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As I lifted my hand to knock on Penny’s door I felt nervous, which was ridiculous. This wasn’t a date, it was a business meeting.
I felt incredibly off kilter around her, which wasn’t like me. Usually, it took a lot to rattle me but for some reason every time I saw her I got flustered. I was 38 years old, I was a respected Sheriff, and I had been in the Navy for years.
I wasn’t prone to flustering, except with Penny. Around her it was like I was 16 all over again. When she had yelled at me on the road the other day, it had really bothered me. We had a history together and we had been good friends once upon a time.
When I first found out she had moved back to Diamond Bay, I guess I had assumed we would be friends again. We were both such different people now, shaped by our experiences over the past twenty years, maybe friendship wasn’t in the cards for us anymore.
You’d like to be more than friends with her, my traitorous body reminded me.
She was such a fiery little thing, and for some reason, the more irritated she got with me, the more attracted I was to her. That was new. Usually, I liked my women a little calmer. Since the day I dragged her off her roof she hadn’t been far from my thoughts. I had even started dreaming about her.
Penny came to the door, a cool professional smile on her face. She was wearing faded jeans that hugged her generous curves and a scoop neck tee that highlighted her cleavage. Her lips were shiny again, but other than that she didn’t appear to be wearing any make-up. When she smiled, I noticed tiny laugh lines bracketing her unusual green eyes. She was stunning.
“Come on in,” she told me, moving aside to let me in. “My office is back here.”
I had a brief impression of a tidy living room and kitchen as we moved to her home office at the back of the duplex. Large windows faced out over the yard and with the ocean in the distance, I could see why she chose this to be her office. Like the rest of her house the office was tidy and organized, with no clutter.
Penny gestured at a chair at the side of her desk. She turned one of her two giant monitors towards me so I could see the screen.
“Let me show you what I’ve been working on,” she said, her voice even and professional. Clearly we weren’t going to waste time on small talk.
We spent the next hour talking about the website, Penny asking questions and showing me ideas while I gave her feedback. She showed me examples of other websites she had done for various law enforcement agencies, and I was impressed with her work. I hadn’t really thought we needed a new webpage, but as I looked at other sites I knew that Penny and the mayor were right: we could definitely do better.
I moved my chair closer to hers so I could see better—I hadn’t thought to bring my reading glasses – and she sucked in a startled breath. We were sitting close, but not touching, and I heard the subtle shift in her breathing.
She moved her chair another inch or two away from me as I tried to decide if she was feeling the same thrum of awareness that I was. I couldn’t be imagining it, could I?
I stretched my arm out to point to gesture at something on the screen and then I settled it on the back of Penny’s chair. I felt her soft hair touch my skin as my arm made contact with the back of her shoulders. She stiffened in her chair, and this close I could see the pulse in the base of her neck pounding.
She licked her lips nervously and my eyes traced the movement, remembering the feeling of those lips around my cock all those years ago. Another first for both of us. Her breath was coming in soft pants, and I knew she was as affected as I was. I took a deep breath and smelled a mixture of coconut and something citrus, probably her shampoo.
We’d had great chemistry in high school, but this was something different. The air seemed to still the longer we sat there in silence, and the room suddenly felt oppressively hot despite the cool breeze coming in from the window. My body vibrated from her nearness, and I was already half hard. I had given up trying to focus on the webpage and I knew she had too.
“Penny,” I whispered urgently.
She shot forward in her chair like I had pinched her again and moved to close out her screen before jumping up to stand.
“OK so I’ll get to work on the items we discussed, then reach back out when I have something for you to look at,” Penny said, her tone breathless and nervous.
“Mom! I’m home.” Callie’s voice came from somewhere else in the house, breaking the spell we were under.
“In my office, sweetie,” Penny called back, a soft smile lighting up her face.
I stood up too.
“Well, thanks for coming Sheriff,” Penny said stiffly. “I’ll see you out.”
We both turned as Callie skidded to a halt in the doorway, her curious eyes bouncing between us. “Sorry Mom, I didn’t know you had....company.”
Penny frowned. “He’s not company. Sheriff Erickson is here for a business meeting,” she explained. “I’m working on the city’s website.”
I greeted the girl with a smile. “Hi Callie, how’s school so far?”
In my peripheral vision I noticed Penny inching towards the door as if she was in a hurry to get rid of me.
“It’s going great Sheriff,” Callie answered. “And I’ve got great news. I just got back from cheerleading tryouts.”
She looked at her mom with a huge smile. “I made it! I made the JV squad!”
“Oh sweetie, that’s wonderful,” Penny said happily, rushing over to hug her daughter tightly. They bounced up and down together excitedly. “I’m so happy for you.”
“Congratulations Callie,” I added. “I bet you’ll be a great cheerleader, just like your mom.”
Callie looked between Penny and me with a surprised look. “You were a cheerleader, Mom? You never mentioned that.”
Penny looked uncomfortable. “Oh yeah, I must have forgotten about it.”
“Forgotten?” I asked incredulously. “You were obsessed with cheerleading all four years of high school. You wore your uniform every chance you got. I think you loved cheerleading more than you even loved me.”
I wondered what the deal was that Penny wouldn’t have shared something that important with her daughter.
“That was a million years ago Mitch,” she said uncomfortably. I had the sudden sense that she had spent a lot of time dismissing her accomplishments.
“You’ll have to show me some of your old moves Mom,” Callie said excitedly.
“I don’t know about that Callie, I’d probably pull a muscle and embarrass myself.”
Callie looked confused at her mom’s attitude but recovered quickly. “Sheriff Erickson, would you like to stay for dinner?” she asked, giving me an entreating smile. “We’re having Taco Tuesday. You and Mom can tell me all about when you were in high school and she was a cheerleader.”
Penny rushed to answer for me. “Maybe some other time Callie, the Sheriff is very busy.”
“Actually,” I interrupted. “I just got off work about,” I looked at my watch, “ten minutes ago and I don’t have plans tonight. I would love to stay.”
I looked at Penny and raised my eyebrows in challenge but spoke directly to Callie, “Unless your mom doesn’t want me to stay.”
Penny frowned, knowing she was caught. “Of course, you’re welcome to stay if you want to, Sheriff,” she said grudgingly. “But it won’t be anything fancy.”
“I think you know that I’m not a fancy guy.”
I met her eyes and held them for a long moment before she broke away with a deep sigh. “You didn’t used to be anyway,” she grumbled over her shoulder.
I followed Penny and Callie into the kitchen and the girls put me to work chopping onions while Penny browned and seasoned the ground beef and Callie put out the other toppings. We ate our meal out on the large deck, enjoying the muted sunshine of the warm summer evening. I wasn’t usually particularly comfortable around kids, maybe because I had never really been around kids much, but Penny’s daughter was awesome, interesting, and entertaining.
With Callie as a buffer, our conversation flowed easily. I quizzed Callie about school and her life in Portland and she was full of questions about mine and Penny’s relationship in high school.
It was obvious Callie thought it was romantic, us finding each other again after all these years, and I was wondering if she was hoping to play matchmaker. This was confirmed when Callie jumped to her feet the minute she was finished eating, claiming to have “a butt load of homework” she needed to do.
Penny looked suspicious. “Really Callie? You said you haven’t had any homework all week.”
Callie nodded vigorously but didn’t meet her mom’s eye. “Yeah, I have lots to do. But don’t let me stop the two of you from hanging out for a while.”
Her eyes bounced between us, alight with mischief. “I know you must have a lot of old memories to relive.”
She raced off before Penny could say anything more, leaving us alone. Penny picked at the label of her IPA bottle, then rallied to politely ask a few questions about my time in the Navy and how I’d ended up back in Diamond Bay.
I returned the questions, but she was pretty close lipped, giving very little away other than she was divorced and had been running her web design business since Callie was a baby.
She seemed skilled at turning the conversation away from herself, and I wondered what had happened to make her so taciturn. The Penny I knew in high school could talk the leg off a mule, as my grandmother would say. And did say, specifically about Penny.
We finally lapsed into an awkward silence and Penny got up to clear the table. I grabbed some dishes and followed her in the kitchen, helping her clean up. She didn’t have a dishwasher in her unit, so I washed the dishes while she dried and put them away, despite Penny’s protests that she would handle it herself.
Every time our hands touched passing a dish I would hear Penny’s breath catch. The atmosphere steadily became more and more charged. My body was completely tuned to hers. My heart was racing. I was sporting a semi, and I could see her nipples poking out through her shirt, letting me know that I wasn’t the only one who was aroused by our nearness.
Penny put away the last of the dishes and turned to face me, her eyes flitting around nervously.
“Penny,” I said, waiting until she met my gaze.
“What?”
“This,” I answered, moving in slowly. When she didn’t pull away I touched my lips to hers gently, tasting her. She sighed and I took advantage of it, slipping my lips in between hers and deepening the kiss. Her eyes closed.
It felt like coming home. Kissing teenage Penny had been fun and exciting but adult Penny felt like everything I didn’t know I was missing in my life.
As our tongues explored we moved closer, and I turned her slightly until her hips met the counter and I was able to press my erection firmly into the cradle of those lush hips. I threaded my fingers through the soft silkiness of her hair, angling her head so I could kiss her even deeper.
Meanwhile Penny’s hands moved up and down my back before slipping underneath the waistband of my uniform pants, cupping my ass possessively. Kissing Penny was both familiar and new at the same time. My rules about dating women in town or women with kids went right out of my mind as we kissed for long minutes. I totally lost track of my surroundings, was totally lost in her kiss.
“Hey Mom, is.......oops! Oh wow. I’m so sorry!”
We broke apart guiltily as Callie came barreling into the room. I felt like I had just been busted by our parents, something that had happened a hundred times when we were younger.
“I’ll just go back upstairs,” she said, backing up with a huge smile on her face. “You guys go back to kissing.”
Penny looked as dazed as I felt but composed herself quickly.
“Oh no, Callie, that’s OK. Mitch, I mean Sheriff Erickson, was just leaving. Weren’t you?”
Penny’s eyes implored me not to argue, and I knew that she and I both likely needed some time to process what had just happened, so I nodded in agreement.
“Yes, I do need to go now, Callie, but thanks so much for inviting me to hang out with you guys. Dinner was great.”
Callie nodded, still smiling like finding her mother and I groping each other in the kitchen was the best thing that ever happened to her.
I looked at Penny. “Walk me out?”
Penny followed without arguing, which I took as a victory. I paused with my hand on the front doorknob. “Thanks for dinner Penelope,” I said with a small smile.
She frowned at my use of her full name; she had always hated it when I did that.
I leaned forward and kissed chastely on the forehead. “I’ll see you soon.”
She nodded, still looking dazed.
“Now lock this door behind me.”