Chance of Rain

by Lin, Amber

  He sat back on his heels, his chest sweaty and dirty and gleaming, his jeans taut around straining thighs. “Once upon a time there was a woman.”

  “A princess?” she teased.

  “A naked princess.”

  His voice was light enough that she knew he didn’t expect her to do it. This was all a game, but she wanted to raise the stakes. She wanted to experience his fantasy, whatever it might be.

  Standing up, she drew her sundress over her head and tossed it aside. Next came her panties. Her hair fell out of the braid she’d tried to tame it with, and then it was just her, bared and waiting for his instructions.

  He hadn’t moved at all, but a muscle ticked in his jaw as his gaze roamed her body.

  She grew hot from the appreciative look in his eyes but nervous too. “What does the princess do?”

  “She’s waiting for her prince.” He jerked his head to the grass. “On her hands and knees.”

  A smile curved her lips, but she obeyed, sliding her fingers through slick grass. She heard him approach, but kept her eyes downcast. He was behind her a long time, his admiration almost palpable. Lightly, slowly, he added touch, stroking along her back, down the sides of her legs and up the inside of her thighs. Then there, where she was wet and needy and jolted at his caress.

  His fingers slipped inside her, gently exploring until they found a spot that made her grunt. Very unprincess-like. “Do it again,” she gasped.

  “Bossy,” he said, though he did as she commanded again, then again.

  Even with her hands on the ground, she’d begun to lose her bearings, so focused was she on her pleasure, but the heat of his embrace brought her back.

  “It’s the royal blood.” Her breath was coming hard and fast and almost—she was almost there.

  “I don’t mind,” he murmured against the back of her shoulder. His fingers were working and working, driving her to the brink. “I know what to do with a bossy princess. I’ll give her exactly what she wants.”

  He paused, to drive her mad, withholding now. With his other hand, he reached around and pressed two fingers against her lips. Her mouth opened to him, tasting sweet grass and dirt and man. If this was what a gardener’s apprentice could do, no wonder the princess had chosen him from all the land.

  She sucked him gently, held on to him with her mouth and her sex, grounded in him. It was messy and kinky. How did he know this was what she had always wanted, because it was...oh, God.

  She must have made some sound, some sign of distress, because he soothed her. “Just let go. I’ve got you. Give in to it.”

  Even then he gave her no respite from his fingers in her mouth, controlling her, owning her, and that was exactly how she wanted it. She never wanted a break from this, from him, never wanted to be without his hold on her, never wanted him to walk away again.

  It was too much, the physical sensations like liquid fire, the earthy taste of his skin a catalyst. She was coming on his hand, biting down, she thought distantly, on his fingers, and this was how she wanted to come forever, at his hands, kneeling before him.

  Before she had recovered, he flipped her over. She stared blankly up at the sky, her limbs lax with bliss, only vaguely aware when his head lowered between her legs, but, oh, when he touched his tongue to her swollen skin, she knew then. She jumped, writhed, but whatever mercy had lent him patience in their earlier play was gone now, evaporated with the blistering afternoon sun, sweated out of him. There was only this man, coarse and wild, her prince, crowned by the sun.

  He lapped up the proof of her climax, then bent to produce another. Then another, until all that was left of her was a sore puddle of sated muscles. She gazed up at him from beneath heavy lids. He looked fierce and frantic with need, the sight filling her with a desire to please him however she could—so long as it didn’t require her to move.

  He put his hand beneath her breasts, not putting his weight on her, but firm. Kneeling between her splayed legs, he jerked himself off in rough, cruel tugs, and soon he was spilling onto her belly, her sex, onto the small patch of grass that separated her bottom and his knees. The warm lashes on her skin were like a brand, a sign of his ownership, a mark of pride.

  But all of that was in her head, an endorphin-fueled fantasy. She blinked up at the washed-out sky—now that was real. The storm coming tomorrow was real. Sawyer leaving was real. And she had to remember that. She kept forgetting.

  Chapter Eight

  Sawyer spent that night trying out every position and kinky act his fevered mind could think of, but there was a catch. The more sex he had with Natalie, the more he craved it. A web spun tighter and tighter around him, the venom so sweet he wasn’t sure he’d ever want to leave.

  The morning dawned overcast and drizzly, so for the first day in weeks, he didn’t work in the fields. Far from discouraging him, the brief repast of homemade pancakes and coffee was rejuvenating. He looked out at the monochromatic expanse and felt pride. He looked at Natalie, disheveled and sex-softened in one of his shirts, and felt pride.

  He began to plan. As if approaching a town on the horizon, the lines sharpened and blurred shapes took form. Maybe he really would make a go of this. He’d purchase some new equipment, see if anyone in town was looking for a job.

  And if he did lose the farm, he realized with some surprise, it would feel like a real loss. But even then, he wouldn’t have to leave Dearling. Hell, Joe was supposed to be a farmer, same as him, but he was sheriff now. Sawyer could move into the town proper and become the resident bank robber just to fuck with him. Or maybe Natalie would let him move into her apartment above the diner, a live-in sex slave.

  Point was, he had options.

  After a particularly vigorous round, he collapsed with Natalie onto the sofa. He drowsed, appreciating the slight weight of her and the way she trailed her fingers over his chest.

  A beautiful woman initiating mind-blowing sex—this was the life. Well, he wasn’t sure if wiping down the kitchen counter counted as initiating, but she’d bent over and he’d lost it. Two minutes flat, and her skirt was flipped up, a condom slipped on, and he was balls deep. In three minutes, she was coming, clenching around him and crying out “oh, God,” so he figured she didn’t mind the interruption too much.

  A crack of thunder broke the silence, heralding the climax of the storm as Joe had predicted. He tensed, involuntarily. Natalie’s fingers paused, then resumed their gentle stroking. He was grateful she was willing to ignore his...whatever this was. Because it was goddamned embarrassing.

  He felt shaken, the electricity in the air from the storm amplifying his internal revelations. Worse, his body was interpreting the endorphin rush as the prep time in a mission. The low rumble of thunder became distant fire, closing in on their position. The thickening storm clouds became the cover of night, go time.

  “I never finished my story.” Her soft voice startled him, like a prayer answered, because if she was here, none of it was real. He was home, and he was with her. She was softness and sex, kindness and kinship, and he wondered if she’d ever stop bringing him back.

  “Yes, you did,” he finally managed. “The prince married the princess. Then they had sex on the grass.”

  “That was you and me, not the characters. And that wasn’t the end.”

  Yeah, but he’d felt a little like that, like an unworthy imposter preying upon a princess, a commoner at the altar of a goddess. “Tell me the rest of the story. Tell me how it ends.”

  “Where were we? So the prince takes his magic sword, puts on a disguise and goes to help the king. The battle is fierce, and the prince’s foot is injured, but he does indeed win the day. No one knows who this masked savior was. The next day, the king visits his youngest daughter to invite her and her husband, who is now the gardener, to the big celebration. Instead, he sees the prince through the bushes, wrapping up
his injured foot.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” he murmured, but he could feel himself unraveling, just a bit, settling into the comfort of her voice.

  “Exactly. The king figures out that it was him, and when they are all at the big celebration dinner, he announces that his heir to the throne will not be one of the lords his eldest daughters married, but the gardener who saved the whole kingdom.”

  “And they all lived happily ever after,” he concluded.

  “Almost everyone. The first king, the prince’s father, had recently passed away, leaving no other heir. The guards confessed to setting the prince free and there was a big search for him. The sorcerer had told them where to find him, and so his true identity was revealed.”

  He slanted his eyes open. “So he got both kingdoms?”

  She nodded. “How’s that for a happy ending?”

  It was the predictable end, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. Somehow, though, it annoyed him. As if maybe she was thinking of him as the golden-haired prince in more ways than a little royalty role-play. He’d noticed the similarities: the prince had an asshole father, he’d gone off to fight his own battles and had ended up inheriting the kingdom—assuming this farm could be called such. But there was one crucial difference she didn’t know. The prince had saved that kingdom with his ridiculous magic sword, and Sawyer’s farm was soggy, unfertile land. There was no magic sword—or hoe or tractor—for him. “Yeah, real happy.”

  “You seem upset.”

  “I said it’s happy. It’s just...”

  “Just what?”

  It wasn’t the way things worked. It was fine to tell stories to children, but he knew better...and so did she. “It’s not exactly realistic.”

  “Of course it’s not. That’s what fairy tales are all about. They show us what’s possible.”

  “There’s a sorcerer,” he said dryly.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

  “What’s the moral here? Have long golden hair? Guess I’m shit out of luck, then.”

  When she sat up without meeting his eyes, he thought maybe okay hadn’t really been okay. And when she excused herself and stiffly walked outside, he thought, yeah, he’d fucked up. But he was still strung too tight to follow her.

  When he’d had a minute to cool down and think logically, he could see his mistake. Who complained that a fairy tale had a happy ending? It was like complaining that sex kept resulting in an orgasm. Yeah, she’d said. Okay. He’d been stupid...and vain enough to think that a story told by her grandmother, written hundreds of years ago probably, was about him. Well, it wasn’t. Fictional, golden-haired princes got kingdoms. He got an old farm with no water rights.

  He didn’t care about that. He had never cared about this place. Except when he’d come home and seen those medals hanging on the wall, those horrible “fuck you” medals in a place of honor, he’d...yeah, he’d started to wonder. Wonder if maybe his dad had ignored him for all those years because running a farm on your own was really goddamned hard. Or that perhaps the comments about Sawyer’s lack of strength, intelligence or anything that would make him worthy of the Nolan family name was his twisted way to make him work harder, become better, in preparation for the day when he would run this farm. None of that made the guy a saint, but it did make him a father.

  Sawyer followed Natalie through the back door and saw her standing out away from the house, near the barn. Wind whipped her hair around her face and drew the lines of her body beneath her dress. Her stance was tall and proud, but there was something forlorn about her. He remembered watching her as she slept, the puzzling sense that she was alone in a crowd.

  In his youthful frustration, he had only been able to see his father through the lens of his wants, his needs. With Natalie, it had been the same way. This is what you are to me. His father had demanded too much from him, and she too little. His father was the wrathful sea, driving him farther away from home. She was sweet Penelope, someone to long for. He had left them both, with so much to prove, so damned self-centered he had barely seen past her pretty smile.

  He thought of the courage it had taken to drive to his barn and ask him out when their last real intimacy, in high school, had ended with him callously rejecting her. He thought of the strength it took to run the diner on her own. Now he wondered, Who are you away from me? What do you long for?

  * * *

  Natalie shivered at the wet spray across her face and wondered what she was really waiting for. For the storm to clear up? No, she had been mooning over Sawyer ever since he arrived back in town. And before that? Always waiting, and her self-imposed bonds were starting to chafe.

  Over the rush of wind in her ears, she heard the crunch of gravel that signaled Sawyer’s approach. She didn’t feel ready to confront him, was barely ready to deal with herself, but there was nowhere to hide. And maybe it was time to stop doing that anyway.

  She turned to face him. His expression was inscrutable, his eyes as turbulent as the sky above them.

  “How’s the diner?”

  She blinked. The diner? He said it as casually as asking about the weather. It was fine. A little chilly. No, it sucked horribly, but she didn’t have control over either of them. “It’s good, I guess,” she finally said. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of cleanup to do once I get back. Most of that stuff needed replacing, so now I’ll finally get around to it.”

  “Most of what stuff?”

  “Uh...everything really. The booths, the plateware. The register is the same one Gran bought, and the period key sticks. Let me tell you, when we hire a high school kid to help with the summer rush, there are more than a few wrong checks. One time, this guy was passing through and we charged him over $300 dollars for the Riverboat breakfast plate. And he paid it. No one even realized until I was running the numbers at the end of the month. All I could do by then was refund the whole amount, so really he got a free breakfast out of it.”

  “You’re rambling,” he said, a smile softening his face. Everything about him looked softer. Not soft, quizzical, as if trying to figure something out.

  “I do that.”

  “When you’re nervous,” he finished for her. “You said ‘when we hire,’ but there’s no we, right? It’s your diner. You could have replaced stuff anytime, if it needed it, if you wanted to.”

  A flush heated her cheeks at his scrutiny that felt like criticism. “It can get expensive to do that. We aren’t exactly fine dining.”

  “I guess. But you were in my house a day and it already looks completely different. You made an entire garden out of nothing.”

  “You know that’s not what happened. It was already—”

  “Exactly. You do that, uncover things, make them better. But the diner looks the same as it did twenty years ago. Well, it looks worse, because now it’s been twenty years.”

  The wind was really raging now, lashing at her, and her heart beat heavily in her chest, under attack. Who was he to question the way her Gram had done things? “It’s none of your business.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Just like it’s none of your business what I do with this farm. Maybe I should make up a story about a princess who inherits a royal dining facility.”

  “I didn’t make that up.” So maybe she’d subconsciously picked that one for a reason, but dammit, he had no right to question her. She cared about him. She loved him. She had always loved him, from the day she saw him in the halls of elementary school, far too shy to ever approach him. Then in high school when he had finally looked at her with heat in his eyes and kissed her. Even when he walked away from her, even when she knew he would do it again, she loved him. And she hated it.

  “Fine,” he said. “It was a random story. And you like the color puce and chipped plates and a diner that you never wanted any more than I wanted this farm.”

 
“Stop it.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the storm. “Stop being an ass because you’re freaked out. Stop pushing me away because you don’t know what you want. It’s not my fault you hate this town. It’s not my fault your dad was a coldhearted bastard—and so are you!”

  His eyes flickered ominously. Damn, she hadn’t meant to say that last part at all, but it was true and she couldn’t take it back.

  “You’re right. I don’t really know what I want. I never wanted this farm before and maybe I still don’t. But at least I’m doing something here. At least I’m giving it a shot. What have you been doing in that diner except...existing? Is that what you want?”

  She tasted the mist and realized her mouth hung open. He looked a little shocked too.

  He stepped closer, but it wasn’t threatening. It was almost tender, the look of regret on his face. Almost protective the way his body blocked the wind. His skin was glistening, dripping, and only then did she realize it was raining, that she was crying.

  “I didn’t mean to say that.” But she knew he had.

  “Go to hell,” she said, but she leaned closer, wanting his heat, wanting him to take it back. Was it true? The diner meant everything to her. No, Gram meant everything, but she wasn’t here anymore. Even in Austin, that was only her body. She wasn’t aware, couldn’t think anymore, and it made Natalie hurt so bad.

  “Tell me what you want,” he said, and it sounded like begging.

  And if a man like Sawyer was willing to beg, then she was willing to submit. Maybe it would be better somehow. Maybe it would mean something to him.

  “I want you to stay,” she said haltingly. “I want to wake up every morning in this house with you beside me. I want you to kiss me goodbye on your way out to the farm and again when you come inside to eat the dinner I’ve cooked for you. I want you to pretend to care about the new drapes I’ll make for the kitchen window. I want you to love this town like I do, to be connected to the land like I am. I want you to want this.”