Tallie opened her mouth, like she was going to interrupt and tell me that maybe I was wrong, maybe this time would do the trick. She didn’t know. She hadn’t been around for all those years. She hadn’t watched the cycle of addiction repeat itself time and again.
I kept going before she could get a word out. “Through it all, Carrie and I were still friends. I was trying to get my hockey career off the ground. She went to college and became a nurse. We’d get together sometimes to lean on each other, and yes, sometimes we ended up in bed. Neither of us wanted anything but the physical in those instances. There was never anything more to it than physical release because of all the frustrations our siblings caused. Our mothers were always trying to get us back together again, but Carrie and I didn’t want that. I wanted my career. She wanted hers. We leaned on each other, and that was that. And then one day, Chantel got pregnant again. That time, she and Kade both made the decision to go to rehab. It wasn’t something they were forced into; it was their choice. We all thought—hoped—it was a signal of them finally being ready to move on with their lives. They stayed clean throughout the pregnancy. Kaylee was born, and everything was looking good. It seemed like they had finally turned the corner and were going to be able to stay clean. For a while. None of us realized they were using again until it was too late. Chantel overdosed. Kade called 9-1-1, but it didn’t matter. She was dead by the time the ambulance arrived. They arrested Kade again, and the Child Protection Division took Kaylee away.”
“To live with Carrie,” Tallie finished for me.
“Not right away, but eventually. And after that, she was busy being a mom to our niece, not to mention grieving for her twin sister. I did what I could to support them both.” I saw a suspicious look come into Tallie’s eyes, and I hurried to curb her reaction before it could fully form. “Not by jumping into her bed. By sending money. By providing what I could. By being a shoulder Carrie could cry on when she needed to, and being a good uncle to Kaylee since her father can’t have anything to do with her. Kade was right about me inviting Carrie to the wedding, but it wasn’t to get her in my bed. It was because she’s part of my family, and I wanted her and Kaylee to be here.”
“Then why didn’t she come?” The cutest frown was taking over Tallie’s features as she tried to process it all. I couldn’t blame her. It was a lot to take in. It was even more to have lived through. Some days, I wished I could forget it all and move on.
Instead of getting up to kiss her frown away, I kept talking. “Because Kade did. She couldn’t bring Kaylee and risk Kade trying to do something stupid to get his daughter back.” Which brought us back to Kade, and all the stupid things he was constantly doing, and the fact that I didn’t want Tallie to be involved in his mess. “Look, I know why you went to see him today. I get that you just wanted to help him. You’ve got a big heart. All he’ll do is trample it, though, and I don’t want to see that happen.”
The thought of her starting to care for my brother, only to see her go through what he’d been putting my family through for years, was enough to steal my breath.
She tried to sip from her empty wineglass, scowled at it, and got up. For a second, I thought she was going to the fridge to refill her glass, but instead she placed it in the sink. “I’m a big girl,” she said slowly, turning to face me again. “I can look after my own heart.”
I’d rather she let me do that. The thought came at me out of nowhere, smacking me like a flyswatter, right in the face. I wanted to look after her heart. I wanted to be the one to protect her from all the shit in the world that kept trying to rob her of her smile. Kade would do all of that and worse if she involved herself in his life.
“So what does that mean?” I asked, my insides clenching in preparation for the worst. “Are you planning to go back to see him?”
“Yes. If he’ll let me.”
Yeah, that was the worst I’d been preparing myself for. She’d decided to care about Kade, when he didn’t even care about himself. It would only bring her pain.
But Tallie had spent her whole life being told not only what to do but when and how to do it. If I insisted on putting myself between her and whatever she’d decided on, I would be shoving her back into the same position she’d finally gotten free of once she’d stepped out from under Lance’s thumb.
The truth was that simply making a decision, choosing for herself what she wanted to do with her time, was a big step toward her being able to stand on her own. I couldn’t take that away from her, even though the thought of her involving herself with Kade made my gut churn in ways I wasn’t ready to explore.
So I bit down on my tongue, stopping myself from telling her she couldn’t do it.
She hitched her hip against the counter, crossing her arms.
That small change in posture lifted her breasts, putting them on display. I forced myself to look up at her face instead of staring at the hint of cleavage peeking out over the top of her blouse.
“You’re not going to tell me I can’t?”
“You said it yourself. You’re a big girl. A grown woman. You can do what you want without me telling you what you can and can’t do, what you should and shouldn’t want.”
She licked her lips, and my eyes followed the path of her tongue. Just like that, I was rock hard. Fucking hell.
“That’s right,” she said. “I can do what I decide. I can ask for what I want.”
There was something dangerous in her tone, a cross between decisiveness and willful intent that could only mean trouble.
“What do you want?” I asked, despite the fact that I knew I shouldn’t ask her anything of the sort. Not right now, while her eyes were turning a dark gold, and her voice was dropping in tone like a sex kitten, and she was looking at me like she wanted to eat me alive.
Because I would let her. I would gladly sit back and allow her to devour me a bite at a time if that was what she wanted to do. That realization scared me, too, because I had never been one to sit back and let someone else take charge, not in any area of my life. I would do it for Tallie, though, if that was what she wanted.
“You swear you’re not in love with Carrie?” she said. “Because I know we’re married, but if you love her—”
“I’m not in love with her. She’s my friend. She’s now the mother of my niece. She’s part of my family.”
Tallie chewed hard on her lower lip, drawing my eye there and making me want to kiss it and make it better. “If I ask you for something, will you give it to me?” she asked tentatively.
“If I can.” I was really afraid I already knew what she was going to ask.
“Will you take me to bed?”
Yeah, that was what I’d been afraid she wanted. She’d had a couple of glasses of wine, but she wasn’t drunk. Maybe a little tipsy but not really. She knew what she was asking me.
And I’d be damned if I wouldn’t give her the whole fucking moon if I could.
“YOU’RE SURE THIS is what you want?” Hunter asked. His voice had gone all rough and scratchy, like the stubble lining his jaw.
I nodded, never taking my eyes off him. It was absolutely what I wanted. Maybe my priorities were all messed up, but even though I’d believed he was in love with Carrie, the whole time he’d spent telling me about the complex relationships he had with her and his brother had left me all kinds of hot and bothered. It was a sickness. Had to be. There was something about his voice that turned me on. That was only one of many reasons I’d been keeping my vibrator in regular use lately.
He got up and came into the kitchen to join me, stopping about a foot away. Close enough to touch, but he didn’t touch me. He leaned back against the bar, assuming a casual pose that was anything but casual, the hand closest to me tightly clenching the countertop. That white-knuckled grip was one of the two signs that he wasn’t as composed as the rest of his body language would have me believe. The other? His dilated pupils and irises that had turned the shade of deep moss instead of their usual silvery sage.
>
“I need to hear you say it,” he said. “I need to hear the words.”
After what he’d told me about Kade and Chantel, I could easily understand that, especially since I’d been making my way through a bottle of wine. I licked my lips again. My mouth was as dry as a summer drought. “Yes,” I finally croaked out. “I’m sure.”
“You want to be in my bed? You want my hands on you?”
More than I wanted air. “I want to feel you inside me,” I forced out, and it was the absolute truth. For weeks, I’d been waking up in the middle of the night, hot and wet, having been dreaming of his hands on my skin, his mouth on mine, his cock so deep I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began. Those dreams were only coming more frequently now, seeming more real.
What happens inside that house with the doors closed is your business and yours only. Daddy’s words from the day Hunter and I had first met reverberated inside my head, and I clung to them like they were the only thing tethering me to reality.
Yeah, I was in too deep now to come out of this marriage unscathed somewhere down the line. It didn’t matter. I might end up with a broken heart, but if that came to pass, at least no one would be hurt but me.
Hunter’s eyes bored into me. “Because it’s going to change things between us. You understand that, right?”
I knew that. I was counting on it, actually. That was one of the reasons I wanted to step across the invisible line in the sand that had been separating us. Now that he’d promised me he wasn’t in love with Carrie, no matter what Kade had wanted me to believe about the matter, I chose to trust Hunter. I wanted to let myself have hope that it was true. There was this crazy idea niggling at the back of my head that maybe he could fall for me the way I was falling for him.
It probably wouldn’t work out the way I wanted it to. Heck, it was really just a shot in the dark. But whether Hunter’s want for me was purely physical or if it went to some deeper part of him, I needed his heat melding with mine. There were still things we needed to hash out, and we would. But right now, none of that held any importance, not in the here and now. Nothing mattered except I was desperate for his touch.
“I do,” I finally forced out, despite the hundreds of thousands of flutters racing through my body, like butterfly wings flapping against my insides in an attempt to get free.
He snaked out an arm, wrapping it around my waist and drawing me toward him.
“Oh.” The word left my mouth of its own volition, soft and shocked-sounding. I put my hands on his biceps to steady myself, wincing slightly from the burn and hoping he didn’t notice.
His muscles flexed beneath my touch in time with the slight upturn of his lips. “Oh?” he repeated.
I shook my head, words failing me. Clearly, my brain wasn’t going to cooperate. Chances were it would be better to just take the plunge without checking to see how far I had to fall.
So I went for it. I stretched up on my tiptoes and kissed him, pressing my body to his. He was already hard, the length of his erection straining to be freed from his pants and pulsing against my body. He opened his mouth without any coaxing required on my part, allowing my tongue easy entry to tease and tangle with his.
He gave as good as he got, one hand sliding up to cup the back of my head and angle me just so, the other tugging my blouse free from the waist of my slacks. As soon as he got his hand beneath the fabric, he slid it up my side, exploring my ribs and lifting the shirt until he could reach my breast. The instant he made contact, I arched into him, an instinctive and involuntary reaction.
Hunter settled his palm over me, molding me to him, and I let out a desperate sort of sound into his mouth. My nipples were already hard before he’d touched me at all, just from listening to him speak earlier, and the gentle pressure of his hand sent waves of pleasure straight to my sex. Hooking two fingers underneath the top of the cup, he tugged it down and freed my breast. The skin of his hands was slightly rough, with a few calluses on his thumbs and fingers, like I would expect of a construction worker.
He grazed my nipple with his thumb. It was a rasping sort of touch that made me shudder, and he nipped my lower lip at the same time. I cried out. Not in pain. It was surprise and overwhelming sensation coming together at once and leaving me breathless and my panties wet.
Hunter sucked my lip into his mouth, smiling against me as he suckled. It seemed a little cocky, but he was a man who knew how to deliver what I wanted whether I knew what it was or not, and that only turned me on more. With thumb and forefinger, he rolled my nipple with just enough pressure to have me rising up as far as possible on my toes and fisting my hands in his hair, desperate for more.
The jarring clatter of his phone vibrating across the counter, alerting him to a text message, made us stop.
Briefly.
I remembered all too well the last time we’d been in this kitchen and things were heating up between us only to be interrupted in the same way. No doubt Hunter remembered it even more vividly than I did, since it had been about his brother’s last relapse.
He groaned and looked down at me with glazed eyes, shaking his head. “Not this time.” Then he clasped my good hand and took off down the hall toward his bedroom, moving along at enough of a clip that I nearly stumbled at first in my lust-fogged quest to hurry along behind him.
“But what if it’s—”
“I don’t give a fuck if it’s about Kade,” he bit off, flipping on the lights and spinning around so he could pin me against the wall with his hips pressing into mine.
There wasn’t any need for him to use his body to keep me in place; the scorching look in his eyes was more than enough. As long as he kept staring at me like that, there wasn’t a chance in hell I wanted to be anywhere but where I was, no matter who had been texting or what they wanted.
The fact was, Hunter Fielding mesmerized me. All I could do was stay in the here and now and pray for patience, because I was so turned on by the way he was looking at me—like he wanted to lick me from head to toe and back again—that my orgasm was imminent.
He still had one of my hands trapped in his, and he lifted it up over my head, pressing it back against the wall. The drywall was cool to the touch, a sharp contrast to the way my body was overheating. I half expected steam to start rising between us, dissipating into the air as it lifted away from us.
One at a time, he popped open the buttons of my blouse. My breathing was labored, erratic, the effort of filling my lungs lifting my breasts up to his view.
“So fucking pretty,” he murmured, sliding the sleeve of my blouse down my free arm until it was left hanging from the other shoulder. He lowered his head until his lips were a hairsbreadth away from my straining nipple. “Perfect, even.” The warmth of his breath whispered over my sensitive skin, leaving goose bumps behind.
I shivered.
His eyes shot up to meet mine. “Put your other arm up over your head.”
I did what he said, and he immediately grabbed that wrist and locked it together with the first, keeping both my hands trapped against the wall. It didn’t even occur to me to deny him or do anything other than what he asked of me.
I wanted his mouth on me so badly that my knees went wobbly. My heart was pounding hard enough to double as a rock band’s bass drum. He finally gave me one single swirl of his tongue right around my hardened nub—just enough to wet it. Then he blew a long stream of cool air.
That only made it tighten, straining more than it already had been. In fact, everything within me went taut as a bowstring, ready to snap. It was like my nipple had a direct line to my lady bits.
I wanted to get rid of the rest of my clothes—and his, too—so we could move on with things. But when I tried to lower my arms so I could do just that, he reinforced his grip on my wrists.
“Hunter,” I pleaded.
He flashed his eyes up again, a seductive grin on his lips. “You wanted me to take you to bed… I’m working on it.” He winked.
“So let’s get in be
d.”
“Getting there’s half the fun,” he countered. With his free hand, he palmed my bare breast, pressing and releasing repeatedly. “Maybe more than half. Besides, who says we need a bed? This wall seems good to me.” He angled his hips and slipped a knee between my thighs, lifting it until he was nearly making contact with my clit. I was so ready he could probably make me come like that even with our clothes still in the way. In fact, I decided to test that theory, grinding down on the pressure he was providing. He nipped my lower lip and flicked a finger over my nose. “Patience, young grasshopper.”
“I’m not good at patience.” Not when he barely had to look at me or say a word in order to start a flood in my drawers.
“So I noticed. Christ, you’re so fucking wet I can feel it even like this.”
Keeping my arms where they were, he inched his free hand down to my pants, undoing the fly so he could slip inside. He cupped me with his palm, two fingers gliding easily between my lower lips. He eased one of his fingers inside me.
I shuddered, waves of heat pouring through me. “I’m so close. So close.” The words came out as barely more than an anguished whisper, and even though I wanted to watch him, to see his eyes and the seductive smiles that made me whimper something fierce, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
“So close, huh? So why don’t we get you there?” He added a second finger and pumped them into me, in and out, in and out, and he used the heel of his palm to rub sensuous circles over my clit.
[Tulsa Thunderbirds 01.0] Bury the Hatchet Page 16