Page 57 of Crave Me
Chapter Nineteen
Chloe
He didn’t give me my shoes back. Instead, when we were halfway through the social meeting room, he’d picked me up and carried me to his car with an arm behind my back and the other under my knees. I’d wrapped my arms around his neck and shoved my face into his chest, smiling when his laugh rumbled against me. In any other club we would have gained attention, in Luminous, no one looked our way.
Much of the car ride back to Simon’s house in River Hills was quiet. We didn’t speak much. I used the time to replay the night in my head. I assumed his quietness was a way for him to allow me to continue thinking everything over.
When I’d first begun thinking and fantasizing of a kinky-sex lifestyle, I’d always imagined spankings and cuffs and the rougher sides of sex. I assumed the rough sex came along with the domination, and they couldn’t be separated. Simon was offering me something completely antithetical. My previous lovers had all been good men. I couldn’t think of a relationship that had ended because the guy cheated, or was a jerk, or too lazy. As the lights of the city disappeared behind us and the glow of the suburb beckoned, guilt rolled through me. A few of them had walked away from me, men I’d truly cared about because I had tried to push them, to manipulate them into controlling me and dominating me in the way I’d believed I needed.
Had I realized all of this sooner, would my crush on Simon have evaporated? Leaving me with a man who would have worshipped me in the way Simon described earlier? Someone who I could be with in public, and not be hidden away? It certainly would have made things easier.
I chewed on that for a moment, and dispelled it. My crush and attraction with Simon went far beyond kinky sex and floggers. I admired him as a man, his intelligence, his profession. Spending eight hours with so many teenagers would have exasperated me before my student teaching days would have ended. He wasn’t just built and muscled and sex on a stick, he was a man with morals and inner strength.
Eventually, his car slowed through a residential street and I turned to him, grinning. “I didn’t picture you as a neighborhood kind of man.”
He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I wanted to be involved in the community where I was teaching and coaching. Plus,” he flashed a grin. In the pale light shining in the car, his cheeks turned pink. “I do want a family someday, and I wanted a safe place to raise them.”
“Well,” I responded, stunned he’d admit it to me. “It makes sense then.”
His answer was a quiet laugh.
He slowed the car and turned onto a short driveway. A simple, mid-century looking home was well lit up with security lights on the front porch and on the sides of the two-car attached garage.
It wasn’t anything particularly special, or overly large and impressive, but knowing that when he bought this house, he was looking at having a family, a wife, made my heart beat faster inside my chest.
He pulled the car to a stop inside the garage and climbed out of his Tahoe. “Let me help you inside.”
I waited for him, and slid into his arms when he reached for me, carrying me into his house like he’d carried me out of Luminous. I focused on his house, and not the fact he was carrying me over the threshold of his house like a new groom would do for his bride.
“Got the house on a foreclosure about three years ago. It needed a lot of work. I’ve done what I can and hired out the rest.”
He sounded nervous, like it was important to him I liked his home.
I pushed down the excited flutters rushing through me as he set me on my feet.
We entered through a short hallway where the laundry room was to one side and a half-bath to the other. The kitchen directly in front of us had definitely been updated with a gray looking wood floor, cream white cabinets and gray and white marbled countertops. Stainless steel appliances gleamed as he flicked on light switches and my jaw dropped as I surveyed the entire open area where the kitchen led to an eating area and then an open living room. Wood beams ran along the length of the vaulted ceilings then down one wall, surrounding a fireplace with slate tiles complimenting the wood coloring along with the floor. The colors were all dark and masculine, the wood shone like he took the time to care for it, yet there was comfort in it, too. Luscious carpeted floors made me want to slide my toes into the thickness. Dining table and furniture that could have been straight out of Pottery Barn filled the space.
“Wow,” I whispered, walking through the living room. Behind me, Simon was silent, but I felt his gaze on me. Everything was warm and inviting. A place where you could envision stockings hung over the fireplace, a wall perfect for displaying family photos, empty now, but primed and ready to be filled. It shouted, “Fill me up with family and laughter and memories,” and the reality he’d planned it this way, clearly wanted it, slammed into my chest.
Was there any possibility, regardless how miniscule, I would be the woman filling the space with photographs and making family memories?
Cassie and my parents gathering at his dining table for a Sunday meal was a non-existent possibility.
“Did you decorate this place by yourself?” I ran a hand along the back of a suede-feeling couch. It was too dark to be beige too light to be chocolate, but it was soft and like everything else I’d seen so far, expensive and high quality.
“My mom helped.”
He was still in the kitchen, near the island. His hands shoved into the pockets of his pants, he stood tense, like he’d been waiting for my judgment.
“Your mom helped you?” I couldn’t stop the smile stretching my lips. This guy. How adorable.
He lifted a hand and ran it over his mouth. “Yeah, well, I’m a bachelor and a guy. I wanted it to look nice, not like a frat house. I saved that for downstairs.”
He winked then and turned toward the fridge. “So, I have, um...water and protein shakes. And wine.”
He was flustered. My heart fluttered in a giddy, schoolgirl sort of way.
“Your mom doesn’t do your grocery shopping for you, too?”
