled me out of there.

Outside, I barely got one breath of cool night air before he seized me and gave me a kiss to take that breath away.

I moaned into his lips, curving my body to nestle with his as my legs turned to something boneless, like Chicken McNuggets.

He pulled back and stared down into my eyes. “You don’t want to go to my trailer,” he stated.

“I don’t? Is it really messy?”

He moved me, pressing my back and butt against the brick wall of DeNirro’s. The brick was still radiating the day’s sunshine, even though we were in darkness, lit only by streetlamps and the headlights of passing cars.

He traced a line down my cheek and the side of my neck.

“I don’t think you’re a big fan of the Airstream.”

“Are you kidding? It combines the best parts of being abducted by aliens with the best parts of being a pioneer, taking the wagon train west and getting dysentery.”

“Something tells me you don’t like camping.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been.”

“How about hotels?” He handed me the dessert box so he could fish something out of his pocket. He dangled a key between us.

I gasped. “Is that for the No-Tell Motel?”

He looked puzzled. “It’s for the Nut Hill Motel.” Pause. “Oh, okay. I hear it now. Anyway, I have a room there. With a bed. And a few dozen tiny little bottles of booze.”

“We can drink from our fists and pretend we’re giants.”

“That's exactly how I usually drink!” He led me to the long black car with the tinted windows. I went for the back door, but he nodded for me to join him up at the front. “Vern’s got the night off. He found some book club thing he wanted to go to, so that means I’m driving.”

“If you’re driving me, does that make you
my
butler?”

We both slid into the leather seats at the front of the car.

“That depends,” he said. “Does your butler do this?”

He leaned over and kissed me while cupping one of my breasts in his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

Even his joking gropes were sexier than other guys’ concentrated foreplay efforts. Dalton had such a casual ease, like there were no wrong moves, and I wondered if the confidence came from his hotness or the other way around. Either way, my runway was wet and ready for him to land his big plane.
Woohoo, down here, Mr. Pilot! Get ready for splashdown!

As he pulled away, I whispered, “What if I’d said no to dinner when you phoned? I’m trying to be charming, and that means I have to say no sometimes.”

“You wouldn’t let me down like that.”

“What am I to you? Just stress relief from a busy day?”

He settled back in the driver’s seat and turned the key to start the car. “I think you cause me more stress than you relieve.”

That made me smile. I don’t know why, but it did.

~

We drove up to Nut Hill and parked in the half-full parking lot of the motel. Dalton pulled a small overnight bag from the trunk of the car, then we held hands as we walked up the steps to the upper level and found our room.

“Woah,” he said, stopping with the door open only an inch. “
Deja Vu.
I feel like we’ve done this before.”

I glanced around nervously, worried about running into someone I knew.

“I’ve never done this before,” I said, and it was true. I’d never been inside one of the units.

“Must have been in a previous life,” he said, with a smile so charming, I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not.

I remembered the things he said to me the night we met and said, “Right. Previous life. Because we’re made of stardust from the same star, and we’re just being reunited again now.”

“So you feel it, too. I should have never left.”

He pushed the door open, then ran in and leaped on the first bed like a flying squirrel. He patted the spot next to him and waggled his eyebrows. The bedspread matched the motel room in that it was mottled, brown, and at least thirty years old.

I kept going, making my way to the bathroom.

I did a sexy striptease as I walked, dropping my clothes on the carpet, with my panties being the final item off before I reached the bathroom door.

A moment later, I was in the shower, hot water spraying down on me from a nozzle that was unlike your typical hotel shower head. I’d never been camping with my family, but we did go on many road trips, always staying in hotels and motels. One of my mother’s favorite things was to write a funny review of every room’s shower. She would have liked this silver beauty, because it actually found that middle ground between soft spittle and tearing your flesh off.

You’d think that a wealthy actor would stay only in the poshest of hotels, with abundant gift baskets and marble surfaces, and I’m sure Dalton Deangelo would have rented such a place if it existed, but Beaverdale was not Paris. Not Paris at all.

He tapped on the door and I invited him into the bathroom.

“Don’t look,” he said. A few seconds later the toilet flushed, momentarily causing a bracing cold spray from the shower head to turn my nipples into Skittles.

“Ah, so you do pee,” I said through the shower curtain, which was mostly white. “You don’t have your butler do that for you.”

“Not yet, but I’m hoping for some advances in technology.” A belt buckle dropped to the floor. “Is there room in that shower for one more?”

I hugged my soapy arms around myself, grinning madly. “Come on in. I could use someone to wash my back.”

His toes entered around the edge of the shower curtain. He had adorable toes, with a few dark hairs on the knuckle of his big toe, and the nails were rounded and smooth as though pedicured.

The rest of the leg followed, and I quickly looked up to his face, so as not to make him feel like a sexy piece of meat. Poor fellow. He was so cute, girls probably objectified him all the time.

“Wash your back, hmm,” he said. “I’m more interested in the front, but maybe if you show me the back, so I can make an informed decision?”

I turned around slowly, hoping the low lighting and streaming water camouflaged the cellulite situation.

I didn’t expect him to grab me in one arm and pull me tight to his body, but that’s what he did, my back squished to his front. He growled in my ear as his free hand roamed down my side, over my hip, across my butt cheek, and then between my cheeks.

With his lips near my ear, he murmured, “Like this?”

The back of me had never felt so good as it pressed up against the front of Dalton’s hard body.

He ran his fingers up and down, moving farther with each stroke, all the way down my coin slot and into my piggy bank.

“Mercy!” I grabbed onto the metal hand rail that had been installed for situations like this.

With hot, soapy, slippery fingers, he continued to explore my body, back and front, top to bottom. Soaking wet had never felt so good, never felt so right.

I turned to face him, and instead of kissing his awaiting lips, I stuck my tongue out and licked along his jaw, from his chin to his beautiful ear. I pulled him close and sucked on his earlobe, drinking warm shower water from his body as divine nourishment.

He gently took my hand and wrapped it around the base of his candy stick, which was upright and sandwiched between us like a third party. A very eager third party.

“Oh, you sweet thing,” he said. “Your hand feels so good. I can’t wait to feel your pussy. And you don’t need to worry about a thing, because the drawer next to the bed is loaded with supplies.”

I stroked the length of his long, thick candy stick, tugging gently on the head and swirling my wet palm across the tip before sliding my fingers back down. “Mamma will take good care of you.”

What? Did I really just refer to myself as Mamma?

And was it just my imagination, or did his dick harden like twenty percent more?

“You’re taking all the hot water,” he said, his eyes closed. “I’m very upset right now, and shivering.” He had a big grin on his face, but he also did have goosebumps visible across his chest and on his arms.

We switched spots and he tipped his head back, washing his hair under the water, his hands up and all his muscles flexing and looking majestic, like a sexy shampoo commercial.

I kept tugging and simply stared in awe as the shower water dribbled down his chiseled face and his perfect chest.

And what a manhood it was, standing at attention like a fence post, and nearly as big. How had I gotten my mouth around it the night before?

(Oh, that’s right. I have a big mouth.)

“I’m objectifying you,” I said.

He wiped the water from his eyes and stared at me with those mesmerizing emeralds.

“Fair’s fair,” he said. “I’ve been objectifying you since the moment you fell into my arms.”

I crossed my arms under my breasts, pointing the nipples up. I had fallen into his arms. And he’d acted like I weighed about half of what I did. Even though…

I bit my lip.

“And you were standing on that stool,” he said, laughing.

“They wouldn’t let me ride the pony,” I blurted out.

“What?”

“In fourth grade. Shayla had a birthday party and all the girls were there, even Chantalle, and Golden, too. The pony’s name was Lionheart, but I couldn’t ride him because I was too big. The man who brought Lionheart was wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and he said if I got on the pony, even just for a minute, it could break his back.”