Dad, goddamn it, he thought, and tears burned into his eyes for the countless time that day. He didn’t even try to swipe them away; shit, it was pitch dark and he was utterly alone, not even a single vehicle had passed. They rolled over his cheeks and he closed his eyes for a moment, aching at the thought that he would never see his father again. He hadn’t even really said good-bye. Last Thursday Daniel had left early for the campground, called farewell on his way out the door; Matthew had still been in bed, catching a few extra hours before he planned to pull an all-nighter getting Marshall’s big rig to the Texas state line.
“See you on Sunday, Matty-boy!” he’d said, using his old favorite nickname, and Matthew had sleepily responded, “’Bye, Dad.”
And that was it. He hadn’t called home on Friday from his motel in Gainesville, Texas. He had been planning to get back to Rose Lake Saturday night, but the semi blew an axle outside Middleton, Oklahoma, and he’d been held up while getting it fixed…and ended up meeting Bryce.
Just the thought of her sent the blood in his body churning with anticipation and wonder. He pictured her for the hundredth time as she’d looked when he first saw her, a case of beer braced against her belly from about five steps below, with her exquisitely beautiful eyes flashing golden-brown in the sunlight, staring up at him as though he sported wings from his shoulder blades.
In that second he was caught in the chest by the strongest punch of desire of his life, though he could not have imagined in those first moments the night they would share together in a few short hours. Hoped, maybe, but still, it seemed a slim possibility; one-night stands had never been his style. And yet he’d been totally powerless against the force of it, had thought of her constantly all afternoon while getting estimates, finally settling and then arranging payment with a service garage, had hurried back to the motel and showered and shaved and then…
When Bryce came around the corner and into the party, he had felt a tug of such force that the room seemed to vibrate. Unexpected, but certainly not unwelcome. He’d been worried about coming on too strong, scaring her off, but there was something in her expression that his heart understood, even if his head was a few steps behind. The way her eyes couldn’t seem to move from his, her delicate eyebrows drawn slightly together, the question her full soft mouth seemed to be begging to ask him, the rise and fall of her breasts beneath her shirt, letting him know that her own breath was short, her pulse erratic in those moments. She didn’t play coy like the many other girls who’d let him know they were interested over the years, didn’t offer any strong hints, but he knew. Holy shit, he knew.
Jesus Christ, he thought, and tipped his head back for a few beats. I can’t let her go.
He clenched his jaw, afraid to admit how much he wanted her, how terrified he was that she was leaving and the only time he might ever set eyes on her again was if she returned here to visit them. Or he went to her…but to what end?
You can’t have her, Sternhagen, so just stop right now. She’ll leave and you’ll get over her in time…
He walked faster, then finally broke into a jog that became a sprint as he neared their driveway, his dress shoes crunching over the gravel. And then he caught sight of her and stopped abruptly. Bryce was alone on the porch, pushing herself on the swing with one bare foot, moving subsequently in and out of the spherical orange glow of the porch light. Matthew held himself utterly still for a moment, studying her, his heart thundering, his breath coming fast.
Her hair was loose and soft over her shoulders, her chin tipped toward a book cradled in her arms. She was clad in his old sweatshirt, he realized, and he was struck with equal floods of desire and tenderness: he wanted to scoop her into his arms and take her somewhere, anywhere, as long as they could be alone and undiscovered, and make love to her until she was too spent to walk…he wanted to wrap her in his arms and hold her until the end of space and time, just hold her, breathe her scent.
The entire house was dark, and seemed to be sleeping; he didn’t want to startle her, and instead whistled softly through rounded lips, making her head flash up in his direction. She closed whatever it was she was reading and instantly slipped it to the floor under the swing, rose to her feet, hugging his sweatshirt against her breasts, feeling the incredible thrusting of her heart behind her crossed arms. He was out there, she knew it, and stepped down to the grass…
“Will you walk with me?” he asked her, his voice low, coming into sudden view, and Bryce caught her breath, even though she had been expecting him. She tried to meet his eyes, could hardly look up into them just as fiercely as she knew she could never look away. At last she nodded. He said, “Let’s go to the dock.”
The path was narrow and again he led the way, allowing her to study his utterly sexy, sloping shoulder muscles beneath the pale dress shirt he’d worn all day, his narrow hips and long legs in black pants nearly invisible in the dark. The water glinted into view, an expanse of black silk in the starlight, slightly darker than the surrounding air, static and as smooth as glass. The shore hummed with fiddling crickets and whining mosquitoes, and beneath this, the constant, undulating chirp of frogs. Bryce stepped carefully, wincing once as she encountered a sharp point. Matthew walked first onto the dock, and it trembled with his tread; Bryce followed, her damp feet making a series of slim, curved prints along the bare boards. At the end, where the water lapped softly, he sat on the bench bolted to the boards and curled both hands around its seat, casually, as though his world were not ending tomorrow.
She sat delicately, leaving a mere foot between their hips, but couldn’t bring herself to look directly at him. Instead she slipped her hands beneath her thighs, clad in her old flannel pajama bottoms, and stared out across the smooth surface, imbibing her senses instead with the sight of the far, tree-lined ridge, darkened to the shade of wet ink as night settled in like an old friend. Her heart trembled in her chest; they were very near, and alone, no one to witness anything. They sat in silence for a good five minutes, the space between them vibrating with awareness, until he couldn’t bear it another second.
“Don’t go,” he said finally, his voice low and husky. She closed her eyes.
“I have to,” she whispered after a time, her own fractured by the jagged lump forming in her throat. She was having trouble swallowing the ache away. A pulse pounded in her temples.
“Bryce, please,” he said then, and his voice made her bury her face into her palms. “Please stay.”
“I can’t stay here, Matthew,” she whispered, and her eyes burned with the pain of not allowing tears. She lifted her face to see him angled toward her, the intensity in his eyes visible even in the darkness. Her own thrummed back into his, and he tightened his grip on the bench, hard enough to dig splinters into his skin.
“Why?” he demanded in a harsh whisper, even though he damn well knew the answer.
“You know why,” she whispered back, and her heart felt as though metal bands were tightening around its chambers, trying to cut off any chance of hurting like this ever again. She imagined not seeing him for the rest of her life, never feeling his hands in her hair or on her face, of never loving someone like this again…you never will, you know it…and the stars seemed to mock her, glittering harshly like diamonds on the finger of the girl he would eventually marry one day…
Tears gushed over her cheeks then, stunning her. She pressed both fists hard to her lips to staunch the flood of choking sobs, and Matthew damned it all and hauled her against his chest, his huge, strong, solid chest, wrapped her into his arms and clutched her like a drowning man. She clung back, her fierce sobbing muffed against his body, her arms around his torso. She wept for what they had and what they could never allow to happen, sobbed against his fancy shirt, tears that had been trapped within her for more than a decade.
“Bryce, oh God, Bryce, don’t cry, sweetheart,” he said, rocking her, his heart clubbing his chest. For long minutes they held each other, so tightly, and her cries at last subsided to shaking
gasps. He pressed his lips to the top of her head and whispered around the lump in his own throat, again, “Please stay.”
She shifted and reached to touch his face, cupped both palms against the scratchy surface of his cheeks. From less than six inches away she looked into his beautiful, long-lashed eyes, her own swollen and red, and he gave her just a hint of a grin, his hands wrapped around her waist. She opened her lips to speak just as he tipped his forehead against her own and said, his voice low and somber, “I’m in love with you, Bryce.”
Her heart lashed her insides with the incredible joy of those words, and tears streaked over her cheeks again, making him grip her even more tightly.
“Oh Matthew, I love you,” she whispered firecely, and his lips were on her neck, her jaw, her fingers curled into the thick softness of his dark hair. “I love you so m—” and his lips claimed her own with possessiveness. Pure, undiluted happiness churned through her body as his tongue swept into her mouth and she opened her lips to his taste, kissing him back with total abandon. It seemed as though lifetimes had passed since he’d last kissed her, instead of four days. He tore away and demanded, “Tell me again,” and she pressed herself flush against him, unable still to believe this was happening, that this gorgeous man with eyes like coals was cracking her wide open to an ocean of feeling.
“I love you with my heart and soul,” she said, her mouth an inch from his, and the air all around them seemed to sigh and shift, and at some level they both felt deep in their bellies, it was as though the earth recognized this statement in this exact moment in time to be a point of no return. The stars sparked above them as Matthew gently thumbed the tears from her cheeks and then kissed her again, his hands moving to splay like starfish along her ribs, and he carried her with him as he moved to lie flat on his back on the old familiar dock boards, holding her against his chest, her hair spilling like a waterfall all around their bodies. They kissed and kissed, her thighs veeing over his hips, his arms locked around her.
When she lifted her head they were both breathless, his cock a rock-hard ridge between them. He ran his hands over her length, gripped her ass and pressed her body even closer, groaning a little. This was insanely dangerous, they both knew it, but they were both powerless to stop it, had no desire to stop it…Bryce rested her forearms on his chest and looked down into his eyes in amazement.
“I feel like I’ve known you before this,” she told him, and he grinned at her devilishly, flashing his dimples.
“Well, darlin’,” he said, affecting a slight drawl to match her own, “I believe you have, several times.”
She flushed in a wave across her whole body, and lightly drummed her fists against him. “No, I mean before we met in Oklahoma.”
He was all at once serious, too.
“I know,” he said. “I feel the same way. When you looked up at me on the stairs at that motel…”
“I can’t explain it,” she whispered back, tracing his eyebrows lightly with her index fingers, overjoyed to have the planes of his actual face beneah her fingers, and not just a photograph. “I just knew it, too.”
He caught and kissed one of her palms, cupped it against his cheek, marveling at how small and delicate her hand felt inside of his own. She laced her fingers through his and kissed his scratchy chin, breathing the scent of him like precious perfume, and he wanted to be inside of her so bad that he shuddered with the intensity of it. He pulled her mouth back to his, kissed her deeply again, sending a rush of pleasure down her spine and into her very core. Still holding her face in his hands, as though to reassure himself she was real, he whispered, “Don’t go, Bryce. We will make this work, I swear to you. I will find a way.”
Matthew loved her. He loved her. And her body resonated with the ferociousness of her love for him. She heard herself whisper, “I’ll stay.” Just a little longer, at least. A few more days, a week…
She tried to believe that this could happen in the face of their family, in the face of society.
He promised himself right there he would make it work, a feeling that reverberated down into his bones.
And right then, he really believed he could.
***
They stayed on the dock for a while after that. Matthew sat up and enfolded her against him, pulling her back to his chest, his arms folded double around her, rested his chin on her head. For long moments they studied the stars, wordless, their hands joined with fingers interlaced.
“Matthew?” she whispered, tipping her head slightly, and he lowered his face and pressed his warm lips to her left temple.
“What is it, sweetheart?”
She pulled his hands even more tightly against her body, whispered, “I want you.”
She felt his lips widen into a grin against her skin, and her heart pounded even harder.
“Where can we go?” she whispered, and he could feel her heart thrumming against his bent arms, arousing him more than he could have ever thought possible. His own heart sent hot blood tidal waving through the channels of his body.
“I’ll be right back,” he told her. He rose, lifting her with, and hugged her hard for a moment, then turned and jogged down the dock, creating a small earthquake along the boards. She watched as he disappeared back toward the house, hugged herself around the middle, firmly deciding she would not think about anything but the present. She would hide out here in this moment, forget the inevitable future in which she would surely have to leave for Oklahoma and the collect up the vestiges of the life she’d been living there before last Saturday afternoon…
For a split second her thoughts circled over and landed on Wade and she recoiled internally, grateful that he was more than a thousand miles away, comforting herself in the knowledge that he had certainly been unfaithful to her over the course of their relationship. The thought of him touching her ever again made her stomach shift nauseously, though she understood how ridiculous that was, hardly fair to a man who had spent years touching her…
Matthew came jogging back a few minutes later, and he had a blanket, a big soft flannel one, folded over his arm. He reached her and said, “The work truck is parked just up the path, on the service road. It’s not exactly a first class hotel, but–”
“That’s perfect,” she responded instantly.
He caught her right hand in his left and said, “Come with me.”
The service truck he and Wilder used at the camground was parked on the gravel road that functioned as a sort of shortcut from the Pull Inn to the Sternhagen’s private dock, a road secluded from the main one, hidden by the dense pine forest. They ran like naughty children through the smoldering June night, and Matthew cranked open the squeaky metal door and spread the blanket over the long bench seat in the front, impatiently. He turned back to help her climb in, but she was already in his arms, and he pulled the door shut with a soft click.
They kissed with the fervor of two people about to be separated indefinitely, as though tomorrow would never come, and tonight meant everything there was in the world. He took her bottom lip into his mouth and sucked it while she moaned against him, gripping his huge shoulders. He didn’t break the contact of their lips as he struggled to unbutton his shirt, and she laughed a little as they reluctantly parted at last while she undid the bottom few buttons, then reached to ease the shirt from his huge shoulders, a small gesture that made her blood boil with its intimacy.
Her belly tightened with an almost aching desire as she pulled the shirt down his body, causing his elbows to lift and his shoulder muscles to bulge. She cupped her hands around them, smoothed her palms along the ridges of hard muscle to his neck, while he waited in a barely-controlled stillness, watching her watch him. When she lowered her hands to grasp her own shirt’s hem, he stilled her fingers and lifted it over her head, gently, his hands shaking a little, as though he were 15. She was naked beneath his old sweatshirt she’d been wearing, her nipples dark, rigid circles against the soft pale glow of her breasts. He bent his head and used both hands to
bring her against his mouth, loving how her own hands went directly to the back of his head to pull him even closer.
Bryce tipped her head back while spasms of joy spread through her limbs and knifed into her belly. His mouth was hot on her flesh, and he bit her nipples lightly, making a low growl in his throat. Back against her neck he whispered, “You are so beautiful, Bryce,” and then he cupped her cheeks with both hands and studied her eyes intently. “I want you to know how beautiful you are, and how much I wish we were in a big soft bed and not the cab of this old truck.” She suddenly realized his big hands were trembling, and she reached up and slipped her own over them, touched to the depths of her soul. He whispered, “I’ve never felt this way before.”
“Me, neither,” she whispered back, and moved swiftly to straddle his lap on the seat. She twined her fingers into his hair, smoothing it as he clutched her naked waist with both hands and let her tip his head as she would. She kissed his right eye, closing it, then his left, breathing him in as she did, her nipples skimming against him lightly, and she was thrilled to feel the trembling move into his thighs beneath her. He remained otherwise motionless as she kissed along his jaw, pausing at his chin, dying to kiss his lips but holding herself back, and then traced soft little pecks along his left jaw up to his temple. There she stopped, her heart reverberating like a gong, her nipples hard enough to slice through glass. She could sense his desire like a gigantic coiled spring, and she was heady with her own. She tilted her chin and bit his earlobe, and he groaned softly, his hands tightening on her flesh. In another second the thrumming intensity between their bodies would eat them alive.
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