The very impact of the man’s personality, his mere presence in the world she’d thought she knew, had been seismic for Ria and, therefore, terrifying. Vulnerability had definitely not been an option back then—and it was pretty scary in the here and now.
Ria had been wide open to everything as a child, a quiet little ghost haunting a family she never quite belonged to, forever on the outside, looking in. Sure, she’d known that her mother loved her; it was just that the poor woman was perennially distracted, focused on pleasing her husband, constantly bailing water in an effort to keep her leaky marriage afloat.
Ria’s father would watch his younger daughter sometimes, frowning slightly, as though he thought she looked familiar but couldn’t quite place her. According to Meredith, then a fractious adolescent with issues of her own, “Daddy” had been gravely disappointed when he found himself with another girl-child, instead of the son and heir he’d hoped for.
Through all this, Ria didn’t feel sorry for herself, nor was she particularly depressed—she was just, well, resigned. As childhoods went, Ria had soon realized, hers had been better than most.
So, throughout the growing-up years, she coped. She got good grades in school, played on the soccer team, participated in student government. While she didn’t run with the popular crowd, she had plenty of friends. In high school, Ria dated regularly but remained carefully detached—she was no prude, but when whatever guy she happened to be seeing at the time began to say things like “if you loved me, you’d...” she was out of there.
Romantic love? Please. Ria had long since decided that, if such a thing existed at all, it was reserved for a very fortunate few.
Later on, in college, she’d dated older guys, men, not boys, blue-collar types who had served in the armed forces or attended the proverbial school of hard knocks before going for their degrees. She’d had sex with a few of them, and found it pleasant but not particularly memorable. Deep down, she’d gone right on guarding her heart, keeping her distance, playing it safe.
Soon enough, Ria had finished school and gone to work full-time for her father’s company, Whittingford International, as she was expected to do. She had her own tiny apartment, an old car and a lot of lonely evenings to fill.
So Ria had joined a gym, stopping by on her way home from the office four nights a week to get a little exercise.
There, she’d met Frank.
He was cute, and muscular, he made her laugh, and though he was clearly attracted to Ria, he didn’t come on too strong. One crisp Saturday morning in the fall, having just showered after a missed workout, Ria ran into Frank in the corridor between the men’s and women’s locker rooms. Frank had asked if she’d like to have coffee with him, and she’d said yes, and that was the beginning. By Christmas, Ria not only believed in love—she was in it, head over heels.
The wedding, big, beautiful and wildly expensive, took place the following spring. Ria was completely happy, and everything seemed possible. Frank made good money as a firefighter—they could manage fairly well on his income if they were careful—and they began to talk about starting a family. Ria looked forward to getting pregnant, and took an indefinite leave of absence from her job, wanting to make sure she could handle staying at home.
It was almost embarrassing, how much Ria liked being a housewife—her friends were getting advanced degrees, scrambling up academic or corporate ladders, while she was more than content with her domestic-goddess role. By then, she and Frank were serious about getting pregnant.
Maybe they were too serious, because month after month, Ria’s period arrived right on schedule. Slowly—so slowly that neither of them really noticed—things began to change. They didn’t make love as often, or laugh as much. And, while they didn’t have any knock-down, drag-out fights, they began to bicker occasionally.
And then came the betrayals—the first was Frank’s. He had that one-night stand while he was out of town, taking special classes. It was harder to place blame for the second, much worse betrayal—her husband’s sudden, tragic death. Frank hadn’t planned on dying any more than Ria had planned on losing him, but there it was. He was gone, killed on the job.
After that, Ria had simply shut down. She didn’t live; she survived. She might have stayed on that track forever, too, if she hadn’t come across the farm, listed on an internet real-estate site, and, on a whim she still couldn’t explain, even to herself, bought the place. Moved there, ignoring the shocked protests of her friends.
Three Trees, Montana? Was she kidding?
It was no joke; Ria threw herself into making her new life work.
Almost immediately, Murphy’s Law being operational, a potential complication arose when she met Landry Sutton at a barbecue at Zane and Brylee’s place. Until then, no man since Frank had made her feel anything, good, bad or indifferent.
But there were things about Landry that set off warning signals in Ria’s mind and heart the moment Zane introduced them. Landry’s slightly crooked grin had rocked Ria to the core, and his husky “hello” made her breath run quick and shallow.
Here was a man who knew what he wanted and invariably got it, she’d thought, unnerved by her own reactions to him. According to Brylee, Zane’s younger brother was divorced and available.
According to Ria, the man was just plain dangerous—too good-looking and too engaging to be anything but the love-’em-and-leave-’em type. No doubt, in addition to at least one discarded wife, Landry had left a long trail of brokenhearted women behind him.
Ria had expected him to make polite excuses and move on to charm someone new, but he lingered, easily drew her into conversation. The way he’d looked at her, the way he’d smiled, had made her dizzy.
In self-defense, Ria had decided then and there not only to dislike Landry Sutton thoroughly, but to steer clear of him as much as possible. And she’d followed through on the plan—until he’d hauled off and kissed her, in a field of daisies and zinnias, the day after the buffalo raid.
Now, only a few days later, here she was, standing in Landry’s bedroom, wearing nothing but a bra and panties and a rash of goose bumps, waiting—no, eager—to surrender.
Where on earth was her sensible self, the Ria who had borne up under heartbreak for so long, and forged a new path for herself in a new place? She had no clue.
To keep her brain from doing any more time traveling, either to the past or the future, Ria shifted mental gears and looked around the large but sparely furnished room, noting the bare walls, painted a muted shade of sage-green, more a hint than an actual color. She examined the beamed ceiling, noted the tall windows that made up the far wall, took in the enormous stone fireplace. Finally, having drawn the inspection out as long as she could without rooting through bureau drawers or peeking into the closet, Ria allowed herself to focus on the bed.
It was quite plain, Landry’s bed, given the grandeur of the room itself. King-sized, she estimated, with a simple brass headboard, thick pillows without shams and a sturdy-looking patchwork quilt in place of a spread.
Ria heard the shower water stop, braced herself and waited for the bathroom door to open. There was a click, and she turned to see Landry, naked except for a towel slung around his lean waist, his skin tanned and beaded with sparkling droplets of water. His eyes widened slightly when he looked at her, saw that she’d stripped to her panties and a bra. He smiled, almost imperceptibly, and let his gaze drift the length of her, at his leisure.
Ria stifled an involuntary whimper as her nipples hardened under the thin lace of her bra. The sensation trailed down her body right along with Landry’s slow, slow glance, leaving her moist beneath her panties, with that familiar feeling of expansion, of getting ready to take him inside her.
Landry approached, stood directly in front of Ria, and despite the light of passion in his eyes, his expression was solemn.
“We need to get one thing clear, before this goes any further,” he told Ria, his voice low and husky and very earnest. “This isn’t a fling, or a one-nig
ht stand. It isn’t the start of an affair. It’s the beginning of forever, and if forever isn’t what you have in mind, then we need to stop, right now.”
Stop? Now? Ria was astounded. Stop—when the very air around them quivered with this strange energy of passion and need? Was the man from another planet?
And what about this forever thing?
Okay, Landry had said he loved her, out there in the truck, and she not only believed him, but she loved him back with an intensity that frightened her. But what red-blooded man talked about “forever” when he and the woman he was with hadn’t even been to a movie together, for pity’s sake, let alone swapped promises or made love?
Ria tried to speak, but not a sound came out. No matter—she wouldn’t have known what to say anyhow, baffled as she was, and bereft. Landry had made her want him—and he’d done it on purpose. Now, all of a sudden, he was suggesting that they stop?
Reading her face, Landry cupped a hand under Ria’s chin, his lips on the verge of another smile, his eyes searching hers. “It’s forever or nothing,” he ground out. “Which one do you want?”
Ria swallowed. She couldn’t deal with nothing, now that she’d fallen so hard for this man, struggled so to let go of her past, finally found forgiveness and peace within herself—and made what was probably the most daring decision of her life: to take a chance, put all her chips on the table and allow herself to love again.
All or nothing, that was the choice Landry offered.
“I’ll take forever,” Ria said.
“That’s good,” Landry replied, his voice gruff and yet incredibly tender. He reached behind Ria and unfastened her bra, pulled it down over her shoulders and then off and admired her bare breasts until she needed his touch so badly that she gave a small, crooning moan.
With a throaty chuckle, Landry cupped her bounty in his hands, running the sides of his thumbs slowly, lightly, across her nipples.
Ria was so aroused that she would have begged the man to take her, hard and fast, standing up, right there in the middle of the room, but she knew he wouldn’t do that—knew for certain that he was going to make her wait and wait—so she simply let go and gave herself up to the exquisite, almost unbearable pleasure of his fingers, then his mouth.
Oh, dear God, his mouth.
Landry bent his head, clasped his hands together at the small of her back and suckled at Ria’s nipples till they throbbed with wanting, teased them with feathery passes of his tongue. The implicit promise in these attentions made Ria lean back in his embrace, offering herself to him, made her bury frantic hands in his hair and utter his name, over and over again, in ragged, soblike pleas.
She didn’t just want Landry to take her; she needed taking. Needed it the way she needed her next breath, her next heartbeat.
But Landry had other ideas.
He went down on her instead, kneeling before her, dragging her panties down over her thighs and off and then burrowing in, taking her full into his mouth as she gave a low, shuddering cry of welcome.
As he continued to ply her that way, to tease and murmur, Ria threw back her head in total surrender, let out another cry of pleasure, this one almost a howl. She felt boneless, liquefied, and she knew she would have sunk all the way to the floor if Landry hadn’t held her firmly with those strong hands of his, keeping her upright.
That first climax, when Landry finally allowed Ria to go over the edge, was shattering, a many-splendored thing, light catching on light, fire meeting fire, and it seemed to have no beginning and no end—peaking, subsiding, peaking again, each pinnacle more intense, each descent curving right back up, and up, and up, eternal as the tide.
Ria was well past any capacity for restraint by the time the ecstasy reached its highest pitch again, in a long, sweeping crescendo that made her entire body convulse as she pressed herself against Landry’s mouth, and he feasted on her until she was exhausted, until she couldn’t give any more. He made her offer up everything, and the final triumph wrung a string of primitive sounds from her very depths, low, hoarse shouts, broken groans, desperate little whimpers.
And then the cries solidified, and formed themselves into words.
“I—love—you—” Ria gasped. “So—so much—”
Ria was still quivering with tiny aftershocks when Landry rose to his feet and, just when her knees would have buckled, caught her and swept her up in his arms, all in a single graceful motion.
He carried her to the bed, pulled back the covers and laid her down on cool, crisp sheets.
“You were saying—?” Landry teased, stretching out beside Ria, parting her legs with a gentle press of his hand, sliding down and down to kiss the tender insides of her thighs.
Ria was just beginning to settle back into herself, almost coherent. “I was about to say—” But she’d forgotten what she’d been about to say, in the heat of the ongoing seduction. She began to writhe as Landry parted her. “Oh, God, Landry—not again—what are you—?”
He flicked at her with just the tip of his tongue.
“Go on,” he urged, in a mischievous growl, as Ria gave a lusty shout and arched her back, raising herself high for him. As easily as that, as quickly as that, Landry Sutton had rocketed her from nestling comfortably into a satisfied stupor to full-spectrum, raging arousal. How was that possible?
Go on, he’d said. As though they were having a casual conversation—as though he hadn’t turned her into a volcano—one about to erupt—here in his deceptively unassuming bedroom.
Ria was wild, tossing, flailing in ecstasy, about to lose herself again, but she managed to gasp a response. “Damn you, Landry—I said—I love—you—”
She repeated the I love you over and over, faster and faster, more and more desperately.
Landry nibbled at her, and chuckled when she finally broke off the fevered declaration to give a long, purrlike moan. It was the cry of a tigress.
“I happen to feel the same way about you,” he rumbled, nuzzling her again, lifting her boneless legs, draping one over his right shoulder and one over his left. “Hold on tight, darlin’,” he warned, “because I’m about to make you love me a whole lot more.”
A tremor of sheer need flared up in Ria when she felt his mouth on her again, now teasing, now greedy, and she rocked her head from side to side on the pillow, delirious, as he drove her steadily, inexorably skyward again. He held her high off the mattress, the palms of his hands strong under her buttocks, savoring her like a thirsty man scooping up water from a stream. This time, though, Landry didn’t torment her with little delays.
No, this time he enjoyed her in earnest, stayed with her when she began to buck like a wild mare, throwing her head back on the pillow and finally, completely, letting herself go. Landry didn’t let up when she began her quivering descent, either, but led her slowly, so slowly, back from the far side of the stars, back into his arms, back into his bed.
Ria had never felt the way she did now—emptied out and, at the same time, gloriously filled—totally female, saturated with light, gloriously and fiercely loved. Wanted. She lay still and replete as Landry shifted, reached for something on the nightstand. He was putting on a condom, she thought dreamily.
Finally, it was his turn to soar heavenward and burst apart in fragments of light, like fireworks splashing across a night sky, while she moved beneath him, around him, running her hands gently up and down his back, crooning to him as the pressure built, urging him to let go.
Except it didn’t turn out like that, exactly. The instant Landry drove inside her, Ria was electrified again, her back arching so she could take him in deeper, her gentle caresses turning rapidly to clutching, raking the flesh on his back with her nails.
She sobbed his name as yet another climax seized her, shook her with the force of an earthquake and then, instead of letting her drift blissfully earthward, hurled her higher instead. And still higher.
Landry took his time, his strokes long and deep and slow.
Ria watched hi
m from beneath her lashes as she met with another release and then another, helpless against the ever-mounting pleasure, the merciless, pounding pleasure—how much longer could she endure it?
Finally, Landry stiffened, uttering a long groan, the cry of something wild and purely male, taking its mate but also letting itself be taken. The powerful muscles in his neck and chest and shoulders tightened visibly as Landry shoved his hands down hard into the mattress, thrust his head back and rasped out Ria’s name again and again, with each flex of his magnificent body. Even when he climaxed, it happened in surges, a thrust, another thrust, a sigh that seemed torn from him.
When it was finally over, both lovers sank like stones into the sweet oblivion of sleep, completely spent.
Ria awakened a long time later, after sunset, surfacing by degrees, only to find herself being ministered to by Landry and soon in the middle of a soft, slow and utterly scrumptious orgasm. She whimpered and buckled, but the release was leisurely, rather than fierce, like before. Her eyelids were too heavy to lift to look at him and, besides, the orgasm went on and on, muted and sweet, and all she could do was ride the undulating wave of it, let it carry her wherever it would.
Landry was watching her face when she finally floated in for a landing, sighed contentedly and opened her eyes. Propped up on his left elbow, he smiled down at her, looking sleepy and rumpled in the dim light from the bathroom and obviously very pleased with himself. His free hand, she realized, was between her legs, at least one finger was inside her and the heel of his palm rested over the damp, still-throbbing nubbin of flesh he’d been caressing.
“I still want forever,” he told her.
He didn’t pull his hand away, and Ria didn’t want him to. She gave another sigh—he was arousing her again—and slipped her arms around his neck, giving a little gasp of joyful despair when the tip of his finger found her G-spot and plied it expertly. “How can you be so sure of that, Landry Sutton?” she asked, though she barely had the breath to speak. “That you want forever, I mean.”
“I’m sure,” he said, with amused conviction. A mischievous light flickered in his eyes and Ria gasped again as he continued to work her with his finger. “It might have taken me longer to decide if the sex hadn’t been so damn good.”
Big Sky Secrets Page 25