The Promise(71)

“Okay, well, you’re already doin’ somethin’ for me so I’ll just ask when you’re done, you do somethin’ else for me and find wherever you wrote down that password?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks,” I muttered, making a move to leave.

“Babe?” he called, and I looked back at him.

“What?”

“Come here,” he ordered, still leaning into his arms on the side of my car.

“What, Ben?”

“Come here.”

“As you yourself pointed out, it’s cold. So just tell me…what?”

“Come here.”

I screwed up my eyes. “Seriously?”

He grinned.

“What, Ben?” I asked.

“Francesca, come…here.”

“Oh, all right,” I snapped and stomped around the car, stopping close. “What?” I asked shortly when I got there.

“Come here,” he repeated, having not moved anything but his neck in order to be able to look up at me.

“I am here, Ben,” I pointed out.

“No, baby, you aren’t. You’re there and the here I want before you go back into the house is for you to be here so you can give me your mouth.”

That caused a flutter along with a dip and my chest warming all at once.

But I was me so it was full of attitude when I leaned into him and pressed my mouth to his.

I intended only a lip brush, but without him even moving his hands, he kept me there by touching his tongue to my lips. Naturally, the promise of that was too much not to go after, so my lips opened and his tongue swept inside. I liked that so much my body reacted and I had to put my hand to his side to steady myself.

He released my mouth and said softly, “I’ll finish up here soon and find your password.”

“Thanks, honey,” I whispered, his kiss—the way he demanded it, the way he took it, leaning casually into my car but still managing to be all about me, something I thought was hot—causing all my attitude to leak out of me.

I was still close so I only saw his eyes smile. Therefore, it was likely he only saw mine smile too.

I lifted away and Ben turned back to my car.

I walked to the house thinking that I’d spent weeks freaking out about this, the idea of Ben and me. Torturing myself about it. Wanting it and finding every excuse not to give it to myself.

But having it—the ease of it, the naturalness of it, the excitement of it—now I was wondering why.

* * * * *

I stood in the hall of Benny’s house, watching him in the dining room and feeling him in the dining room.

It was the feel of him that had me rooted to the spot.

And the weird part of that was that the feel of him was calm, quiet.

Benny.

He’d come in from the garage forty-five minutes earlier, washed his hands, and went directly in search of wherever he wrote down the password.

This began the deep state of shock I was currently experiencing.

This was because it had been at least an hour after I’d gone out to the garage to ask for it. Yet he came back, remembered, and started looking right away without me even raising my eyebrows to give him a hint there was something I’d asked him to do and wanted him to do it.

Then he couldn’t find it.

It wasn’t anywhere in his “office,” not the desk, not in the mess of papers shoved what appeared to be randomly in an expanding file, not even in the piles that were definitely randomly piled against one wall.

He then went to the kitchen where he had not one but three drawers that were shoved full of junk that included bits of paper, stubs of bills, even envelopes that should have been thrown out.

It wasn’t there either.

Now he was sorting through the shit in the dining room to find it, so much of it that it might take a year to go through all of it.

I had offered to help, but he told me he remembered what it looked like and I probably wouldn’t be able to spot it, even if I had it in my hand.

And I was in a deep state of shock because Benny was a Bianchi. I’d known him for years and this was not him. This was not any of the Bianchis. Not even Theresa.

The reason why it wasn’t was because he was not pissed. He wasn’t even acting annoyed, frustrated, or the slightest bit impatient.

He’d been searching for a slip of paper with a bunch of digits written on it for forty-five minutes. A slip of paper he, personally, didn’t give a shit about. It was a slip of paper that would help me. He probably wouldn’t need to use it unless his router got screwed up which, if it hadn’t after a year and he used it only for his TV, it probably wouldn’t.

I expected him to give up, tell me to suck it up and use my phone or haul my ass to an Internet café. I even expected him to blow, taking the frustration of his seriously lacking filing system out on me.