Mr. Fix-It by Crystal Hubbard

champagne loosened his tongue, intensifying the slow, sleepy, undiluted ’Bama drawl that Khela could listen to all day. “I’m sorry.” She giggled softly. Savannah… “I’ll bet she was a pageant girl, wasn’t she?”
    He chuckled. “The name gave it away?”
    “Yep. So what was she? Miss Chilton County Peach Blossom? Miss Elkmont Soybean?”
    “She began her career at three when she won Grand Supreme at the Southern Baby Belles and it ended nineteen years later, when she came up third runner-up for Miss Alabama. That’s when she decided it would be best to get hitched, start makin’ babies, and force her husband into her daddy’s cattle business.”
    “At least she told you her plans up front.”
    “Uh uh.” He slowly shook his head. “I didn’t know the master plan until I overheard it at the wedding rehearsal dinner. She and her parents were talking to some of their kin, and I heard them say that Savannah’s people had enough brains and money to take care of us, but that I had good genes to contribute. Our children would be tall, strong and good-looking, and in another generation, you’d never know that ‘lesser’ stock had been a part of their evolution.”
    “That’s gross,” Khela said.
    “I was just a human version of Secretariat to them. Someone to sire good foals. Savannah and I had words about it. She admitted that love wasn’t her motivating factor in accepting my proposal. I called off the wedding, left Alabama before her daddy could load his rifle and I haven’t been back for more than two days at a time since.”
    “So we’re both walking wounded,” she replied.
    “I guess so,” he muttered.
    They sat, silent, watching the bright lights break over the harbor.
    “I’m sorry I used you,” she said softly.
    “I’m sorry I’m so handsome.”
    His remark was just the right thing to break the tension, and they spent the next moment laughing. Carter scooted closer to Khela, putting his feet up on the cocktail table so that his ankle touched hers.
    “If we were characters in one of your books, what would be happening to us at this point in the story?” he asked.
    She shrugged. Looking at her strawberry rather than at Carter, she answered his question. “I suppose what was supposed to happen would have happened already. My heroine would have slipped into the shower with the hero for hot, urgent ‘first sex’ in the tight, steamy confines of the shower stall.”
    Carter inhaled deeply through his nose, his eyebrows rising with the expansion of his chest.
    Khela ran her knuckles along her thighs, unmindful of the way Carter’s eyes followed their path. “The showerhead is on a flexible cord, so they would have had all kinds of fun with that. They would have spent at least fifteen-hundred words learning each other’s tastes, textures and responses,” she went on, “and then he would have surprised her by putting her pleasure first. And he’d know very creative ways to please her. She would respond in kind, of course, probably trying techniques and positions she’d only heard of or read about.”
    Her voice softened, and now she spoke more to herself than to him. “The way he stared at her would almost be enough to bring her to orgasm. She might touch herself while he watched, partly to tease him, partly to let his reaction thrill her even more. When she was ready, she would pull him to her, and their bodies would fit together as though they had been made for each other. She would have found carnal freedom and expression the likes of which she hadn’t before thought herself capable.”
    She shook herself from her reverie and looked up to see Carter staring at her, his forehead creased in rapt attention. “She would make love to this man with her whole self. Without guilt, without regret…without expectation.”
    After a moment of silence in which he was aware of nothing but the contact between his ankle and Khela’s, Carter rattled his words loose. “Would your hero