Misadventures of a Curvy Girl (Misadventures #18)(10)

I want her to stay here.

Slow down. You’ve only known her for half an afternoon, and Ben hasn’t even met her yet.

And if Ben doesn’t feel the same as I do…then I’ll have to give up this craving for her, this clenching urge to bring her close. He and I are a package deal and have been since the day I helped him pick up a pile of spilled crayons in kindergarten.

“Ben’s sister sometimes comes to stay with her wife and kids,” I say, “and we have some boots for her here. If you’d like to try them out, they might be better than the shoes you’ve got on.”

Ireland gives me a smile—a real one now, not one of her secretive and slightly unhappy ones. “I’d like that,” she replies.

“Then I’ll let you change,” I say, and then I leave her in the room, closing the solid wood door and resisting the urge to linger like a pervert in the doorway. I don’t need to hear the sounds of fabric rustling over skin to know it will make me hard. I don’t need to hear her small sighs and steps to know I’ll want to hear those sounds every morning for the rest of my life.

So I go downstairs, put out a bowl of food for Greta along with a bowl of leftover chicken for the barn cats, and then I finally text Ben.

You still coming home this afternoon?





Thursdays are one of the days someone else closes the bar down, and Ben and I have a standing…well, not date, really. It’s not like that.

I mean, it’s not not like that either.

Yes.





It’s a terse reply, but it doesn’t bother me—Ben’s been short with words and even shorter with smiles since his first stint in the Korengal Valley. One of the reasons Mackenna left us all those years ago.

There’s someone here from Drew’s company to take pictures. Ireland Mills. She’s staying with us because of the storm.





No reply from Ben, which isn’t surprising. He would consider that text a conveyance of information that doesn’t require a reply, not a lead-up to something bigger.

Which it is.

I like her, Ben.





That’s all I have to say, because when it comes down to it, I’m pretty simple with my words too.

Three dots appear and then disappear and then reappear again. I must have surprised him.

Finally, he answers.

Be there in an hour.





And that’s as much as I’ll get out of him until he arrives, I’m sure.

I put my phone in my back pocket, and then footsteps down the stairs make me turn.

And swallow.

Ireland has toes painted a bright, cute kind of blue, and a toe ring winks off her right foot. I wasn’t expecting these adorable wild-child feet to come out of those fancy office shoes of hers. And then—holy hell—she’s in jeans.

Lots of girls Ireland’s size don’t wear jeans, or at least they don’t wear tight jeans. But Ireland’s got on jeans that hug every delicious line of her body, tight enough that I can see the tempting shape of her groin. And then she finishes coming down the stairs, and my brain sort of goes blank, white and blinded, like after a bright flash of lightning.

She’s not wearing her shirt anymore.

Instead, she’s in this painfully thin camisole thing—maybe what she was wearing underneath her silk shirt to begin with. I can see the lace whorls of her bra through it. I can see the slight shadows where her nipples are.

I can barely breathe. Between the tight jeans and the hardly-even-there camisole, I can visually trace every three-dimensional curve of her. The places where she’s full and soft. The places that would give under my touch, under my body if I covered her frame with mine and slowly entered her.

When I was thirteen, we had to look at old paintings in art class, and lots of them had naked women. But not like the naked women you’d see in the dirty magazines a guy might steal from his old man. The women in these paintings were so womanly, with soft rolls of flesh around their bellies and dimpled asses and thighs. With the coy vees between their legs so plump and inviting. Some of the kids giggled when we looked at the pictures. But me, I couldn’t breathe right, couldn’t stop staring. After I raced home and did my chores for the day, I locked myself in my room and clumsily shoved my hand down my pants until I climaxed in a juvenile mess thinking of those plump pussies with their shyly pouting lips. Those navels buried deep in bellies you knew would be so soft, so giving, and those thighs and upper arms you could grab and grab and grab…

Ever since then, I knew. The way other boys had types—freckled or blond or dark-haired—I had a type too. Stretch marks are my freckles, and dimples and rolls are my hair color. I never worried so much about the why; it seems to me like men never have to defend liking blondes, after all. It’s just my type. It’s just what I like.

And fuck me, Ireland is it. Like every Rubens painting brought to life, with that plump shape between her legs, with her camisole revealing the places where her jeans can’t contain her.

“You okay?” she asks as she finishes descending the stairs, her eyebrows furrowed a little. “You look upset.”

Not upset, I want to growl. Fucking horny.

But I manage not to. I tilt my head toward the kitchen, where a back door leads to a screened-in porch and the spare pair of boots. After I find her some clean socks of mine—which bunch around the ankles they’re so big on her little feet—and we get her into the boots, we head outside. I was so distracted by Ireland’s body that I didn’t notice she brought down her camera with her, but it comes out now as we walk around, with her pointing it at various things and then fiddling with the settings and muttering to herself and pointing it at the same things again. It slows down the tour, but I don’t mind. I like watching her. I like how she looks in boots, silhouetted by distant hills and dark clouds, and I like how Greta plops down into the grass at her feet whenever she stops to mess with her camera. I like how the wind kisses the hair off her shoulders. I like everything about this moment, and if I had a fancy camera of my own, I’d take a picture too.