by Anthology
Reserve, uncertainty. Lust and desire. Need. Fear.
“I’m looking at you like I’m about to eat you alive,” he retorted, unable to keep the tension from his voice, the need. “Because I am.”
He watched her shake even as he felt it in her fingers, and then she tugged her hand from his and obeyed him, sliding all of that soft, feminine deliciousness into the center of his brand new, ridiculously large and pretentious bed, that no one had been in but him. Twice.
And then he stripped off his own clothes with laughable speed and all the grace of a very, very lucky teenage boy, before he crawled up and joined her.
He could see her pulse rocket against the delicate skin of her neck. He thought that if her eyes got any wider he might fall in, and he’d never in his life wanted anything more than he wanted to please this woman, so much and so deep she’d be as addicted to him as he was very much afraid he was to her.
He stretched out over her, every sharp intake of breath she took like music to his ears, every restless twist of her hips and shiver that traveled the length of her body, and he was grinning by the time he took her hands and stretched them out above her, wrapping them around the brass rails that formed his headboard.
“Hold on, darlin’,” he murmured, a dark promise he had every intention of keeping. “I expect this is going to get a little bit crazy.”
***
He wasn’t kidding.
Chelsea’s hands dug into the brass headboard while Jasper settled that powerful body of his over hers. Then she gripped it even harder, because he leaned in close, and used his mouth.
That mouth.
He spread a raging, impossible fire everywhere he touched, and he took his sweet time doing it. He tasted the line of her neck, the ridge of her collarbone. He held her breasts in his hands, then licked his way into the hollow between them, making her moan and thrash, yet he made no move to take her bra off. He tested every inch of the belly she’d previously thought was her worst feature, growling out his intensely male approval directly into her skin, so she could feel the curve of his smile pressed there below her navel.
Then he moved even lower, holding her hips in his hands and exploring every inch of what lay between, using his mouth, his jaw, the whole of him, like he really was a wild animal and he was scent-marking her. Tasting her and changing her. Then he learned her thighs, her calves, all the way down to those damned shoes, which he tugged off her feet and admired before tossing them aside.
Crouched down at her feet, his hands on her skin and that dark heat making his hazel eyes gleam gold, she thought he looked like a panther. Something as sleek and menacing and deliciously dangerous as that bike he rode so well.
“Do I get to touch you?” she asked, in a voice that didn’t sound like hers at all. It came from that lick of fire, that dancing need, that coiled in her and became her. Took her over until there was nothing in the whole world but this man. This bed.
This.
“You’ll get your turn,” he said, sounding amused, and that, too, was like a blaze inside of her, making her stomach twist and her breasts seem to swell against the lace of her bra. Making her feel slippery and swollen and needier, somehow, than she’d known was possible.
But then, this man was revelation upon revelation. Every moment, every touch.
He prowled back up over her the way he’d stalked her across the grand stretch of this floor he’d made his home, and Chelsea gripped the bedrails and watched, her breath loud and unmistakable between them as he dispensed with her panties. Then she released her hold when he moved to her bra.
And then there was nothing between them except all of that wild heat.
She didn’t think, she just reached for him.
Finally, she traced those mouthwatering ridges on his steel-hewn torso that had stunned her this morning, that she’d felt move beneath her palms on that long ride tonight. Finally, she leaned forward and lost herself in all his heat, his hardness, all those fascinating planes and muscles that made him something like steel wrapped in velvet.
“You’re not built like an executive,” she murmured, and felt his laughter move inside his hard chest even as she heard it above her, around her.
“We Flints are more laborers than liege lords,” he said. “Can’t help it. Not one of us does too well behind a desk.”
She filed that away, and then gasped when he tossed her back down on the bed, his easy expression gone like it had never been. He was all heat and dark intent, and even while she trembled, she wanted him in ways she didn’t understand. She watched as he reached over to a box beside the bed, rummaged around in it, then came back with a condom. She wanted to do something while he rolled it on that long, hard length of his that made her mouth go dry, but she felt pinned in place as surely as if he’d held her down. He didn’t have to; his gaze did it—too bright, too intense, making her feel as if he’d wrapped those steel arms around her chest and squeezed.
And then he was settling himself between her legs, and the hardest part of him was nudging against her molten center.
Chelsea had never felt like this. Lit up, made new.
“I thought I was promised carousing,” she said, daring and reckless and it felt good, like flying down the side of Copper Mountain on the back of his motorcycle, like laughing while his hazel eyes held hers. Like him. “This appears to be textbook missionary position.”
“This is called taking the edge off,” he replied, dropping down, his head next to hers, his arms holding her tight against him. “I think you can suffer through it.”
“I guess,” she said, and sighed as if it was a stretch for her, but even as she did, he thrust himself into her.
And everything splintered. Changed forever.
Caught fire.
It was slick, hard, perfect. It was unbelievable.
She thought she said his name. Maybe he said hers. Maybe there was nothing at all anymore but that searing fusion, so deep inside of her she didn’t think she’d ever be the same again. She didn’t want to be the same.
And then he began to move, and everything shattered again.
Then again.
He set a wild pace, a glorious rhythm, and Chelsea met him as if she’d done this a thousand times, as if she’d been put on this earth to dance like this, with this man. As if her previous experiences didn’t seem black and white and pointless with each expert surge, each rock of his hips, each utterly insane movement.
And all the while, his mouth was at her neck, her lips. Urging her on, making her gasp. He muttered filthy and beautiful words, like a thread of darkest poetry straight into her ears, her sex. He called her carnal and amazing and all manner of things she’d never imagined she could be, and she believed him.
She was all those things, when he touched her. When he moved over her, in her, dark and graceful, sleek and perfect, as if he’d been crafted by some benevolent god for exactly this purpose.
She felt her back arch, her hips reach for his of their own accord. Felt a wildness like a panic, a wave, crash over her.
“Yes,” he said, his voice something like harsh, and then he issued a series of dark commands, one after the next, and she obeyed.
She burst into a thousand fiery pieces. She screamed. And she held him tight when he followed her, whispering her name like a prayer.
Chapter Six
Jasper took her home when the night was starting to edge over into the start of another deep blue morning, in a Range Rover that purred quietly up the long and twisting drive that branched off of Black Bart Road and led up the hill to Crawford House.
“Black Bart?” Jasper asked when he saw the street sign. “That doesn’t sound like the kind of name people generally bestow upon the more revered members of society.”
“I mentioned he was an ass.” Chelsea laughed. “It was only when his descendants wanted to lord it over everyone else in this valley that they started making noise about social classes. Barton Crawford liked being rich, period.”
> It seemed to her that Jasper went very still beside her, or the air changed.
“I know the type,” he said after a moment, in a low voice that made Chelsea frown—but then they were turning off the road onto the unpaved drive that looked exactly the same as it did it all those ancient pictures Mama had framed and hanging in the house, with the forest pressing in on all sides and quick glimpses of clearings and pastures as they wound their way toward the historic front door.
Where Chelsea’s mother was probably sitting up waiting, simmering in outrage and wrapped in her years of disappointment like a woolen throw against the night’s chill.
She knew she should feel something about that—anxiety, even panic—but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Not yet.
Not while they were still cocooned together in the quiet warmth of the Range Rover’s front seat that smelled of leather and pine, his large hand so easy on her leg, like they’d done all of this a trillion times before. Like they belonged.
He felt like fate, and she knew better than that. But she soaked in it even so, while he took the curves of the long drive with the quiet competence he’d showed in everything else he did, and she pretended that she was fated to be someone other than who she’d always been—until tonight.
Jasper had been as good as his word. He’d “taken the edge off,” and then he’d taken her again. And again. He’d feasted on her, let her return the favor, and then he’d done things to her she’d never imagined she’d do at all, much less like as much as she had. And she’d gloried in every moment. In every stroke of his bold possession, in every heated whisper, in all of that wild, intense passion that she could still feel simmering inside of her, a flickering flame she didn’t think would ever go out again.
She hadn’t wanted to leave. She didn’t want this night to end, to have to force herself back into her tiny and safe little life. Not now that she knew how it could be, if things were different. If she was different.
Jasper was talented and imaginative, demanding and sure, and even thinking about the things that had happened in that gigantic bed of his made her core throb and then ache all over again. It made her wonder how she’d never known that she had all of that inside of her—that wantonness, that abandon. That shuddering need that she’d explored again and again beneath his hands, his mouth, that knowing gaze of his.
Like he knew exactly what was inside of her. Like he could see it.
“Thank you,” she said softly when he pulled up to the house. Mama hadn’t left the lights on, which could be either a good or bad sign. Chelsea didn’t know which, though she supposed she’d find out soon enough. “I can honestly say that in all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve never had a night quite like this one.”
“Marietta men must be damned fools.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t have nights that were similar in many respects. No need to get quite such a big head.”
“You know that every single thing you think shows on your face, don’t you?” He reached over and brushed a lazy finger over one cheek, then the other, and that current between them sizzled all over again, sparking like it was new. He grinned when her breath caught, like he felt it move in him, too. “You’re like a billboard. I can read every thought and feeling you have. Right here.”
She shouldn’t find that charming; she should be horrified. Alarmed, certainly. But for some reason, she smiled.
“You can’t.”
“Which is only one of the many ways I know I rocked your world, Triple C. Aside from being there, doing the rocking, I mean.”
“You’re an insufferably conceited man.” But she was still smiling, even wider now, like these were love words. Incidental poetry in that low growl of a voice.
He shook his head, his gaze intent on hers, then dropping down to her lips.
“It’s that prissy little voice coming out of that mouth of yours. It’s so damned hot.” It took a long time for him to drag his gaze back up to hers, and by the time he did, she’d succumbed to that heat again. It flashed over her, drugging and deep. “You’re the kind of girl who could start a bar fight.”
Chelsea was almost positive that was an insult and that she should be offended. Shouldn’t she? But she’d spent thirty years being widely regarded as the sort of woman who might faint at the idea of entering a bar. A kind of latter day Puritan, by default. The kind of woman, or so she’d heard through the grapevine, that men cheated on because she felt too much and they were afraid to admit to her that they had darker needs.
The kind of solid, bland, invisible woman absolutely no one in her right mind would ever choose to be. Who Chelsea had simply become without meaning to, sometime in high school, and had been stuck with ever since.
The notion that she might be the kind of femme fatale-like creature who drove men to get into brawls? To act like fools, like she could make them lose their heads? Obviously, she should be appalled at the notion. But there was that part of her—the part that reveled in feeling that surge of feminine power from deep inside, the part that felt like joy—that exulted in the idea.
“What would you do?” she asked. His expression turned quizzical. “If I started a bar fight?”
His lips crooked, and she knew how they tasted now. The magic they could do.
“Oh,” he said, his voice thick with Texas and a certain male confidence she should find offensive, she knew she should, “I’d handle it.” The look he shot her then was level, the faint amusement in those bright hazel depths intoxicating. “But then you and I would have a pretty serious conversation.”
He leaned in closer then, cupping the back of her head in his hand and pulling her mouth to his. He kissed her, hard and consuming, as if the night was just getting started. And she wished it was, harder than she’d ever wished anything else.
“My God,” she whispered, when she could speak again, because the darkness outside the car was bluer by the moment, and she had a real life waiting for her no matter how hard she pretended otherwise. “I have to teach in the morning.”
“I hate to break this to you, darlin’, but it’s already morning.”
Chelsea glanced at her watch, then shuddered. “I have to go.”
His smile was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and she knew she was hoarding it even as it happened—tucking the image of it away somewhere deep inside, in case this was the last time she ever saw it. She told herself that didn’t hurt to think like that, that bittersweet was a good thing.
It meant something worthwhile had finally happened to her.
“Go.” His voice was a low scrape that worked in her like another touch of those talented hands of his, that punch of giddy fire, the same kick in her pulse. “Before I change my mind and keep you.”
It was only a line. She knew that. But it still burst inside of her, bright and sharp, and she knew she’d cling to it when he was gone. Maybe for the rest of her sensible, solid, old maid’s life, right here in this house she was fairly certain was her destiny, as she slowly and irrevocably turned into her mother.
Chelsea made herself climb out of his car though it was by far the hardest thing she’d ever done, and she liked that he waited there as she walked to her door, watching intently like he thought the mountain lions might swoop in and get her on the short walk to safety.
The trouble was, she liked it all. Everything about this man who should have been her enemy. Too much.
And as she opened the door and slipped back in to her comfortable life and the consequences she’d surely have to suffer for what she’d done tonight, Chelsea still felt Jasper’s hard mouth on hers and the hot brand of his possession like an ache inside of her, and she knew it was worth it.
Whatever happened next, she didn’t regret a single second of this night.
Not one second.
She made it through a particularly chilly breakfast a few hours later in the face of Mama’s furious silence. The Silent Treatment was her mother’s weapon of choice. Usually, Mama trotted it out and Chelsea
fell all over herself trying to fix whatever was wrong. Cajoling and even begging, until Mama could be coaxed into discussing whatever it was she was angry about. It was better to grovel a little than to suffer through the angry silence, which Chelsea could remember Mama unleashing on the entire family for weeks at a time when she’d been a kid. It was part of the game.
But the Chelsea Collier who had roared off on a stranger’s motorcycle and found herself in his bed all night didn’t want to play that game. Not today. If Mama wanted silence, she could do silence. It was better than the recriminations that were sure to follow.
She stood for what felt like hours in her shower, pretending the hot water was as restorative as a night’s sleep, then found she hated all of her usual work outfits when she looked for something to wear. She might not want to prance around with her ass on display the way Jasper had told her she should, but she discovered that after last night, it turned out she had a whole wealth of feminine vanity she’d never paid the slightest bit of attention to before. Whatever else happened today, she didn’t want to face it while dressed like a woman twice her age.
It took some digging, but she found a black dress Jenny had talked her into buying in Bozeman once on one of her wedding-planning expeditions, but which Chelsea had banished to the depths of her closet. It was just too much, she remembered thinking. But she pulled it on today, and liked the way the soft material flowed around her. It was feminine and flattering, skimming over her curves without calling too much attention to them and then flaring out on its way to her knees. She started to twist her hair back, but stopped, letting it fall to her shoulders instead, because it seemed to go better with the dress. A pair of low heels with a delicate ankle strap and she was ready for school—and dressed, she thought, like she thought she deserved to be considered pretty as well as competent.
Because she did. And she was. And she didn’t know why that had never occurred to her before.
And she couldn’t think of a better outcome from her first and only one night stand than to hold herself in higher esteem because of it.