by Anthology
“That’s not how I roll, Triple C.” His grin went wolfish. “I’ve never seen a boundary yet I didn’t like to push. You might want to let go of your expectations altogether.”
He made that sound like the most delicious, most dangerous prospect imaginable. And Chelsea decided she wanted nothing more than to let him push every single boundary he discovered in her. No matter what happened. No matter what it cost.
She climbed up behind him on the bike, carefully, feeling ungainly and graceless, like a single wrong move might topple the whole thing over, crushing them beneath—
“You’re not going to break it,” he said over his shoulder as she slid into place, feeling off-balance and unsafe, and not in a fun way. “But you’ll fall right off if you don’t hold on.”
“I am holding on.”
She had a death grip on the back of her seat, and she felt foolish sitting there, splayed open behind him and red with uncertainty, for everyone to see.
“You’re missing the point,” he said, and did she imagine there was something gentler in his voice then, winding through her and making it easier to breathe? “Why do you think a man rides a bike?”
“A death wish, presumably,” she snapped back at him, too overwhelmed to be anything but snappish, and maybe slightly hysterical while she was at it. “Also, they’re loud.”
“Sure,” he said, shrugging, and she had the impression of his laughter, though when he shifted in his seat, all she saw was the firm line of his distracting mouth and perfect jaw, and no laughter at all. “But there are other, better reasons.”
He reached back and tugged her arms around his chest, then yanked her close, so she lost her rigid place completely and just… slid into him, the most tender part of her crushed against his behind and her breasts flat against the perfect, smooth wall of his back.
She made a shocked, small little noise, and felt the rumble of his laughter then, radiating through his strong back, his wide shoulders, the smoothly-muscled torso where her hands rested. This is too intimate, she thought, scandalized and vulnerable at once. The powerful machine beneath her, this equally powerful man in front of her, sitting right there between her legs—
“This is one of the best reasons,” he rumbled at her, low and hot, and she could feel his voice almost as well as she could hear it, moving in him and then in her, shaking her apart in an entirely new way. “Hold on tight.”
Then he kicked the bike into gear, and took off, the motorcycle like a gleaming, muscular bullet into the coming dusk, headed out of town in a low, sleek growl.
And Chelsea simply held on tight, the way he’d told her to, and surrendered.
They rode for a long time.
The world narrowed down to the roar of the bike and the wind against her face. The man she clung to, and the heat of his broad, muscled back. As the light started to sneak toward the far off hills, he stopped, high up on one of the Copper Mountain overlooks.
It took Chelsea a moment to come back to earth. To remember herself and peel herself away from him, then climb off the motorcycle so he could, too. She unbuckled her leather helmet and placed it carefully—too carefully—on the seat she’d just abandoned.
She felt exposed and scared—though it was a different kind of scared, she recognized. Not her usual head in the sand version. This was more the I might explode kind, and she didn’t know what to do about it, so she turned away from him and looked out over the familiar stretch of land before her instead, turning red and gold in the light of the setting sun.
“Legend has it that the first settlers here believed there was copper in these mountains because of sunsets like this one,” she heard herself say, though she hardly recognized her own voice, small and reverent, scared and soft. “They thought it was a sign.”
Jasper moved to stand behind her, and she could feel that intense blast of his heat she’d come to depend on during the long ride, looping around and around through the fields and into the hills. It emanated from him, like he was his own furnace, and she felt cold without it.
She thought she might die if he touched her. She knew she’d die if he didn’t. She felt restless, shivery—and the feel of him was still pressed into her, like he’d branded her, all that smooth, male muscle, that heft and power.
Chelsea wished they were still riding. That she was still touching him. That they could have gone on like that forever.
“I stopped here when I was riding through,” he said, his own voice different, like he felt it too. “Almost a year ago. We’d decided to sell the company, and I was trying to figure out what came next.”
“I think a lot of men in your position figure that out on private Caribbean islands,” she said dryly. “Not in rural Montana.”
“If I liked men in my position, I’d probably still be one of them.”
She wanted to look back at him, to gauge the expression on his face, but she was afraid to move. To break this spell, whatever it was.
“Chelsea.” Not Triple C. Not now. Like it meant something, the way he said her name. The way it cut into the twilight that settled around them.
And then he waited.
She knew that’s what he was doing. Just standing there, waiting for her to make the choice. The way he had three times already now. Outside the saloon. At the table. And before she got on his bike.
My choice, she thought fiercely. This is mine.
And so she turned around to look at him, standing there like something she might have conjured up in her head, so impossibly beautiful in the last of the day’s light it made her pulse pound. The reds and golds teased over him, making him that much more compelling, like he was truly that bronze she’d imagined him.
She didn’t care who she was or who she was supposed to be, Chelsea thought then. She simply wanted him, and nothing else mattered.
So she moved closer, stretching up to loop her arms around his neck as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He traced lazy shapes over her upper arms, and the smile he gave her then seemed carved from stone, sharp and hot.
“Is this where the carousing starts?” she asked, amazed that her voice was so husky. Amazed that the sound of it didn’t embarrass her.
She felt like she was alone in the world with this man, and she loved it. She wanted it. Him. Nothing but him—whatever that meant.
“If you think you can handle it.”
“I know I can’t,” she murmured, his mouth so close now, his head bent to hers, his hands moving over her shoulders to sink into her hair and tug her head back. “But I’m a quick learner.”
“Hallelujah,” he muttered, and then he kissed her.
Chelsea had been kissed before, even well, she would have said.
But Jasper was a revelation.
He kissed her the way he’d driven them on his bike, with an ease and a skill that combined into something liquid and powerful, driving her straight out of her head. He took her mouth like it was his, like she was his and always had been, and he tasted like fire and whiskey.
And she wanted. She yearned.
His hands sunk deep in her hair, holding her head right where he wanted it, while he bent her back and commanded her mouth with his own. And she couldn’t seem to get close enough. She couldn’t seem to think. She simply exploded into his hands, pressed herself against his body as close as she could get, lost herself in the wildfire he kicked up so easily, the sweet, hot burn.
He pulled back and muttered something under his breath, then smoothed a hand over her hair, his breath ragged as he studied her face. He frowned at her.
“What the hell was that?”
She didn’t know how she could stand there with his hands on her, kicking up so many brushfires she didn’t think she’d ever put them all out again. She wasn’t sure her legs worked any longer, and it felt like there was champagne in her veins, bubbling everywhere, thick and sweet and enough to make her head spin.
And he was looking at her like she’d stunned him.
Chelsea
thought this might be what it felt like to fly like the eagles that had soared overhead on their ride up here, so bold and free.
“I thought I wasn’t your type,” she said.
That wolfish crook of his lips. “You most definitely are not.”
He traced the ruffled placket of her shirt as if it fascinated him, and her heart hit so hard against her chest she thought it might cripple her, but he only swept that damned finger up and down and back again, as if he didn’t notice how close he was to her breasts or how desperately she wanted his touch—so desperately she felt bright red and bursting with it.
“Well,” she said huffily, as if none of that was happening and he was simply another surly teen slinking into her classroom for detention. “You’re certainly not my type. I prefer the gainfully employed, for one thing. Safe, steady, and sturdy.”
That grin widened. “Sounds like you’re talking about support beams. I think someone needs to mess you up a bit, darlin’, if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for in bed. You’re missing all the fun.”
“I hate mess.”
“Then you shouldn’t kiss like that. It’s distracting.”
“I don’t kiss like anything!” She blinked, considering that. “Do I?”
“You kiss like a very loose woman with a very long night ahead of her,” he told her, and his finger crooked between two of the buttons of her shirt, which she only registered for a scant moment before he yanked her close to him again, plastering her against him, making her moan like the loose woman he’d just described.
Making her wish she was, because maybe then they’d already be naked.
“That’s me,” she lied breathlessly. “I dance on tables and engage in very long, very loose nights at least three times a week. I’m bad to the bone.”
“I like that about you.”
And this time, when he took her mouth, he lifted her up, wrapping her around him and holding her there as if she weighed nothing at all. He pressed her against the unmistakable jut of his arousal, and she shivered, then moved restlessly against him, trying to get closer—trying to do something with that terrible, all-consuming ache that she thought might eat her alive.
Her legs were locked around his waist and his arms were around her, and she felt like she was flying again, like they were still on his bike and this was more noise, more speed, more of that intense rush, ruining her for anything else. She knew it.
She couldn’t seem to care. Or stop.
So it almost hurt her when he did. When he put her back on the ground, very carefully, and then stepped away from her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he gritted out. “Or I swear to god, I’ll take you right here.”
She couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t do exactly that, which must have shown on her face, and he cursed. Then let out a laugh.
“Come on,” he said, gruff and needy. “I’m either taking you home, or I’m taking you to my bed, where I might not let you go for a long time. Your choice, Chelsea. But I’m not doing this on the side of a mountain where anyone could drive by and see us. I’m not an animal.”
“What if I want you to be?” she asked. She didn’t know where it came from. His gaze took on that narrow, hungry gleam, and she felt it turn molten inside of her, promising all manner of dark, delectable things. “What if you make me feel like one?”
“Careful what you wish for,” he rasped out. “Your home or mine, Triple C. Decide.”
But of course, she already had.
Chapter Five
The last time Jasper had brought a woman home, that home had been his absurdly ostentatious mansion in Dallas’s Preston Hollow neighborhood, an enclave of the very rich that he’d aspired to ever since his daddy had driven him through it when he was a kid and told him Flints would never be good enough to live in a place like it.
He’d wasted more time than he cared to think about proving the old man wrong.
The home he brought Chelsea to was a far cry from that monstrosity.
He pushed his way inside the old, ornate door and slapped at the wall switch, aware as the vast space blazed with the sudden light that he hadn’t really thought this through. He didn’t know what this cavernous loft he’d only just started pulling together looked like to anyone else. He only knew what it represented to him.
His dreams, not his father’s. His taste, not the outlandishly expensive opinions of his ex-wife via Dallas’s snootiest interior decorator, who’d made such a point of sniffing over every last hint that Jasper was as uncouth and untutored as suspected. He’d ended up feeling like a bull in a china shop house, unwelcome in his own damned home, and he’d vowed when he left that he’d never subject himself to that again. He’d decided to live up on the top floor of the train depot mostly because of the light. It poured in from all sides, and there were mountains in every direction. It made his heart feel too big for his chest. It felt right.
But that didn’t mean Chelsea would like it.
Jasper really didn’t want to think about how important it was to him that she did.
He stayed quiet as she walked inside. That deliciously frilly shirt of hers was untucked now and her wavy blonde hair scraped at her shoulders, hanging in a tousled mess around her head, and he was lost for a breath or two in the rhythm of her hips, sensual and enticing, as she moved further into the great room.
She stopped, her heels loud against the old floors, and turned in a slow circle.
He wondered how it looked through those Big Sky eyes of hers. The remnants of his old life he’d only just unloaded into the room, having made only a few gestures toward separating it all into a makeshift bedroom, dining area, living room. The standing lamps that stood here and there, making the light more of a golden glow. The big brass bed on the far wall, and the gigantic mirror that he’d bought over the objections of his ex-wife, and had taken when he’d left her that monster of a house and all the fussy, asinine things she’d filled it with. Including a new oil man, he’d heard through the grapevine, which was all she’d ever wanted.
Good riddance, he thought, without the slightest shred of bitterness or rancor, which was one among the many ways he knew he never should have married Marlene in the first place. She could keep her monument to tackiness and the nouveau riche lifestyle she loved so much. Jasper didn’t want any part of it.
What was here in this space was what mattered to him. It was excruciating to discover that Chelsea did, too, this woman who’d shown up out of nowhere this morning and tilted his world in a whole new direction. It was an uncomfortable sensation, but he let it wash through him, and he waited for her verdict.
“I feel like I’m standing in the attic of a very old, very eclectic palace,” she said, her voice a lovely thread of sound in the great space, and when she turned to him, her whole face was lit up and her blue eyes sparkled. “Or some kind of eccentric museum.”
Jasper decided, then and there, that he would keep her.
But first, he thought he might die if he didn’t find a way to taste her. To discover every inch of that body of hers that she hid away in those hideous clothes—but he’d held her in his arms, felt her pressed tight to his back, and he knew better. He knew that what she hid away was far better than what she showed.
If he didn’t get inside her soon, he thought he might rip apart, from the inside out.
He prowled toward her, taking a deep satisfaction in the way her eyes widened in a kind of sensual alarm that told him everything he needed to know about her supposed career as a bad girl. She was backing up, moving away from him, and he bet she didn’t even know it—a bet he won when she backed right into the side of his bed and let out a startled little yelp.
“Oh,” she said.
Breathless and wide-eyed and his, he thought. Utterly his, every delectable inch of her.
“Oh?” He was teasing her as he closed the distance between them, mocking her gently, and he had the pleasure of watching her shiver.
But
she only swallowed, hard and loud, her eyes on him as if she was the one who was mesmerized. God, the things he wanted to do to her.
“I wasn’t kidding about the jeans,” he told her, when he could reach over and start to work on that shirt of hers, those silly ruffles that wound down over the swell of her breasts and her belly beneath.
“I’m not buying something that shows my ass just because you think I should,” she snapped at him, but there was no heat in it, and he knew that was because he was tugging open the shirt and baring her perfect breasts to his view, enough to fill his palms and swelling against a lovely bra in a pale blue shade that made him want, desperately, to know every last one of her secrets.
“I hate your clothes, Triple C,” he whispered, leaning in to deliver each word against the softness of her skin, to feel that exquisite shiver of hers himself.
He pushed the shirt off her shoulders and let her deal with it while he made short work of her belt. He shoved the ill-fitting black mess down from her hips and then sucked in a breath, because she was even better than he’d imagined. He helped her step out of the pants as they pooled around her ankles, and then he kept holding her hand while he eased back so he could look at her.
He was a goner. She was perfect.
All those curves, lovingly held in those scraps of pale blue lace. Her long legs, sweet hips, gently rounded belly. That messy, just-out-of-bed hair that he could still feel slide through his fingers like a rough silk, scented like almonds and cream, all around her lovely face. And that mouth of hers that had made him uncomfortably hard when she’d been dressed like a dour old matron and now, wearing nothing but lingerie and very high heels that were made for his favorite kind of dirty, imaginative sinning—
He hurt.
“Get on the bed,” he ordered her, his voice almost angry with the violence of the need in him, the pounding, relentless grip of it.
“You’re looking at me like I’m a ghost,” she whispered, and he could see everything she felt on her face.