Secrets in the Stone Read Free Page B

her hold on the hips that kept bucking, afraid that Emma was going to fling herself off and take Rooke down with her. Not only was that not the climax she was hoping for, but her toolbox was open on the floor behind them. She hadn’t even had time to close it when Emma had arrived unexpectedly, proclaiming she only had thirty minutes before cooking class and couldn’t wait another hour for Rooke to make her come. If Emma crashed down on a bunch of hammers and chisels, she was likely to get hurt.
    “Don’t you dare answer that phone,” Emma gasped, twisting her fingers through Rooke’s thick, unruly hair. “I’m going to come any second. You just keep your mouth right on that spot.” She arched her back as Rooke obediently attended to her demands. “God, you are so good at that. I can’t believe…I went…three whole months…without this.”
    The phone stopped ringing, at least Rooke thought it did, but she wasn’t certain because all she could hear was Emma screaming to God or maybe that she was God. She smiled, resting her cheek against the inside of Emma’s thigh. She never tired of hearing Emma’s pleasure, no matter how many times they did this.
    “Oh, honey,” Emma sighed, brushing Rooke’s hair back from her forehead with trembling fingers. “I am going to miss you something fierce when you finally get yourself a girlfriend.”
    Rooke stood, ignoring the cramps in the backs of her thighs, while Emma arranged her skirt. Then she clasped Emma around the waist and helped her down. “What makes you think I’m looking for one?”
    “You might not be looking, but I expect someone will find you.” Emma opened the hair clip at the back of her neck, smoothed the loose chestnut tendrils laced with gray back into order, and reclipped it. She braced her hands on Rooke’s shoulders, leaned up on her tiptoes, and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re too good looking and just plain too damn good every other way to be running around loose. If my ex-husband had been half as talented with any of his body parts as you are, I’d probably still be married to him.”
    “You’ll find another one someday. Maybe even one who knows what to do with his…parts.”
    Emma laughed. “You’ve spoiled me, although I do tend to be drawn to those extra bits by nature. Can’t really imagine why.”
    Rooke grinned and stretched, checking the big metal, plain-faced clock that hung over her workbench. Almost eight. She still had a lot of night left ahead of her to work.
    “I’m keeping you from something, aren’t I?” Emma asked, glancing toward the door to the rear of the garage where Rooke worked. In all the dozens of times they’d trysted in this small front room, she’d never been in the back room.
    “That’s okay,” Rooke said. “There’s plenty of time.”
    The garage had once been used to house heavy machinery, but when a newer, bigger building had been built to accommodate a larger fleet of backhoes and Bobcats to meet the cemetery’s needs, Rooke had claimed for herself the building next to the groundskeeper’s house where her grandfather lived. She’d grown up in the big house next door with him, but by the time she was twenty and this place became available, she was ready to live on her own. In the five years since, she hadn’t changed anything about it, other than finishing the second floor for her living space. The first floor was still just two rooms with concrete floors, rough wood paneling, and an unfinished ceiling with exposed pipes and heating ducts. The small room in the front where she stored most of her tools had a counter along one wall with pegs above for hanging tools and shelves underneath for storage of her bigger items and toolboxes, a potbellied stove in the corner with a small black-and-white TV on a high shelf behind it, and a big overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. She only used the double roll-down doors when she brought in large materials, coming and going through the