Page 25 of Daddy's Little Librarian
Or standing in her bathroom upstairs like they had been last night, with his hand still stinging from the swat he’d landed on her skirt-clad backside and her attention raptly fixed on his reflection in the mirror.
She was tripping every single one of his Daddy triggers, and she didn’t even seem to know she was doing it.
In the kitchen where he’d left it, the phone rang, but Kurt made no move to answer it and after only a few shrill cries, it went quiet again. He didn’t care. He was much more intently focused on the way Scotti was rolling her lips together, as if savoring the touch of his mouth upon it.
When her gaze dipped to his lips, even knowing he shouldn’t, he said, “A woman like you, Scotti, should be made to take kiss after kiss, after toe-curling kiss. Until your whole body can’t bear to take another one.”
She shivered.
Were her nipples perked? Were they beaded up against the inside of her shirt, pushing stiffly out against the cloth, reaching toward him in the hopes they might receive a chance touch of his hand?
Don’t look, he told himself. He was torturing himself with a woman he barely knew.
Oh, the devil on his shoulder cooed, but it’s worse than that, isn’t it? You’re not just torturing you; you’re torturing her too.
Somewhere in the bowels of the house, he heard the hard buzz of a dryer go off. Almost at the same time, in the kitchen his phone started ringing again.
“I better get that,” he said, shoving his chair back.
Bursting into awkward laughter that came out just a little too shrill to be normal, she jumped up too. “Yeah, I, uh… I should get that too.”
She grabbed her laundry hamper and all but ran with it downstairs. She only looked back at him one time, but when she did her eyes were huge and hurt and perplexed all at the same time.
What the fuck was he doing?
Pissed at himself, Kurt stalked back to the kitchen. Half expecting the call to be from District Attorney Dickface on a different phone line, he was ready to block that too. But no, it wasn’t an unknown number this time. It was Grams.
“What’s up?” he said, answering on the fifth ring.
“Are you going back to jail?” Grams asked bluntly, without her usual cheery greeting. In fact, she sounded tense and far more serious than he was used to hearing from her.
“No, why would you—”
“Why is a DA calling my house, and why does he want to talk to you?”
Stifling a curse under his breath, Kurt threw an exasperated frown to the ceiling first, and then the floor. He rubbed his eyes. “I ran into Krissy yesterday. He probably wants to tell me the restraining order is still in effect.”
“Which only brings us right back to my original question,” his grandmother insisted. “Are you going back to jail?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Like that stopped them from putting you in prison the first time,” she said, rare notes of bitterness creeping into her voice. “What are you going to do?”
As if there was anything he could do.
“I’m going to get on with my life,” he told her. “I’m allowed to have a job. If Krissy doesn’t want to see me, she can frequent another fast food squid house. I don’t care, but I’m not running from her. And I’m sure as hell not running from DA Dickface.”
“You’re still calling him that?” Grams asked, with a chuckle that made her almost sound back to her normal self.
“He doesn’t deserve to be called anything else,” Kurt said. “And if he thinks for one second a phone call from him is going to make me panic and run, then he doesn’t know me any better now than he did the first time he locked me up.”
Only the guilty ran. Kurt wasn’t guilty, and he didn’t run.
Not from anybody.
Chapter Ten
“Is that him?” Doris O’Conner asked, rising up on tiptoes to her full height of four feet and nine inches. She peeked over the checkout counter at where Kurt was unobtrusively sitting on the floor below Scotti’s desk, reading a book on World War II Japanese submarines. She adjusted her bifocals and squinted to get a better look.
