by Maisey Yates
So she reached down to the belt of the robe and undid it. Then she let it drop to the floor. And she was standing before him, wearing nothing other than ridiculous shearling boots and a smile.
“Maybe you could stay.” Her voice felt scratchy; she felt scratchy. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear, and the steam filling up the room seemed to swallow her voice.
But she could see his face. She could see the tightness there. The intensity.
“Honey...”
“No. I just... Maybe this is the time to have a conversation, actually. The one that we decided to have later. Because I’m getting warm. I’m very warm.”
“Put your robe back on.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you. I already admitted to that. Why do you think I’m so upset? All the time? About all the women that you bring into the winery, about the fact that my father gave it to you. About the fact that we’re stuck together, but will never actually be together. And that’s why I had to leave. I’m not an idiot, Jericho, I know that you and I are never going to... We’re not going to fall in love and get married. We can hardly stand to be in the same room as each other. But I have wanted you since I understood what that meant. And I don’t know what to do about it. Short of running away and having sex with someone else. That was my game plan. My game plan was to go off and have sex with another man. And that got thwarted. You were the one that picked me up. You’re the one that I’m stuck here with in the snow. And I’m not going to claim that it’s fate. Because I can feel myself twisting every single element of this except for the weather. The blizzard isn’t my fault. But I’m making the choice to go ahead and offer... Me.”
“I...”
“If you’re going to reject me, just don’t do it horribly.”
And then suddenly, she found herself being tugged into his arms, the heat from his body more intense than the heat from the sauna, the roughness of his clothes a shock against her skin. And then his mouth crashed down on hers.
Seven
He was being an idiot. He was being a damned idiot. There were so many women out there in the world that he could sleep with and suffer no consequences for doing so. She was not one of them. She was in fact one of the few women who wasn’t in that number. The only others were his friends’ wives. And then there was Honey. And she was clinging to him like she wanted him. Like she wanted him and needed him. Like he was air.
He’d tried to resist. He’d told himself to.
But she wanted him.
That changed everything.
And she was so damn soft. And he was powerless not to rub his hands up and down her curves. From her rib cage just beneath her breasts, down her slender waist, to cup her ass, which was the most delightful handful he could’ve imagined.
And back up again. She was divine. And sweet. Just like her name suggested.
She might be vinegar when she talked, but when she kissed...
She shivered in his hold, her response to his kisses so intense it floored him. She was trembling with need. And it was... It was intoxicating. And maybe because she was a woman that he shouldn’t want, he wanted her all the more. Maybe that’s what made her skin so soft. Maybe that’s what made her cries of pleasure so sweet. Maybe that was what made her so damned irresistible.
He moved both hands down to her ass and squeezed her tight, pulling her up against him so that she could feel how hard he was. And he knew it was too late. Knew that it was too late for better judgment and smarter decisions. There was no decision to be made. She was naked, she was in his arms and he wanted her.
He lifted her up off the ground, sat down on the wooden bench there in the sauna with her legs parted wide, her thighs on either side of his. He tilted his head back and looked at her, as best he could in the steamy room. Her breasts were small and round, beautiful, her nipples the same color as her name.
Tight and begging for his attention. Her stomach was flat, muscled from all the hard labor that she did, her thighs just the same. And that thatch of curls between her legs... It was all he could have ever asked for.
He gripped her hips, stared at the way his hands looked against her skin, moved them up beneath her breasts and slid his thumb across her nipples. She was beautiful. Delicious. He leaned forward and kissed her, right between her breasts, and she arched.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he said, his voice rough.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “Please don’t stop.”
He lowered his head and sucked one bud into his mouth, flooded with relief. Because all this tension that had existed inside of him had suddenly unwound, tension he had known was there.
The denial that he wanted this. The denial that he wanted her. He did. And there was no denying it or hiding it. He had tried. He had put it down to a few errant moments of looking at her ass, but it was a hell of a lot more than that.
It had been building. And he knew it. It was why he’d been so furious when she said she was going to sleep with someone. It was why he’d been so obsessed when he’d found out that she hadn’t.
Because he was full of this. This deep, dark, forbidden desire for a woman that he knew he wasn’t supposed to touch.
But he was touching her now. Tasting her.
And it was a hell of a thing.
He moved his head from her first breast and then paid equal attention to the other, where she was just as sweet, just as filled with desire for him. She let her head fall back, and a cry of need escaped her mouth.
He didn’t have a condom in here, so it wasn’t going to go all the way. But he could take her there.
He curved his forearms up beneath her knees, pressed his hands to her lower back and lifted her from his lap as he slowly laid her down across the bench, parting her thighs and gazing at all of her feminine beauty.
“Jericho,” she whispered.
She said his name. She said that she wanted him.
This seemed to prove it. Beautifully.
This was insanity. But he was neck-deep in it and feeling fine. Feeling ready to be submersed. He kissed her inner thigh, and she shuddered. Then he lowered his head, flicking his tongue over the source of her pleasure.
She gasped, arching against his mouth.
And she tasted sweet, and he knew that he had overdone it on the references to Honey, but it kept being true.
And he didn’t know how he had ever thought of her as simply Creed and Jackson’s younger sister. She was Honey and herself. And right now, she felt a whole lot like his. Right now, he didn’t want to think of what moment followed this one, where she was so perfectly sweet and aroused for him. Only for him. All for him.
So he kissed her there, and teased her, until she was writhing against him, until she was begging.
Until she was crying out her pleasure, and he could feel it. Deep down inside. He could feel it.
“Jericho,” she gasped.
The scene was all around them, between them. And she sat up. She looked dazed, filled with wonder. Her skin was dewy from the heat and the steam, and he wanted to lick every inch of her. And he had never seen a more beautiful sight.
Forbidden fruit. Pleasure deferred. Whatever you wanted to call it. It was damn sweet.
“Jericho...” And then suddenly she basically flung herself at him, kissing him, touching his chest, and he was so hard it hurt. She settled herself on his lap, the slick, wet heat of her hot against his denim-covered arousal.
He moved his hands over her curves, over her softness. And he knew that he would never get enough. Not of her. Not of this. Ever.
It was a scary thought, considering he shouldn’t even have another bite, let alone gorge himself on the feast like he wanted to.
“I don’t have a condom,” he said.
“I have tons
of condoms,” she said.
“I meant I don’t have a condom in here.”
“Right,” she said. “Oh... Oh. But we should get one.”
“We should go back to the house.”
“To get a condom.”
“Maybe to take a breath,” he said. But he would rather have a condom.
“I don’t want to take a breath.”
And she was looking at him expectantly, and he realized if he stopped now it would be... Well, it would be because of something other than her.
Sure, some of it was because of him. Some of it was because he was the last man who should be taking someone’s virginity. He didn’t have the sensitivity for that. He didn’t have the sensitivity or the emotional... Anything. To be the person who should be handling something like this. But a lot of it was about Creed and Jackson, and at the end of the day, that wasn’t fair. Because Honey was her own person, and the fact that her family seemed dedicated to not treating her like her own person, capable of making her own decisions, not even bothering to check with her before her dad sold the winery... All of that... That was... Well, it wasn’t fair. She deserved to be treated like she knew her own mind.
Right. And that’s the thing that will get you laid.
He wasn’t going to claim he was being altruistic about it. But he was looking at it from a different angle. That was all.
The angle that let him have an orgasm.
But no. It would never just be that. She would never just be that. She was Honey Cooper, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. If he wanted to get laid, he could get laid. But she said she’d always wanted him. She’d said...
Well. You’re a little bit sad.
Because the fact that she’d always wanted him, that meant something to him. This girl, this beautiful woman, who was part of the best family he’d ever known, wanted him. He couldn’t deny that did something to him. Made something inside of him that had previously felt shattered feel fixed. And the fact that he wanted to chase some feeling of redemption in her arms was messed up as hell. The fact that he seemed to believe on some level that the gift of her body was going to wash away a world of hurt... Yeah, well, he had never claimed to be the most emotionally well-balanced person. Quite the opposite. He knew that he was a mess. He’d always known.
The kid who’d never really been a kid. The kid who’d been rejected by his father. Who’d lost his mother. Yeah, he never claimed to be real balanced. So he might as well just embrace it. Because hell, they were snowed in. What else could they do? And he could turn away from it now, but the odds of them resisting were low. Unless they were going to be rescued in the next ten minutes, and the way the snow continued to come down didn’t make it seem likely—well, he might as well just go with it.
So he wrapped her in the robe, scooped her up in his arms, realized that she had never taken those boots off and pushed open the door to the sauna. It was still freezing cold outside. The snow was continuing to dump down in buckets, and he didn’t know how long they would be stuck here.
“This is an extraordinary circumstance,” he said, carrying them both through the snow. “And when we get rescued...”
“Right,” she said. “I get it. Only during the snowstorm.”
“Only during the snowstorm.”
“What if we end up here for Christmas?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“I would like to cross this other bridge first.”
“Seems like a good idea to me.”
He kicked open the door to the cabin, then closed it behind him with his heel. They would need to get a fire going again in the bedroom.
He carried her up the stairs, and she clung to him, her arms around his neck, and her eyes took on a strange, soft look.
“What?”
“Well,” she said. “No one has ever... I mean... No one has ever treated me like this. I had to be tough pretty much this whole time.”
She had been. Tough, mouthy Honey, and everybody did treat her that way. He knew that was so. Even he was guilty of it. But did nobody really treat her with any softness? That was all he wanted to do. Wrap her in furs and make sure she was warm. Well, that was not all he wanted to do, but it was definitely the more gentlemanly thing he wanted to do.
He hadn’t felt compelled to care for anyone in years. He’d been burned out on it. But Honey always seemed so invulnerable. And he knew she wasn’t. That much had become clear on this little trip together.
It brought out tenderness in him he’d thought long gone.
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he just kissed her. He kissed her because she was beautiful. He kissed her because he wanted her to feel that.
He kissed her because there weren’t words to say that he was sorry for all the softness she’d missed out on because her mother had died. Because she had then been surrounded by people who were as wounded and hard and hurt as she was.
That was the truth of it. They had taken him in, but they were all in the same boat. Grieving and wretched and in general some of the least emotionally conversant people around.
And they’d all been there for each other, but clearly something was missing. For her.
Something no one had realized.
He would make it his mission for her to feel it here. For her to feel it this week. Week. You don’t know how long it’s going to be.
No. He didn’t.
Someone could come knocking on the door right now—which he found he really didn’t want—someone could find them in a week. Two weeks. They might be able to get the car out in the next couple of days. They didn’t know.
But right now, it didn’t matter. Right now, he was determined to dedicate everything in his power to making Honey feel all the things that she hadn’t before.
That’s a power trip.
Maybe. Maybe it was a power trip. Because he was a kid who—at the end of the day—felt like he had never really been able to offer much to anyone. He had tried, but his mother had still died. His father hadn’t been there. The Coopers had given to him. And in the end, he felt like, to an extent, he had given back by buying the winery. Except he had still hurt Honey. And that did matter.
Sure, his own success was important. But so was her happiness.
And for the first time, he felt like he might be giving more than he was taking, and that was a pretty good feeling. Even if it was trumped up, all things considered. Since he was also getting sex and it wasn’t like this was a mission of charity.
He was hardly the Mother Teresa of orgasms.
The bedroom was cold, and he laid her out gingerly on the bed and wrapped her up in the furs there.
She burrowed beneath them happily and kept her eyes on him as he began to build the fire.
The urge that he had to suddenly just...give her everything that he could think of... It was almost overpowering. He wanted her to have...every good thing. Every good thing. He got the fire going, nice and big, and when it was done, he straightened. “Okay. So tell me where the condoms are.”
Eight
Honey fought the urge to burrow deeper beneath the covers. She was... She was so desperately aroused, so desperately excited that she could barely breathe. Jericho had kissed her. Well, she had kissed him. After stripping naked. And then he had... Hell. He had kissed her. And places that she hadn’t even got around to fantasizing he might kiss her.
It had been transformative. And now this. This realization of her deepest fantasy. She wanted this man. She wanted this man in ways that defied her experience. That far outstripped anything she’d ever done, anything she’d ever fantasized about in a concrete fashion.
It was real. But it was ephemeral and unformed. A mass of feelings that made her breath quicken and made her heart beat faster.
He was beautiful. She had always thought so.
But it was the way he looked at her. That was what truly left her in awe. That was what made it so she couldn’t think.
Because he wasn’t looking at her like she was just Honey, the same woman that he’d seen every day for the past who knew how many years. He was looking at her like he’d never really seen her before. And that made her feel new. The kind of new that she had wanted. The kind of new that she had believed might be out there for her, but it was better than finding it with a man she had never met before. She had found it with him.
She had found it with him, and she hadn’t been expecting that.
Oh, how she wanted this man, this man who looked at her as if he had never seen her before, all the while he was a man who saw her all the time.
It was the fulfillment of her deepest need. Her deepest fantasy.
He was everything.
But she was nervous. And she found herself shrinking into those furs and that soft mattress.
They had shared this bed last night, but they had kept a healthy amount of space between them. Just a few moments ago in the sauna there had been nothing between them at all. And now...
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said, doing her best to sound emphatic.
It came out with just a little more tremble than she would’ve liked.
“Are you sure?”
“I am absolutely sure. I did say.”
“You can always change your mind.”
In those words, coming from the strongest, hottest man she had ever known, who was essentially sex and cowboy boots, did something to fire up her arousal even more.
He was strong enough to take what he wanted, to do whatever he wanted. He was strong enough to break her if he wanted to, but he didn’t want that. He wanted to use his hands to give her pleasure, and only the pleasure that she wanted.
He was more than any fantasy she’d ever had. And she was so unbearably aware, not of his strength then, but of the way that he kept it leashed.
That was power. And the intensity of it was enough to make her combust.
“I am 100 percent sure that I want to have sex with you, Jericho. I have been 100 percent sure of that for a very long time.”