by Anne Calhoun
Her breath scudded from her throat. The scent of clean skin and sweat, his taste lingering on her tongue, the sound of his breathing. She trailed her index finger from the hollow of his throat down his breastbone, over abdominal muscles covered with the thinnest layer of skin to his belt buckle. His hand covered hers, held it flat against his button fly. Heat and hardness strained against her palm.
“Not yet,” he said. “My turn first.”
He went to work on the buttons of her blouse, his touch very matter-of-fact, and in a few moments the shirt hung open, revealing her basic beige cotton bra. One dark brow lifted, and she nodded, not trusting herself to speak. He reached behind her, unhooked the fastener, and in seconds she was bare from the waistband of her cotton skirt to her hair. Then he unfastened her braid, first tugging the elastic from the end, then working the sections loose to send it tumbling around her shoulders. Her hair, as long and thick and straight as a horse’s tail, slid forward into her face, sheltering her a little. Based on the way his shaft flexed against her, he liked the peek-a-boo game it played with her breasts. Heat flickered to life between her legs, and she shifted.
Call-and-response, her body to his and back again. Layers upon layers of pleasure and sensation.
He wove his fingers through her hair so the ends protruded like the bristles of a brush. Then, his gaze locked with hers, he stroked the soft undercurve of her breast, the touch gentle, slow, his rough knuckles a hard counterpoint to each caress. Her mouth went dry and her nipple hardened. He wrapped more hair around his other hand and did the same thing to her other breast until her eyes drooped, then closed, and her breathing shallowed.
Crickets chirped, the leaves rustled in the trees, and what little water flowed through the brook burbled under the breeze as her attention slowly focused to the strokestrokestroke of her own hair on her flesh. Molten heat coursed along newly awakened nerves, then pooled in places she didn’t know could hold such desire.
His hands cupped her breasts, not nearly as shocking with her skin already sensitized, her body growing hot, needy. But when his thumbs slowly brushed her nipples, back and forth, back and forth, her head dropped forward, sending her hair into her face.
“Talk to me,” he said.
She tipped forward and rested her open mouth on Ben’s. His tongue flickered out, caressing her lower lip, then dipped inside to touch hers before retreating again.
“It’s good,” she breathed. “So good.”
His lips moved under hers. “Yeah,” he said. The word came out knowing, confident, masculine.
His palms cupped her knees, then slid up her thighs and under her skirt to grip her bottom. A few moments of shifting and he lay back on the bench seat with Rachel draped against him. The precarious position rolled her nearly full length against his body from chest to knees, her bare breasts to his exposed torso. He cupped the back of her head with one hand and held her mouth to his for kiss after hot, wet kiss. She flattened her palm against his abdomen. Hot, damp skin stretched over shifting muscle.
His fingers worked her skirt up to her hip, then slid into her panties to gently stroke her belly, then the damp curls at the top of her sex. She shuddered, and his movements slowed. “You’d never been touched here.”
“No.”
“No wonder you didn’t want me to go down on you.”
Her eyes opened enough to meet his blue gaze. He wasn’t apologizing, or justifying, or blaming her. Just stating facts, calmly and certainly, as his fingers spread her soft folds. The first time she’d been unprepared for the hot flashes of pleasure expanding under his fingertip. This time she knew, anticipated, needed.
“I wasn’t paying attention to you. But I am now,” he said as his finger arrowed in on a particularly alive spot.
Her breath caught as she shuddered, and the flames leapt higher in his eyes. Her thighs clenched and her hips shifted forward, into his hand. She rolled forward and rested most of her weight against his body. One finger dipped lower, and this time when his finger slid against that bundle of nerves, moisture eased his way. He set a slow rhythm, taking his time, careful and measured, and heat built between her thighs. He kissed her and he touched her, tongue and finger and body working together to draw her down into the vortex.
But she was taking more than she gave. “I still want to touch you,” she said.
This time when she reached for his belt buckle he didn’t stop her. The buckle was a straightforward silver, the seams and pressure points of his button-fly jeans nearly as white as the clasp. She fumbled with the buckle but the fly opened easily, the button holes frayed and worn. As she moved down the placket the backs of her fingers rubbed against something hot and hard and still foreign.
She flicked him a glance. His gaze was still relaxed, heavy lidded, sensual. He lifted his hips, and she tugged his jeans and cotton shorts down just far enough to release his shaft. The wind pushed air through the truck’s open doors, over their bodies. Her hair lifted, then caught on her mouth.
“May I?” she asked as she tugged the strands free.
“All yours, honey.”
She gathered her wayward hair and swept it behind her shoulder, then trailed her fingers down his ridged abdomen to the shaft straining up from the thicket of brown hair between his legs. Hesitantly she wrapped her fingers around it, squeezing, exploring texture and hardness, the softness of the sac below. After a few moments his hand covered hers. He looked deep into her eyes as he taught her how to touch him, gripping the shaft more firmly than she would, cupping his testicles, then back to the shaft, where he set a slow rhythm. Then he lifted both hands to her head and drew her mouth down to his. This time she took the lead kissing him, and learned yet another way to build the pleasure. He jerked under her as she licked the soft curve of his mouth and moved her hand up and down.
Finally his hand landed on hers, halting her midstroke. His hand slid back into her panties. With two fingers he circled her soft opening, but when the fingers delved inside, she inhaled sharply.
His gaze searched hers. “Hurt, or surprised?”
“Surprised,” she said. “Don’t stop.”
Those winter-sky-blue eyes never left hers as he gently, slowly worked his fingers in and out. His thumb brushed her clitoris with each subtle movement. Before long her eyes closed, so she felt his hand slide into her hair to cup the back of her head and hold her mouth to his. He didn’t kiss her, just let the sweet, tantalizing promise of his mouth brushing hers provide the counterpoint to the smooth stroke of his fingers inside her. Then his fingertips slid over a hot, electric spot inside.
This time the noise was part gasp, part throaty moan. He did it again; again and without conscious thought she responded. Arched her back so her aching nipples brushed his chest. Touched her tongue to his. Undulated in his grasp. Her sex brushed his shaft as she moved, the heat and promise teasingly close, never far from her body, her mind.
“Feel good?”
She gave a half laugh, half gasp, because it felt like nothing she’d experienced before.
Nuances. Nuances would be the death of her.
He withdrew his hand, and she opened her eyes. Moisture gleamed on his fingers and she watched, dazed, as he touched her nipples, transferring the juices to her skin. Then he lifted his head and licked them. Between the muscles in his chest and abdomen flexing and the sensation of his tongue and teeth on her nipples, every nerve in her body lit up. She was past the point of need she’d reached the last time. Her blood slipped hot and thick in her veins, and sensation simmered between her legs.
“Why did you stop?”
He groped on the floor for his wallet, opened it, and extracted a condom packet. “Because when you come I’m gonna be inside you,” he said as he opened the packet and rolled the latex down his shaft. His hands gripped her hips as he centered her over his shaft. “Slow,” he cautio
ned.
This time the stretch was delicious, a promise fulfilled. She sank down, pausing when the burn threatened to become pain, felt her body clench around this unfamiliar thickness, then lifted up again, slid down. He wasn’t all the way inside her, but it felt good. Powerful, something to claim, not hide from, or reject out of hand.
“Tilt your hips back,” he said. His voice seemed to be part of the descending twilight, deep blue and as smooth as the rhythm. She did as he suggested, and on the next descent his shaft glided over that hot spot inside.
“Oh. Oh yes.”
His fingers tightened on her hips. She couldn’t tell if he held her to prevent her from rushing or because he liked the feedback of feeling her slide down his shaft, but the next time she took him all the way inside.
“Go on,” he growled. “Take it.”
Yes. This. Oh yes, this. Keep it slow at first, feel heat and pressure build. Feel your head drop back. Feel your skin heat up and glow. Feel him inside you, yours for the taking. Feel want grow into demand, demand swell into need.
Feel.
She was gasping, trembling, overwhelmed, unsure what was coming or how to get there, knowing only that she had to have it. Ben flattened one hand at the base of her spine while the other skated over her hip. Once again his thumb pressed firmly against her clitoris. With her next downstroke her skin tightened and on the next, fire raced from her core along her nerves as she tipped over the edge, her swollen walls clenching around Ben’s length. Soft cries echoed in the truck’s back seat. Only when the release began to ebb did she realize they came from her.
When she opened her eyes she blushed, hard, because based on his face he’d watched . . . everything. She ducked her head to let her hair slip over her face.
“No,” he said, and tucked it behind her ear. “That was hot. That was very, very hot. Now do the same thing for me.”
The demand made her blush harder, but she eased back into the rhythm, and studied his face for cues. Faster, or slower? Hard, or soft?
Sweat trickled from his temple to his jaw. She remembered his response to her teeth, leaned forward and licked the bead from the stubble, then closed her teeth on his jaw. His big body shuddered under her, so she did it again, testing the edge of her teeth along his jaw, then more gently on his lower lip, and all the while she took him into her body with no other goal than returning the pleasure back to him, of making him feel what she felt.
His shaft throbbed inside her and his hands closed hard on her buttocks. His head tipped back, exposing his throat. She took advantage, biting the straining tendon before licking the hurt to soothe it. Emboldened, she braced her hands on his shoulders and dug her fingernails into the taut muscles. A shudder rolled through him. He’d held himself entirely still under her, but with the sting of her nails his hips lifted into her as she slid down.
Now she got it. Slow, but hard. Impact like hammer strikes with body and mouth, and she could make him lose control like she did. Her next moves matched his intensity, and moments later a blood flush bloomed on his cheekbones as he fought to keep his eyes open. Reveling in the delight and desire coursing through her body, she rode him until his arm locked around her hips as he pulsed inside her.
She eased forward to lie against his heaving chest until the tension in his muscles eased. There was so much power to this, female power.
No wonder this wasn’t allowed.
“Off,” he said.
Their bodies disengaged when she sat back on her heels at the far end of the bench seat. In one smooth motion he shifted upright, then out of the cab. His motions were hidden but she assumed he was removing the condom. He added something to the sack of trash generated by their picnic, then jerked his jeans up and buckled his belt.
Modesty kept her from leaving the truck until she found her bra and blouse on the floorboards and put them on. He turned his back to her, running his hand from crown to forehead before buttoning his shirt. She stepped into her panties, tucked in her blouse, smoothed down her skirt. Hands on his hips, he gazed across the creek at the fallow pastureland.
“Do you want to say hi to your parents? It’s a long drive out here without stopping in for a moment.”
He looked at her. A muscle jumped in his jaw. “No.”
For the first time that night an embarrassed flush swept up her neck, into her cheeks. Of course he wouldn’t want to stop in and say hello to his folks with the woman he’d spent two hours rolling around in the back seat of his pickup truck.
“I could stay in the truck,” she offered, trying to make it better.
A long moment passed, then without looking at her he slammed shut the tailgate. Metal clanged against metal, shocking the silent night air and startling her nearly out of her skin.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said. The breeze tossed her hair into her face; without thinking she quickly tamed it into a loose French braid she bound off halfway down her back. Arms braced on the tailgate, he watched her, but this time there was no pleasure in his eyes. Now they were the color of the sky during an icy cold snap. Blue frost.
“Ready?”
“Yes,” she said.
She opened the passenger door and climbed inside. He stepped up into the driver’s seat. They drove back to Silent Circle, music from an alternative rock station filling the silence between them. She directed him to the next driveway down, the direct road to the apprentices’ bunkhouse, and gripped the door as they jounced through the potholes.
“You’re angry,” she said. It was a guess, more than anything else. Elysian Fields didn’t just restrict choices in hair or dress or sexual activity. Everyone spoke with soft voices, said only kind words. Harsh feelings were reason for prayer, and certainly weren’t vocalized. Not that Ben was actually speaking. But whether he realized it or not, emotion carved the line of his jaw, the thin set of his mouth, the rigidity of his shoulders. And while he’d looked much the same thirty minutes earlier, just before she brought him to orgasm, this was different. Very different.
“Nothing to say.”
“All right.” She opened the passenger door. Hot air rushed from the truck’s undercarriage up her calves as she slid out of the truck.
He stopped her before she could close the door. “Rachel.”
She turned to look at him over her shoulder. The interior light cast his square jaw and forehead in planes and shadows. “You’re going to confuse it with love. It’s not. It’s sex.”
“Actually, I don’t think I will,” she said. “I know what love feels like. That wasn’t love.”
He looked out the windshield, then gave a little laugh, the flashing, daring smile’s dark and jaded cousin.
“Why did you do this?”
“Because I could,” he said with a shrug.
Her eyes narrowed slightly and her lips pursed as she considered this.
“That pisses off most girls, you know. It’s supposed to piss you off.”
“My train of thought derailed back at the idea of having sex just because you could. I’ll think about that for a while,” she said. She slid down to the parking lot’s dirt. “Thank you for a nice evening,” she said, and closed the passenger door.
By the time she opened the bunkhouse’s door, Ben’s truck was raising dust on the dirt road back to the highway.
Chapter Six
Ben stood outside No Limits watching the bouncers handle the door. A line contained by a red velvet rope stretched from the front door along the brick exterior to the corner nearest the parking lot. The door staff, both muscle-bound bruisers, maintained an orderly line and for the most part kept things under control in the bar. Ben and his partner Steve, another off-duty Galveston cop, were there for when things got really out of hand.
Nothing that happened at No Limits was as dangerous as setting foot on the
Bar H for the first time since he moved out. He’d taken Rachel out there because it was private and quiet, and to prove to himself that the ranch meant nothing to him. As casual as he’d been to her, he’d been facing off with danger down by the creek, in more ways than one. She smelled like danger, like thunderstorms and lightning and abandonment, a scent he’d learned to be wary of on the Bar H.
The door opened to let patrons out into the parking lot, and club music thumped into the hot night air. Ben glanced up, using eight years of experience to assess the sobriety of five women leaving the club. Four of the five teetered on their heels, but the one who shepherded her friends to a Jeep Cherokee and got behind the wheel was sober. Until Linc Sawyer bought the bar two years ago, No Limits had had a reputation for sex acts both inside and outside, and a higher-than-average number of DUI arrests and accidents for people leaving the premises. GPD logged more calls to No Limits than any other bar in the county. But Linc had fired the manager and all the bartenders, implemented strong policies about cutting off drunks, hired bigger bouncers, and added off-duty cops for consequence while improving the sound system and marketing the hell out of the place. As a result, the city’s hottest nightclub had the fewest number of incidents related to alcohol while gaining a reputation as the place to go for a hot hookup.
Most nights the work was five hours of boring punctuated by the occasional ninety seconds of action. Stand outside and use the uniform to discourage fights, drunk driving, and parking lot hookups. Steve relieved the tedium with a Facebook addiction. Ben scanned the line, then the parking lot, keeping his behavior-detection skills sharp.
A familiar blonde, tall, slender, and dressed in a halter top and tight black skirt, detached herself from a pack of similarly dressed friends, ducked under the rope with considerable grace for a woman in heels and a microskirt, and had a short conversation with the bouncer. He nodded, then when she headed across the parking lot for them, gave Ben and Steve one raised eyebrow. Ben didn’t need special training to determine her intent. Every cop on the force knew Juliette, or a woman like her.