Illegal Motion: Boys of Fall

by Erin Nicholas

  She couldn’t deny it, so she stayed quiet.

  “I never wanted to be serious long term with someone because to me, marriage was what always made everyone unhappy. Dad kind of behaved while he was just dating someone. I mean, a few women got tired of his jealousy and stuff early on and never made it to the diamond ring, but the ones he did marry—it seemed like they were happy up until then. They had their own lives and friends and jobs and stuff. Dad was part of their lives, but wasn’t their whole life. Like a normal relationship. But as soon as they had his ring and last name, suddenly they stopped seeing their friends and their family, he made three of them quit their jobs, saying he wanted to support them and that they were taking away his chance to provide for them and care for them. He wanted to know where they were all the time and who they were with. It was just…so toxic. And for several years, I thought that was marriage. I didn’t see any other marriages behind closed doors. I just saw my dad claiming to love my stepmoms and them being miserable. And I never wanted any of that.”

  Lacey shuddered slightly. Obviously Carter’s dad had some issues. Those marriages were in no way typical. But thinking that all of that had been Carter’s reality for a long time made her sad—for the little boy who hadn’t seen true love up close and for the man who clearly still had some scars from it.

  She pushed up out of her chair and slid into his lap before she could think twice about it. Carter might not want her comfort but he was going to get it. She sat sideways on his thighs and put her hands on his shoulders. “You’re not your dad.”

  He set his coffee cup to one side and put his hands on her hips. “I know. I’ve always felt very much not like my dad. I’ve never understood him.”

  There was a long, heavy pause and Lacey held her breath.

  “Until you.”

  Lacey felt her heart drop. She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never loved someone so much that I wanted to be the only thing that made her smile, the first thing she thinks of in the morning, the person she wants to share everything with. But I get it now.”

  “With me?” Lacey asked softly.

  “I want to consume you. I want to own you. I want to make you mine in every way and I don’t want you to ever need or want anything I can’t give you.”

  Lacey felt her lips part and her breathing speed up. She knew that he was saying all of this as a warning, a way to scare her off, but it wasn’t working.

  “And you love me?”

  “I’m crazy about you,” he said. Then he chuckled. “And that’s what I’m worried about.”

  She put her hands to his face, making him look at her. “Being in love isn’t crazy.”

  “Lacey…I can’t even explain it.” He sighed, clearly frustrated. Then said, “Watching you eat my cooking tonight made me hard.”

  She felt her eyes widen. “Really?”

  “Making something for you that you enjoyed that much…it was almost like sex.” His hands squeezed her hips. “I fucking loved providing that for you, doing that for you. If it hadn’t been insane, I probably would have insisted on actually feeding you.”

  She felt a smile threatening but he was definitely worked up about this and she had to take it seriously. “I spent the morning with Annabelle and you were fine with that.”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “And you would never try to cut me off from my family.”

  “No.”

  “Or make me quit my job.”

  He hesitated over that one.

  “Carter?”

  “No. I wouldn’t. It’s just that if you moved here, you wouldn’t have a job and that would be okay with me.”

  “I’d figure something out. I love what I do and I’m not the type to sit around and just wait for my man to get home.”

  His fingers tightened on her hips at her words.

  “Oh, you like the ‘my man’ thing?” she asked, wiggling a little closer to his fly.

  “I do. I want to be your everything. And Jesus, Lace, I actually get my dad. I see how this could become an obsession. The idea of you leaving makes me want to howl.”

  “But most of all, you want me to be happy,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And I would be unhappy if I didn’t have my friends, family and job and a few interests and hobbies outside of you. So you won’t do that to me.”

  He looked up at her and she could see that his emotions were still swirling. But he wanted to agree with her.

  “I can’t marry you,” he finally said roughly. “I don’t want kids. I’ve seen divorce rip people up and I know people stay because of the kids all the time. I don’t want you bound to me in any way. I want you here because you want to be here. I want you here because of how you feel. I don’t want there to be any other reasons. And I want you to be free to leave whenever you want to.”

  Lacey felt her stomach knot.

  He saw it in her face.

  “And this is why I loved having Garrett as a part of this. He was that guy. The husband-and-father guy. I want you to have that but I can’t be the one to give it. But now, without him, I don’t want you to be with anyone else. But I know that you want it and I want to give you everything…” He blew out a frustrated breath. “I’m so fucked up over this.”

  Lacey swallowed hard and put her finger over his lips. “It’s okay.”

  He started to shake his head but she pressed against his lips. “Yes, Carter. It’s okay. I showed up here just last night. We have time to figure it all out. Part of all of this is still the emotions over Garrett and being apart for so long and now that we’re together, everything is jumbled up. We’ll work it out.” She moved her finger and leaned in, putting her lips to his is a gentle kiss. “What I do know is that there’s nowhere else for me to be. I need to be here with you.” She kissed him again, a little longer and harder this time, then said, “And if I’m going to be owned and consumed by someone, I definitely want it to be you.”

  He groaned and lifted a hand to the back of her head, taking over the kiss this time, urging her lips open and stroking his tongue boldly over hers. Then he growled, “Woman, those are dangerous words.”

  “I mean every one of them.”

  He kissed her again, hungrily, and she pressed her butt against his cock.

  When he let her go he said, “Do you know how many times we’ve sat by a fire pit and all I could do was think about how gorgeous you would look with me thrusting into you by firelight?”

  She whimpered as need seemed to seep into her bones. “As many times as I’ve watched you sitting on the other side of the fire pit and imagined getting up, walking over to you, stripping as I went, then climbing onto your lap and riding you?” she asked.

  He went still for a moment. Then he gripped her hips and pushed her off of his lap. “Do that.”

  She got to her feet. “Really?”

  “Yes. Holy shit, yes.”

  A thrill went through her. She really had imagined this scenario countless times. Whether he’d been pissed off over the way the Cowboys had played or laughing with Garrett about some dumb criminal story, she remembered watching him across the patio and imagining exactly what she’d just described.

  Lacey walked to the opposite edge of the patio. She turned back and met his eyes. She held the eye contact as she started toward him slowly. She tugged her top off and tossed it onto the closest chair. She toed one shoe off, then the other and kicked them out of the way. Her shorts were next, tossed to drape over the arm of the chair she’d been sitting in. Then her bra. By the time she was directly in front of him she wore only her tiny bikini panties, and she pushed those down and stepped out of them as she put a knee on each side of his on the chair cushion.

  Still watching his face, she pushed his shirt up to bare the abs she’d always fantasized about and stroked her hand over the hard ridges.

  His breath hissed out at the first contact and his fingers dug into the arms of the chair.

  The
firelight shone in his dark eyes and she could see the tightness in his jaw as he held himself in check. She unbuttoned and unzipped him, pulling his shorts and underwear out of the way and wrapping a hand around his cock.

  “I imagined you exactly like this. That you would be hard and hot just sitting here talking and laughing with me.”

  “Every damned time, babe.”

  She loved that—the words, the truth she could hear, the roughness in his voice that spoke to how much she was effecting him.

  “Did you know that every time you laugh it goes right through me, like brandy on a cold night? It just rushes through me and makes me feel hot and happy but also needy, like I’d do absolutely anything you asked.”

  “Fuck, Lace,” he ground out, pushing his cock up into her grip.

  “Oh, yeah, move against me like that,” she urged, tightening around him.

  He groaned and flexed his hips again. The feel of him sliding through her fingers made her wet and she was throbbing with the need for him after only three strokes. But she didn’t want to let go of him.

  “You better move your hand and get on,” he told her. “You’re too good at that.”

  “I’d love to see you come like this,” she said, not taking her eyes off of her hand around him.

  “God, woman, you’re going to kill me.” He grabbed her hips and pulled her forward. “Sometime. No problem. But not this time. The first time I come with you on a patio like in all of my dirty daydreams, it’s gonna be buried deep inside your sweet pussy and with you coming hard on my cock while I fill you up.”

  She almost orgasmed right then and there. But he lifted her and then brought her down on him, easing into her as if they had been made to fit together.

  She grabbed his shoulders, his name coming out in a long moan as she took every inch of him.

  He gave her no time to even breathe again before he was lifting her and thrusting again. She took the cue and began moving up and down, taking him deep and then rising almost to the tip before going down again.

  It was magnificent.

  The fresh air, the firelight, the stars overhead and Carter’s hard, hot body, her name on his lips as he struggled to breathe.

  They came together.

  It shouldn’t be that easy. Lacey knew that. But as she sagged against Carter and felt his hand stroking up and down her back, heard his heart beating under her ear, as intimately connected as two people could be, she didn’t care if it was easy or not—it was worth it.

  Chapter Nine

  Three weeks.

  Lacey had been in Quinn for three weeks and Carter was already so used to her being there—at his dinner table, in his bed, on his couch, under his cat, that he knew without a doubt, with absolute certainty, only one thing: he was royally fucked.

  They’d been laughing, loving, talking, and getting closer every day for three weeks and he never wanted to let her go.

  He hadn’t wanted to let her go from the moment he’d met her. But he had. Kind of. Now he couldn’t. The best he could do now was not become a crazy, controlling freak.

  Easier said than done.

  He’d been doing okay until she’d gotten sick. But for the past week or so she’d been not feeling well and had spent the last two days lying in bed or kneeling beside the toilet.

  It was making him nuts to not be able to make things better, but the last two days had been his days off and at least he’d been there with her. Today he was working and it was making him, well, crazy.

  Carter shook his head and tried to force himself to focus on the report in front of him. There wasn’t anything he could do for her and, honestly, she didn’t need him to do anything. It was a stomach bug. She had soup and crackers and Netflix and Mooch. She just needed to get through it. And he needed to get some damned perspective.

  But this was exactly why he was so sure he was completely fucked.

  Things had been great. Comfortable. Familiar. Hot. Sweet. For two weeks. He’d had her all to himself, his feelings of guilt had faded and he’d started to believe that things could be normal between them.

  When he was at work, she hung out at home with Mooch, cooking, reading, doing some work remotely and relaxing. She’d even gone down to Pitchers with some of his friends a couple of times. She fit in, she liked it here, everyone liked her.

  It was all good.

  He was keeping his shit together. He was settling in. He was confident about how she felt about him and that he could maybe even possibly be the guy she needed him to be.

  And then she got sick.

  Of course, he’d realized on some level that he was completely overreacting to some basic puking. This was nothing in the overall scheme. But he’d had this helpless, I-need-to-be-with-her-constantly feeling nagging at him ever since he’d awakened at three a.m. the first morning to hear her retching in the bathroom.

  He clearly couldn’t be rational about the woman he loved any more than his father had ever been. And the last thing Carter wanted was to make Lacey miserable the way his father made the women in his life.

  Carter tamped that thought and tried to unknot his gut. It was all ridiculous. He couldn’t explain why he was so worked up over her throwing up a little. She didn’t have a fever. She actually felt pretty good most of the day. It was just when the nausea hit and she couldn’t stop puking that he felt as if he was going to crawl out of his skin.

  He should be happy to be at work, distracted by something other than the instinctual need to take care of Lacey every goddamned minute of the day.

  “Shaw!”

  Carter looked toward his chief’s office doorway. “Yeah?”

  “In here.”

  Carter shoved his chair back and stood quickly.

  Thank God.

  He couldn’t distract himself but maybe something big had happened. He shouldn’t be hoping for a call that would take all of his attention and time for the rest of his shift but…he was. He really was.

  “Tonight could get rowdy. Steve Brady already called and said that some kids were mouthing off to each other at the gas station,” Don Keaton, the Chief of Police, said as Carter stepped into his office.

  Tonight was the big Homecoming game against the Pioneers, the Quinn Titans’ biggest rivals. That meant there would be a lot of football players jacked up on testosterone, ex-football players jacked up on testosterone and football players’ dads jacked up on testosterone.

  Grown men often got stupid when it came to sports and there was no sport like football in Quinn, Texas, and the surrounding area. High school rivalries lasted forever around here. It wasn’t unheard of for a guy to not get a job somewhere because of where he’d played ball and a romance between kids from rival towns was like a damned Romeo and Juliet story. It was ridiculous. And it made Carter grin as he strode into his boss’s office. He felt the same way. No kid of his would ever date someone from Riverbend.

  His grin dropped. Well, he didn’t have to worry about that.

  No kid of his would ever date someone from Riverbend…because there wouldn’t be any kids of his.

  He’d always told himself that. Or at least ever since figuring out that his mother had stayed with his dad two years longer than she would have otherwise because of him.

  Lacey would never leave a kid. In fact, he was beginning to think that she would stay with him forever because of a stray cat.

  But he couldn’t tie her down like that. He wouldn’t. If Lacey stayed with him, it would be because she wanted to, never because she felt as though that was her only option.

  He shoved those thought aside and focused on his boss.

  “Yeah. Afterward could be interesting too,” Carter agreed. Last year the rivalry game had been in Riverbend and there had been a couple of fights, a stolen car and a spray-painted barn in the aftermath of Quinn’s big win.

  This year was even bigger. Quinn was on track to do something they hadn’t done since Carter, Garrett, Jackson, Joel, Tucker, and Wade had played—bring home the
state championship trophy.

  And no one wanted to bring them down more than the Riverbend Pioneers.

  “I know you need to be at the game for the halftime ceremony,” Don said.

  Carter and the rest of the championship team had been invited to go onto the field with Coach Carr for a special presentation to the coach who had meant so much to so many. Carter and the rest of the guys were really looking forward to it.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Was hoping you’d be willing to be at the game in uniform,” Don said. “I know you’re there as a guest tonight, but it would be helpful to have the badge visible in case of any trouble.”

  Carter knew Don was right. And he didn’t mind. It wasn’t like everyone didn’t know who he was anyway, including those from Riverbend, but somehow the uniform often helped keep people in check.

  “That’s fine.”

  “You mind patrolling a little while you’re there rather than sitting in the stands?” Don asked. “Greg and Lance will be there too.”

  He’d been planning to sit with Lacey among their friends—their friends, he liked the sound of that—but Carter realized that Lacey likely wouldn’t be attending the game now with the way she was feeling. Which shouldn’t disappoint him. He wasn’t playing and it wasn’t him that was getting the award tonight. But he was damn proud of being a part of the championship team and the idea of taking the field with his teammates and coach again had been great. The idea of having Lacey see him strutting his stuff with the other guys who could still rehash every detail of every play of that final big game had made him grin.

  Now he might as well patrol during the game. “Sure. Not a problem.”

  “Great. Appreciate it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Carter finished up the report he’d been working on and then headed out. He knew the places where the Quinn kids were most likely to run into kids from Riverbend and start trouble.

  As he cruised the streets, he called Lacey.

  “Hi.”

  Her voice made him smile, as always. “You sound better.”