Unbreak Me

by Michelle Hazen

  “Slow down,” LJ gasped, cupping the back of her neck. His biceps bunched and trembled, belying his words when he said, “We don’t have to rush. I don’t want to risk setting off an attack, okay? You listen to my voice and take it as slow and easy as you need, sweetheart.” His dick flexed, sending a trill of pleasure bolting up inside of her.

  She sank down, her scalp tingling at how smoothly they came together, because she knew how much it turned him on to make her wet. She took two inches of him, the stretch of his cock a beautiful kind of pain. Four inches.

  She leaned down and whispered over his lips, “I don’t have to go slow. I know you, LJ Delisle. My body knows you.” She took all of him with one confident jerk of her hips, and he gasped at the jolt of sensation.

  She relaxed, easing around his cock and holding him inside her body until they were both comfortable. Once he exhaled, she squeezed her muscles around his erection in a small, secret caress. His eyelids fluttered, and his mouth opened on an airless sound. Andra bent closer so her nipples would tickle across his chest, laying kisses on both of his high, gorgeous cheekbones. On his temple, where his pulse beat so gratifyingly fast.

  She cupped his cheek in her hand. “I need you deeper. And I need you to hold me.”

  He kissed her, gasping his answer into her mouth. “Yes.”

  He pulled out and turned her onto her side, both of them barely fitting on the narrow couch. She trusted him with her weight as he pulled her back into his chest, pillowing her head on his arm. Her bottom fit neatly into the curve of his hips, and his hand stroked down her bare breasts and over her stomach. He flirted around the edges of where she wanted him, but then moved to clasp her thigh instead.

  “Lift up a little, sweet girl.” When she did, he fit his knee between hers and lifted it up, the hair on his leg teasing her inner thigh. “Ah, God,” he growled. “You got no idea what it does to me when you let me do that.” His cock thrust out between both their legs, and he fisted it in one hand. “I want you to get me all wet.” He teased his erection over her entrance, all her muscles tight to bowing as he moved higher.

  Then his slick cock touched her clit, and she clamped her teeth together.

  “You’re close, aren’t you?” He put the hint of a rock into his hips, rubbing her in tiny little pushes, and she couldn’t . . . she couldn’t—

  She moaned, her body curling forward as waves of sensation bolted through her. LJ’s knee kept her legs pinned open, and he thrust into her, the clasp of her orgasm clamping down on his dick. His hips snapped forward, his erection hitting that deep, secret place that burst white stars behind her eyelids.

  She cried out, and LJ’s hand came over her mouth, muffling the sound.

  “You moan all you want, gorgeous,” his slow drawl said in her ear. “You scream all over my hand. Tell me what I do to you.”

  His hand over her mouth had scared her once before, but now it felt erotic, keeping her ragged breaths a sexy little secret just between them. She kissed his palm.

  When his next thrust hit home, a cry ripped out of her like a begging shout. Tingles raked down the naked front of her body, and his warmth enveloped her back. His arms held her safe, and his cock jolted pleasure through her over and over again until she couldn’t decide if she was coming or he was, if she’d peaked twice or never stopped. Her tongue went dry and her throat raw, and his hand still drank her moans.

  Liquid heat melted through her, and he twitched, the last burst of his release lost in her body. She sank against him, her muscles unclenching into limpness one by one, in perfect contentment.

  Kisses smoothed over her tangled hair, and LJ’s hand moved away from her mouth. His knuckles stroked her cheek. “How do you feel about baking cakes, Andie-girl?”

  She blinked and tried to crank that question through her rusty brain. “Um, why?”

  He nibbled on the back of her neck, rich laughter riding underneath his voice when he said, “Because we owe your employees ten or twelve to make up for the little sound show we gave them.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “Oh shit. I meant to be quiet. You don’t think my dad heard, do you?”

  “Nah, doubt he stuck around. Besides, big dick like mine, no way you could have helped yourself.”

  “You’re terrible.” She laughed. “Never change, okay?”

  “No worries, darlin’. They don’t shrink with age, far as I can tell.” Carefully, he pulled out. “You okay?”

  She scooted up to sitting, glancing around. “I cannot believe we just did it in the tack room. There’s no way to get out of here without everybody knowing what we’ve been doing, and Stacia will be giving us crap for the next twenty years. I really didn’t think this through.”

  “You’re crazy kinky, girl. It’s all I can do to keep up.” LJ reached down and plucked his fallen cowboy hat from the floor, dropping it onto his head with a grin and a languorous stretch of his naked body. “I think you said you wanted me to wear this next time, but you got a little too vigorous for it to stay on.” He linked his hands behind his head and grinned.

  She couldn’t stop giggling, even as she drank in the sight of him. “If you’re going to wear that hat, I’m going to need a bigger couch for our second round.”

  LJ bent his knee so his ankle wasn’t hanging over the end of the couch. “I wouldn’t argue with that for a hot second. Speaking of, why is it they design planes in miniature? Don’t adult-sized people ever fly anyplace?”

  She winced, feeling guilty he’d put himself through that just for her. “I never thought of that. I bet you don’t fit that great in airplane seats, do you?”

  “Still got the imprint of the seat in front of me in my kneecaps. Plus my shoulders were taking up half the spot next to me that was supposed to belong to a nice old lady named Marge. Cost me my mama’s second-best cupcake recipe to get her to stop glaring, and if Mama ever finds out I gave it away, she’ll whup my ass for sure.”

  Andra burst into laughter, starting up all over again every time she pictured him charming a hostile elderly woman with a cupcake recipe.

  When she eventually quieted, there were just the soft sounds of horses in the stalls outside, the scent of hay and sex, and one big, beautiful man—a whole lifetime of unlived years quivering between them like a question.

  “Are you sure we can do this?” she whispered. “Louisiana and Montana, my family and yours, all the . . . everything that comes with that?”

  “I know it’s not perfect, Andra. But nothing is, not even me.” He smiled, so brightly it almost covered the uncertainty in his dark eyes. “What do you think?”

  She lay down next to him and pulled him close so in this moment of all moments, he couldn’t feel alone. She knew the road they had ahead of them. It was bumpy, but it wasn’t impossible. They’d been through so much worse, back before they’d found each other.

  “I think some things are better than perfect.” She smiled back. “And you make me believe in all of them.”

  Epilogue

  Two years later

  LJ kicked the dust off his boots and nodded to his mama, who was sitting on her porch with her purse in her lap. “Going someplace?”

  Mama pursed her lips, like she did when she was trying to hide a smile. “As a matter of fact, I’m headed down to Mona’s.”

  “Want me to walk with you?”

  “I’m perfectly fine and you know it.” She pushed to her feet. “You could have been back in Montana three weeks ago if you didn’t hate the snow so much.”

  It was probably true. Since his paychecks had gotten bigger, she’d been able to cut back her hours at the restaurant, and her lupus was responding well to the extra rest. She didn’t have too many flare-ups these days, but Andra and LJ had gotten spoiled on spending winters in New Orleans even when she was well. The horses they brought with them seemed happier in the warmer temperatures, too.<
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  “Can I help it if I wanted three more weeks with my beautiful mama?” He slung an arm around her shoulders and grinned. “And yeah, snow in Montana’s up to your belt buckle this time of year. I don’t mind skipping that.”

  She hugged him and then stepped back to adjust the collar of his shirt, even though it was both dusty and sweaty from a day of working Lawler horses at his uncle’s ranch.

  “I’m not headed to church, Mama,” he protested, squirming a little.

  “You might want to look nice. Andra’s in there with a surprise,” Mama said in an undertone.

  What kind of surprise required his mother to wait out on the porch?

  He glanced at the house, his pulse perking up. Last year in Montana, Andra had decided she wanted to be more comfortable naked, so they’d cranked the heat and she’d stopped wearing clothes in their cottage for a month.

  It was pretty well his favorite thing that had ever happened.

  “I’d, ah, better go see what it is,” he said, edging away from his mother’s fingers.

  She gave him a stern look. “Don’t you laugh at her now, Lyndon Johnson. What seems funny to one person doesn’t necessarily seem funny to another.”

  “I promise I won’t laugh.” He’d promise most anything right now if it’d get her to turn loose of his collar so he could see about his surprise.

  She patted his shoulder. “Good. Now I’m going to go have a nice, long visit with Mona. And she might want me to stay for dinner.”

  “Okay, have a good time.” He was already halfway up the porch steps, loving his mama more by the second, but his phone rang in his pocket before he made it to the door. He checked the screen and gritted his teeth against a groan when he saw Bill Lawler’s name. What was his luck with getting cock-blocked by parents today?

  But he knew he’d answer, because Bill called him mostly for business matters, and he liked that he’d earned that respect from the older man.

  When he’d first come back to Montana, Bill had swapped hostility for chilly politeness. As they fixed a few miles of fence, that politeness had eased to a working rapport. The first time they’d shod a horse together, Bill had actually cracked a joke—and admitted that LJ could shape a shoe faster than he ever could. He hadn’t thought, years ago when he sat sweating in the guest chair of Bill’s office, that he’d ever be comfortable sharing a beer with the other man. A lot of things had changed since then.

  “Hey, Bill. How’re things back at the ranch?”

  “Fine, good. Except Stacia won’t lay off about that terrible blood pressure diet my idiot doctor told her about. How’s Rose? Did that cough of hers turn into anything more?”

  “No, the doctor said it was nothing. Thanks for asking, though.”

  Ever since Mama had visited Montana last summer, Bill was always checking up on her. She hadn’t been fond of Lawler Ranch. She thought it was a howling wilderness rather than a simple ten-minute drive to town. However, she and Bill got along like they’d been raised in side-by-side cribs.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear she’s doing well, because I’ve got a colt who hates trailers.”

  “Uh-huh.” LJ tried to sound neutral. As much as it gave him a nice, warm feeling to have Andra’s father calling him for help, it wasn’t exactly unusual for a colt to hate a horse trailer.

  “Don’t use that politician voice with me, Delisle. This colt would drive you through two rosaries and halfway to drink, and if I’m wrong, I owe you a bottle of Bushmills.”

  LJ grinned. “Hates ’em a little more than normal, does he? Make it a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  “Well, I’d ship him down to you and call that a thirty-dollar bottle well spent, but I can’t exactly get him in a trailer, now can I?”

  Ah, so he didn’t just need help; he was starting to miss his daughter and was ready for the two of them to start making their way back west. LJ let him off the hook easy, mostly because he wanted to hang up the phone and practice looking surprised for Andra.

  “I think we were planning on heading north for the season soon anyway. Save that colt and that bottle of bourbon for me, and we’ll see you next weekend or so.”

  “Sounds good. Give my daughter a hug for me.”

  LJ glanced at his phone. “I, uh . . . I definitely will.” Man to man, he and Bill got along decently, but it still caught him off guard on the rare occasions when Bill said something approving like that about LJ’s relationship.

  LJ stuck his phone back in his pocket and brushed off thoughts of his boss before he went inside.

  In the back of the house, a door slammed. “Shit! Crap, crap, crap, I’m not ready!”

  He stopped in the midst of toeing off his boots. “Want me to go out and come back in?”

  Andra poked her head out of the front bedroom and scowled at him. “Rose gave it away, didn’t she?”

  “No!” LJ said. Andra raised a skeptical eyebrow. She was wearing eyeliner, which both made her eyes even more beautiful and seemed to indicate that something about tonight was special. LJ decided he liked eyeliner. “Well, she did say very loudly that she was going to Mona’s. Why, was there something to give away?”

  She came out of his mother’s room, one hand still hidden behind the doorframe. She wasn’t naked, but she was wearing a short denim skirt and tooled cowboy boots with turquoise flames up the sides, plus a silky little tank top. That outfit was definitely the next best thing to nothing at all.

  LJ gave her his best smile, trying to coax her a little farther away from the door so he could see what she was hiding. “I really will go out and come back in, and I’ll look real surprised when I do it, too.”

  She shook her head and laughed. “No, it’s okay. I was going to—but it’s fine. Just sit down. And close your eyes.”

  He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat, clasping his hands over his belt, then changing his mind and propping them on his armrests. Just in case this was the kind of surprise she might need to sit on his lap for.

  Andra’s surprises had become a constant in the last two years, one of the things that stayed the same no matter whether they were in Louisiana or Montana. She said she liked surprising him because he gave the most satisfying reactions. Other than the time with the live lobster, he supposed that was probably true.

  The piano bench scraped, and he worked to keep from looking disappointed that she was still so far away. “Any chance I can get a kiss before my surprise?”

  “I—just let me do this, LJ, okay? I didn’t think I’d be this nervous.”

  His eyebrows ticked up a bit. Nervous? When it was just the two of them in the house? He listened sharply for any kind of clue, a little tempted to sneak a peek. But he didn’t have to listen long before he heard the first four chords of “The House of the Rising Sun.”

  His eyes popped open, and Andra grinned at him, her long black hair brushing the curved body of Ty’s acoustic guitar. Her fingers stuttered, but she looked down and picked up the chord progression again, only a little halting.

  “Hot damn.” He draped his wrists over his knees, unable to stop grinning. “I didn’t think there was a thing in the world that could make you any sexier, Andie-girl, but that guitar . . .”

  “Don’t go getting hard over the guitar. It’s Ty’s, and I don’t think he’d appreciate that.”

  She slowed down a touch but managed to keep up the chords even when she was talking, and his chest swelled with pride.

  She beamed at him. “Do you recognize the song?” She sang, “There is a house in New Orleans . . .”

  “I get you,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. How long must it have taken her to practice this, all for him?

  He tried to wait for her to finish, but he was out of his seat two chords before the end. He brushed the long strands of her hair back away from the guitar and kiss
ed her. Slow and languid, because too often these days they ended up with quick pecks on their way past each other. He should take more time to sink into the taste of her like this, their tongues playing together, comfortable and teasing all at once.

  When the guitar started biting into his ribs, he pulled away and kissed the tip of her pert little nose. “I love you, sweet girl. And just so we’re clear, I loved you even before you learned just enough music to make me look good.”

  She exploded with laughter and shoved him away. “Oh, you caught me. This was all about making you feel better about how you play. Especially since Ty has you beat on a guitar even on your best day.”

  He clapped a hand over his heart. “You’re killing me, girl. A man’s ego is a delicate thing, you know.”

  She snorted. “Maybe some men’s, but certainly not yours. Thing’s as big as Texas and twice as tough.”

  He laughed and turned toward the refrigerator. “We ought to have a celebration dinner after that. What are you in the mood for?”

  She caught his hand. “Hold on. There’s more, and . . .” She wet her lips and tugged at his hand. “Maybe just sit here with me for it?”

  Her voice was too small to tease her, so he dropped cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “Sure I will.”

  He pretended to look up her skirt, and she slapped halfheartedly at him, laughing. When he settled down, she carefully placed her fingers on the frets like she’d practiced this song a lot.

  This one was slower. He listened to several chords, nodding along, and when she peeked up at him, he smiled. “It’s nice. Keep playing.”

  Uncertainty flickered in her eyes, and she stopped midsong and started again, watching his face this time. He broadened his grin, hoping that would suffice until he figured out what the hell she was playing.

  The song finished, and he smiled even harder as he reached for her. “Dang, girl. It’s a good thing my mama’s gone, because that was gorgeous. I mean—”