Page 26 of Echoes in the Storm
I drag my gaze from her mouth, and find her watching me. Her eyes are lazy, her fingers stilled on her bottom lip as she absently pushes at the plump flesh.
Fuck.This woman … She’s got no idea what she’s doing to me right now. Absolutely none.
“Anything I can do around here for you to say thanks for the board?” I shift in my seat, doing my best to subtly rearrange my jeans so the fabric doesn’t choke my dick so hard.
“I’ll think on it.”
For once, the woman appears out of things to say. Is that because of me? I test the theory, leaning back in the seat to stretch my arms, lacing my hands behind my head in a way I know shows off my muscles.
The hand over her mouth drifts to her throat before she snaps out of the trance with a gasp. “Tell you what …” She comes close to tripping over her chair in her hurry to stand, “you wash, I’ll dry. A bit of teamwork to cut the chore in half, huh? I’ve got less than an hour left before I have to be back at the theatre anyway, so the quicker we do this the better.”
Interesting.
I give my arms a flex before dropping them to my sides and rising to my feet. I’d say something further, rile her up a little more, but she’s already in the kitchen with her head in the pantry as she retrieves her cleaning supplies from the cockamamie place she keeps them.
“I really don’t get why you don’t keep them close to the sink, you know, where you use the dishwashing liquid all the time.”
She stills, bent double with that pert little arse poking out toward me. “Really, Duke?” I shift my gaze up her body to her face as she straightens and turns toward me. “Less than twenty-four hours in this house, and I’ve already lost count of how many times you’ve criticised the way I keep it.”
“Observation, is all.”
She dumps the liquid and dishcloth beside the sink, and turns to me, one hand propped on the edge of the counter. “You know, most people have this thing called a filter. It stops them saying stuff that isn’t crucial to the succession of the day, snide little remarks about things that don’t matter like, oh I don’t know”—she taps a finger against her lips—“where somebody keeps their dish washing liquid.”
I lift both hands, walking toward her. “Just trying to make your life easier, is all.”
“Appreciated, but it’s really not necessary.” She steps aside, giving me clearance to set up.
“When is the next show after tonight?” I ask, feeling a change of topic is in order while I wait for the water to run warm.
“Thursday. We only do five a week: Thursday night, two on Friday, and two on Saturday. It amazes me we can manage to pack most of the shows out, considering there aren’t that many people around here.” She chuckles. “But I guess we all like a little escape, right?”
“Yeah.” I dump a healthy dose of liquid into the water and swirl it around to create bubbles. “I guess.”
Except when I escape reality, it’s to a place infinitely more horrible. The kind of landscape that nightmares and horrors are made in.
The kind of landscape that once wasn’t simply a bad dream.
It was my reality—my every day.
My life.
Mariana Harwood ran a shaky hand through her long brown hair and sighed. Six weeks of doing this dance, and it never got any easier. Her fingers snagged in a knot, the brittle ends of her hair reminding her how long it had been since she took a day to look after herself.
Yet she wouldn’t begrudge the reason she hadn’t. Her children were her life, especially after her husband of fifteen years had up and walked out when the kids were still young. Oftentimes, their hugs and whispered words were the only thing that held her together on the toughest days.
Which is why it was only fitting she returned the favour and did everything in her power as a mother to soothe the pain her oldest son was in.
“They let me know that you’re being discharged next week.”
Her baby boy—not that he was much of a baby, or a boy anymore—rolled his head to face her. “Yeah. They said.”
“How do you feel about that, Duke?”
He didn’t reply. He simply shut his eyes and rolled his head to the face away once more.
She had thought receiving the phone call about his injury was the hardest moment in her life. But she’d been wrong. Having somebody tell you in a clinical baritone that your child would be returning home on a medical flight caused pain, sure. But nothing wounded her as deeply as the cold distance that accompanied Duke when they wheeled her boy off that plane.
Gone was the laughing joker she would curse out as he sprung another prank on her while she tried to organise dinner for the family. Gone was a boy she remembered giving his little brother grief because at four years old, Cody didn’t quite have the same level of coordination to jump his BMX as Duke did.