Two Cabins, One Lake: An Alaskan Romance

by Shaye Marlow

  It was hard to keep my mind on the lesson, though, with Gary standing a few feet away, watching me with all kinds of wickedness in his eyes. J.D. had started in on his spiel, but I couldn’t hear him past the eye-lock Gary and I had going on. I swear, he was fucking me with that look. I felt myself getting hot, just holding his gaze.

  “Well?” J.D. said. “Go.”

  My face flamed. “Uhm, could you say that again?”

  He breathed a heavy sigh in my ear. “So that’s how it is, huh? Would it help if I turned you the other way?”

  I nodded vigorously, and he turned me so my view consisted of a skeleton of a shed and two oblivious brothers. Nothing interesting there.

  Then we got down to it. I wormed my way around, twisted my head to get it out, and gained control of his arm. In a variation, I was encouraged to pound his balls before reaching a hand up over his back to drag him down by clawing at his eyes. I peeled out of his hold for the fifth time, and knocked him to the ground with a “Ha!” of triumph.

  “And what do you do when you get out of his hold?” Gary asked.

  “Either beat him up some more…or run,” I said grudgingly.

  Gary stepped up to us, looking me over critically. “What do you weigh? 120? 130?”

  I kept my mouth shut. If he wanted to know my weight, he’d have to drag it from my cold, dead…shit, I’d seen how well that worked with the chainsaw.

  He seemed unfazed by my reticence. “And—” he gently pinched my upper arm, where my bicep was supposed to be “—you don’t work out, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You guys are practicing for a bigger attacker, right? A man? Who’d probably be a few inches taller than you, stronger, and at least fifty pounds heavier?”

  “I suppose…”

  “Then, you run,” he said firmly. “You get them down, you find your opportunity, and you run. You might be able to take them down that first time, especially since you’ll have the element of surprise and they’ll underestimate you, but after that… Like Brett, they’re gonna be angry, and they’re not gonna pull their punches. So I know you wanna get in there and hurt somebody, but the smart thing would be to get the hell out.”

  J.D. nodded. “He’s right. Anybody at all trained will quickly get the upper hand, and even if they’re not…. You should escape when you get the chance.”

  I huffed. Here I’d been thinking I was doing well, that I was such a badass. And here they were telling me to run, because if I didn’t, I’d get hurt. It was ego-deflating.

  “There’s one hold I think you could benefit from knowing how to escape,” Gary said. “May I?” he asked. He directed the question at J.D., who waved him on while backing up a few steps. Then Gary looked at me, and raised a brow.

  It felt like a challenge, and it made my pulse race. “All right,” I said. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but that’d never stopped me before.

  “Lie down on the ground, face up.”

  I eyed him for a long moment, and then J.D. My brother shrugged, his mouth quirked in a little grin.

  I lowered myself to sit, and finally I lay back in the grass. The sky overhead was brilliant blue—it had really cleared up from the overcast morning.

  “Bend your knees, feet flat on the ground.”

  This was going to be awkward, I just knew it. But I bent my knees, and watched the man who’d smothered my orgasmic screams drop to his a couple inches from my toes.

  “I think it’s really useful,” he said, “for a woman to be able to get out from under an attacker who’s trying to assault her. So what I’m going to do is move up between your legs, and hold you down, and talk you through escaping me.”

  His long pause drew my eyes to his. “Spread your legs,” he said.

  Zing went my nerve endings. But my brain had different ideas: Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, this is not happening. Not in front of my brothers.

  I looked to J.D., but he just looked entertained.

  “I have it on good authority that lots of women have trouble escaping a man between their legs, holding them down,” Gary said. And of course the bastard was talking about me, on this same damn patch of grass the other day. He wanted to recreate that, and this time he wanted me to get away.

  “You’ll get to try to kick me,” he coaxed.

  Aw, hell, I was in. I spread my knees apart, and he wedged himself into the space between. He didn’t keep a respectable distance. Oh no, not Gary. Instead, he hooked his hands under my knees and pulled me flush against his thighs in a proprietary move that made me burn.

  Then he captured my wrists, and leaned over me, levering my forearms up until he had them pressed to either side of my head. He was blocking my light, my thighs were hooked open over his, his mouth was directly over my own, and I wanted so badly in that moment to misbehave. But my brothers were watching.

  “This is a pretty common hold, or so I’ve heard,” he said, obviously teasing me.

  I squirmed a little bit, but quit when it just rubbed me against him.

  “Okay, so how do you get out?” he asked.

  “I’d like to just get to the part where I’m kicking you.”

  “That’s coming,” he said with a curve to his lips. ‘Just like you did’, said his eyes. “Did your brother show you how to get out of a wrist hold?”

  I nodded, biting my lip as I watched his lips wrap around his words.

  “So you squirm your way out of my grip,” he said. “But what do you do with your legs?”

  “Kick you?”

  “Yes, but you need to give yourself some room to do that. So you need to dig in a heel, and push your butt back, curling to the side like a shrimp. Then do it with the other heel, to the other side. From there, you can get a foot on me to push me away, or if you get the room, kick the hell out of me.”

  He showed me what he meant by a ‘shrimp’, walking me through the heel-push move. “The key to this is explosive motion,” he said. “You want out of my hold, you throw yourself into the action. Fully commit. Fight fast and furious, and you kick your way free,” he said.

  Fast and furious, I thought I could handle.

  “Ready?”

  My heart-rate jumped as I stared up at him, my body tensing. I nodded.

  “Go.”

  I did just like he said. I yanked and twisted at my arms to free them, while simultaneously shoving backward across the grass. He stayed with me at first, but then I got ahead of him, got a foot on him, and wrenched an arm free. Then I jammed my other foot against his chest, and made him fly back off me.

  “Good! But that was your opportunity to run,” he said, jumping on me again. “Fight dirty,” he said, panting as he struggled to hold me down. “If you get a hand free, gouge at your attacker’s eyes, try your best to tear off their ear, scratch them, slap them, bite them, whatever it takes. Slam your heel into their crotch; that’ll disable them completely.”

  We wrestled across the ground again, and I pulled my punches at first, until I realized Gary seemed able to take—and deflect—just as much abuse as J.D. So we fought and rolled across the ground for real.

  Did I try to gouge out those gorgeous peepers, or crush his man-berries? Hell no; I had plans for those. But I put everything I had into throwing him, pummeling him, and getting away from his fine ass.

  Er, trying to get away. It seemed like the slipperier I got, the harder he tried. He clung to me like a booger, hanging on even when I’d writhed myself face-down and slammed my butt up into his belly. He just made an “Oof!” sound, and laughed breathlessly as he hung onto me like I’d hung onto his fish.

  I didn’t feel like laughing. My skin was raw from Gary’s handling, but it just seemed to add to a growing fire. A tingling heat permeated my blood, my muscles. The adrenaline rushing through my veins demanded action. I felt like a volcano fit to erupt, the river of lust inside me slamming up against the dam of my brothers’ observation. I wanted to jump my loud neighbor so bad, it wasn’t even
funny.

  I finally squirmed free, and the contact between my knee and the side of Gary’s head was more accidental than anything else. He fell sideways, and I lunged to my feet, more than ready for this practice session to end. My skin felt chafed and tingly, my breasts full and aching, and my panties were a mess. Any more of this sensual torture, and I would not be held responsible for my actions.

  Gary shook it off as he had done at least a half-dozen times already, and climbed to his feet.

  J.D. stepped forward to clap him on the back. “Where’d you learn to fight?” he asked.

  Gary shrugged. “Here and there,” he said. Then, catching me watching him, he admitted, “I was in the marines for nine years.”

  “Oorah!” Rory called from the shed.

  Gary waved at him and looked over at me.

  I was watching him with lust still pounding through my veins. It was rushing through me with such force, I could hear it, and taste it, and God, could I feel it. The hot ache between my thighs was verging on pain, and I didn’t think I could tolerate even one more touch from him. Not unless he was going to finish what he started.

  The way he looked at me said he maybe had some understanding of what I was going through.

  I was mentally dragging Gary up to my loft when Zack yelled from the shed. Gary walked over, and tossed him up a tape measure that’d been left next to the chop saw. A few seconds later, Zack yelled down a request for a 2X4 cut a certain length. Gary cut one, and passed it up to my brothers. Then he did it again. Within a matter of minutes, someone had given him J.D.’s hammer and belt, and suddenly my loud neighbor was pounding nails into the frame of my shed.

  I watched with bemusement as this happened, and then watched him surreptitiously for the rest of the afternoon. Gary seemed competent in his work, and absorbed in it, which made observing him a little easier.

  Around 3:30, at the height of a hot day, his shirt came off, and I almost dropped the gallon jug of water I was holding. He was just so… eye-catching. He had muscles that I now recognized as having been chiseled by the military, highly functional without being overly bulky. He had a nice thickness to his shoulders. And a tan. And that happy trail…

  Before that moment, I would have said there was nothing sexy about construction. But I guess I just hadn’t seen the right people doing it. I was unable to look away.

  The way that scarred leather belt slung low across his hips. The way he handled his hammer; the commanding way he sank a nail in two solid thumps. The sweaty muscles of his arms and shoulders flexing.

  The way his eyes sparked when he caught me looking.

  Oh God, that was the same look he’d had on his face last night, when he’d been watching me cum.

  “You might wanna close your mouth,” J.D. whispered to me as he passed, “before you catch flies.”

  I snapped it shut, and saw Gary’s mouth curl as he turned away.

  I was feeling overly warm by that point, but I managed to resist the impulse to take off my own shirt. And for the next couple hours, I tried my best to aid my brothers with such male perfection on display. More like, I tried not to run into things and stumble over flat ground.

  Yeah, I wasn’t very successful at either. By six o’clock, they were putting the last screws into the metal roof, and I was so hot and bothered, I couldn’t see straight. I pretty much fled into the cabin to make the men dinner.

  I wasn’t much for sexist bush roles bullshit, but when men made me a shed, I made them dinner. As I simmered red sauce and boiled water for spaghetti, I longed for just five minutes alone with my vibrator. But I wasn’t going to get five minutes alone; not so long as my brothers were here. Through the window, I glimpsed the muscles of Gary’s back flexing, the amazing way he filled out the seat of his jeans, and I groaned.

  They finished up with the shed about the same time I had the food ready to go. I watched as they filed in, my greedy gaze absorbing the sight of Gary all sweaty and streaked with dirt and sawdust. Was it weird that even in that state, especially in that state, I found myself wanting to lick every square inch of him?

  He used my bathroom to clean up and replace his shirt—which made my eyes so very, very sad—and they all gathered around the counter where I’d set up the buffet line.

  “Is this moose spaghetti?” Rory asked, having been the first to fill his plate and take a big bite.

  “Yup.”

  Gary’s eyebrows lifted a bit. “Did you do the hunting?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I’m as much a hunter as you are a fisher.”

  Rory snorted, but otherwise made no comment.

  Gary filled his plate and sat down, and I was left with the seat directly across from him—after I scrounged up one more chair and shoved my way in between my brothers. The fit was tight, and Zack wasn’t at all circumspect with his elbows. I wrestled the parmesan from him, and then dumped a quarter-inch over the top of my meal.

  “So Gar,” started Zack, “where’d you learn the carpentry?”

  “My dad was a contractor,” he said. “I did a lot of odd jobs for him as a teen.”

  My eyebrows drifted upward. In the couple questions they’d asked him, my brothers had found out more about Gary than I had in two weeks. Maybe if you were to actually talk to him, and ask him questions, my inner critic sniped. But why would I want to do that? This was physical attraction, and that was it.

  But I still listened with interest as he told them he’d gone into the marines straight out of high school. “I was infantry,” Gary said.

  Rory grunted. “Deployed?”

  “Four times.”

  “Afghanistan?” Rory asked.

  “Yes.” Gary gave the short answer without looking up from his food. His shoulders seemed tense, and he had a look on his face, a hard, slightly bitter, slightly sad expression. It wasn’t one I’d seen on him yet, and it pulled at me. I found myself wanting to erase that look from his face. In entirely physical ways, of course.

  J.D. maybe saw it, too, and he changed the subject. “You ever buy that old rifle you were talking about getting from Mike Effey?” he asked, turning to look at me. “And what was it again?”

  I started to smile. “Yeah, I did. It’s a Weatherby Mark V. A real pretty one.”

  Zack hooted and rubbed his hands together. “Shooting after dinner!”

  I wasn’t going to argue with that. It was tradition that, during their visits every summer, they put a healthy dent in my ammo supply. Plus, they’d built me a shed.

  “You gonna join us Gar?” Zack asked.

  Gary looked at me. “Sure,” he said.

  And that’s how we wound up in my side yard with a table full of guns. I went and got earplugs while Zack raided my gun closet. He brought out the handguns first, and I helped him get them laid out while Rory and J.D. played gopher and set up a target. They went about fifty feet out, past the closest couple of trees, in a direction I knew I had no neighbors.

  We started with my Glock 19, a 9mm semi-automatic. My brothers went first, each firing a couple rounds using their own targets. They gathered around, ribbing each other for missed shots, obviously feeling manly with a gun in their hands and having refused my sissy hearing protection. I watched with arms crossed and hearing muffled while they gave a decent showing.

  Then Gary. His hands seemed as competent curled around the black steel of the pistol as they had been on his hammer. And as they had been on me last night. His actions were quick, efficient, his fingers deft as he loaded and slid in the clip.

  Really and truly, he looked like he’d been born with a gun in his hands. And he made that target his bitch, firing a nice tight grouping around the bullseye. He was a better shot than my brothers, easy.

  He reloaded for me, a task which each man had been doing for himself. Which meant he was either being courteous, or he didn’t think I knew what I was doing.

  He handed me the gun, muzzle-down, and I tried to ignore the way my body ignited at the barest brush of his fin
gers. “Don’t hurt yourself now,” he said as he stepped back.

  Ah.

  I held the gun out from me, handling it gingerly. I looked at it as if it baffled me. “Do I have to cock it?” I asked.

  My brothers snickered.

  Gary didn’t know exactly what was going on, but of course he knew that something was up. When I just continued to give him my best dumb blonde look—and with practice, it’d become pretty damn good—he said, “You have to pull the slide back for the first shot. That there on top,” he explained at my continued apparent cluelessness. “It’ll load a round.”

  I did so, jumping a little when it clicked. I looked at him with big eyes. “And…does it have a safety? Is it off?”

  My brothers elbowed each other.

  Gary shook his head again. “No safety. Just point and shoot.”

  I gave him a wide-eyed, simpering smile. And then I spun around and emptied the clip into the target. It had a bit of a kick, but I handled it. One didn’t grow up with three brothers without toughening up.

  The slide locked open, signaling that I was outta ammo. Hooting, Rory jogged out to retrieve my target. He brought it back and slapped it down on the corner of the table.

  Bullseye, every single shot.

  I shot Gary my triumphant look, the one that said, ‘Take that, sucka!’

  He looked at my target for a long moment, and then he looked at me. And if his glances all day had been hot, this one ought to have been measured in Kelvin. That look said ‘I wanna fuck you right where you stand’. The lust he communicated with that one glance made my whole body sizzle.

  This wasn’t what I’d planned. I’d kinda wanted to humiliate him, embarrass him, laugh in his face.

  Gary didn’t look embarrassed. He looked turned on.

  We went through the rest of the handguns this way. My brothers would shoot, and then Gary would shoot better, and then I’d put them all to shame. And every time that target came back with the center shot out of it, Gary gave me that look, and I got just a little bit hotter.

  Then the brothers carried the handguns inside, and came back out with my rifles.

  That’s when Gary’s eyes flickered. I wouldn’t have noticed this if we hadn’t been engaged in a hot bout of eye-fucking, but we were, and I did. His shoulders regained just a little of their tension as Zack lifted the Remington Model 700 with scope.