Page 23 of Timeless

Deb, realizing that their moment was over, picked her own dress off the floor along with her undergarments and tossed them into a basket in the corner of the room before she went to one of her drawers and pulled out her dressing gown.

“And you know he doesn’t wantthat,” she added softly.

“Fine. Let’s say her moving back in doesn’t happen,” Harriet replied. “Whatisgoing to happen is that he’s going to be…” She faded out.

Deb closed her eyes at the sound of anger turning intosadness in Harriet’s voice. She moved to her then, kneeling in front of her, and slowly unbuttoned her dress. Harriet didn’t protest. Her hands rested at her sides as if she had no idea what to do with them.

“We’ve put it off for as long as possible, Harriet.”

“I know,” she replied.

“I love you. He loves Jacob. This won’t change anything about either of those two things. Look at Jacob and Delilah: they’re about to be parents, and he and John David are still fine. We are so lucky because JD knows about us and lets us be. I’ll be fat and pregnant for a while, and you won’t want to touch me at all, but–”

“I always want to touch you,” Harriet argued, interrupting her. “Every day of my life, since the moment I met you, I have always wanted to touch you.”

“Tell me, my love,” Deb requested and pushed the dress off Harriet’s shoulders.

“Not just like that. When we were little, I didn’t know anything about that. I only knew that I wanted to hold your hand and sit next to you whenever we were playing. I wanted to touch your hair, too. You always had that braid down your back, and I wanted to tug on it.”

Deb smiled up at her and spread Harriet’s legs.

“When we were about ten or eleven, I wanted to kiss you on the cheek all the time,” Harriet continued.

“I remember. You used to do that in the field.” Deb pulled off Harriet’s undergarments and stared down, licking her lips. “What else?” she asked and leaned in.

“Then, I kissed you, and I only ever wanted to kissyoufrom that moment on. I remember that the first time I tried to kiss you with my tongue, you asked me what I was doing.” Harriet chuckled. “Oh, yes,” she let out breathily when Deb licked her. “We figured out the whole tongue thing, though, didn’t we?”

Deb moaned at the taste of her and gave Harriet a light shove on the stomach to tell her silently to fall back onto the bed. Harriet did, and Deb spread her farther.

“I remember when I saw your breasts for the first time. We were fifteen and swimming in the river. We got in naked, but we didn’t look.” Harriet put her hand on the back of Deb’s head. “Yes, there.”

Deb moaned against her.

“I wanted to see you, to touch you. When the water rose and fell, I could see your breasts, along with your rosy, pink nipples, and I wanted to taste them.” Harriet’s hips lifted and dropped back down. “God, I loved you so much even then. You moved to me, too, and your legs wrapped around my body. I couldn’t see you, but I could feel you everywhere, and I knew I’d never want anyone else, Deb.”

“I never want anyone else, either,” Deb said, looking up and meeting Harriet’s eyes to make sure that she understood what she meant. “Ineverwant anyone else.”

“And when you’re with him?”

“Only because neither of us has a choice,” Deb reminded, and she’d remind her over and over again for the rest of her life if she had to.

“When you’re pregnant,” Harriet began and gave Deb’s head a little push down, causing Deb to smirk and lick her over and over again. “I’ll still want this whenever you do. I’ll want this more than you probably will because Ialwayswant this with you. You could be bigger than this farmhouse, and I will still want you.”

Deb moved her lips into and O shape and began to suck.

“Please show me how much you wantme,” Harriet pled.

Deb nodded and slipped two fingers inside her.

CHAPTER 10

1938

The moment the baby had been born and her mother had told her that it was a boy, Deb had breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been in excruciating pain, so the relief hadn’t lasted all that long, but having her son in her arms had made all that pain to get him there worth it. They’d named him John Paul, which was a combination of his father’s name and his grandfather’s name, her own father, who had been happier that Deb had had a boy because that meant there was a male to carry on the now-joined family farms more than because he had a grandson. She wouldn’t put any kind of pressure on him to be the future of the family, though. John David would when he got older, but that would be years from now, and she had time to worry about that then. Deb was just happy that she’d had a healthy baby and that there hadn’t been any complications with his birth.

“Now, you can get to workin’ on your second one,” her mother had said practically minutes after John Paul, whom they’d decided to call Paul, had been born. “You’ll rest up for a few weeks, of course – that part’s important – but now that you’ve got one, you’ll want to start working on number two. Never can tell what might happen when you only have one.”

“Mama!” she’d yelled at her mother, causing Paul to wake in her arms and start crying.