by Cat Johnson
Chapter Eleven
Jack had been the absolutely perfect date. He’d arrived exactly on time. Not too early so she wasn’t ready and not too late so she was afraid she’d been stood up. He’d brought her a beautiful bouquet of white lilies and opened every door and pulled out every chair. He’d chosen just the right restaurant too. Not so expensive she felt obligated to him in any way, but not so cheap she’d think he was stingy either.
So why now, as he walked her to the backdoor of the bar where the entrance to her apartment was, did she fear what was probably going to come next?
Jack stepped in close and raised his hand to her face. He stared deep into her eyes and smiled. “They’re green.”
His comment took her by surprise. “Yeah.”
He frowned a bit. “Hmm. Why have I never noticed that before?”
The memory of how Trey had surprised her by knowing the color of her eyes the day before they left for Kosovo hit her.
Was that really just a few days ago? It seemed more like a year. So much had happened between them. And why was she thinking about Trey?
Damn it. This date was so she could move on and forget him. Although, if that was really the case, she probably shouldn’t have picked his best friend to forget him with. She looked up at Jack. What the hell was she doing?
He lowered his head a bit. “Carly, can I kiss you?”
Her heart rate sped with nervous energy as she nodded. Jack lowered his mouth to hers and pressed his lips softly to hers. He was a good kisser, both sober and drunk.
His gentle, almost chaste kisses lulled her into a sense of security. This was fine. Pleasant actually. She could do this. She could like Jack. Though why the hell was she thinking so much? She didn’t remember being able to think at all the first time Trey had kissed her, or the second, for that matter.
Jack stepped even closer, his leg between hers now. He wrapped his big hands around her head and tangled them in her hair. As he kissed her harder, his lips parted and his tongue sought hers. She stiffened at first but forced herself to relax, allowing him to kiss her the way he wanted.
Then he broke away and leaned his forehead against hers with a short laugh. “You’re not doing such a good job, darlin’.”
“Huh?”
“Of pretending you like me. You’re trying, but you’re not really here with me, are you?”
She shook her head. “Jack—”
“Shhh. It’s all right.” He placed one finger across her lips to silence her. “I don’t blame you. If I was a woman, hell, I’d be in love with him too.”
He was talking about Trey. How did he know? She shook her head again to deny it, but then the tears started and there was nothing she could do about it. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, darlin’.” He wrapped her in his arms and rubbed her back. “Let’s go upstairs. You put on your favorite pj’s, I’ll tuck you on the couch under a nice blanket and then I’ll make you some tea. We’ll talk about you and him and what we’re gonna do about it.”
Through her tears she grabbed onto the one topic that wouldn’t make her cry harder. “You know how to make tea?”
Jack smiled and took the keys out of her hand. “Darlin’, I’m Southern. We invented tea, or was that the mint julep?”
Across the parking lot in his truck with the lights turned off, Trey watched Jack kiss Carly then lead her up the stairs to what he assumed was her apartment. The fact he was basically stalking them made him realize he was a sick, sick man, both mentally and now physically too. He watched the light go on first in what looked like a living room and then in her bedroom, before she closed the blinds.
He closed his eyes and banged his head against the steering wheel. What the hell was he going to do? Jack and Carly were up there together doing who knew what. Actually, that wasn’t true. Trey knew what.
They were doing what he should be doing with her right now. What they’d done together in Kosovo. What they could be doing together right now if he hadn’t acted like a stubborn ass and pretended their time together meant nothing more to him than a mission.
After a few more bangs of his forehead, he left his head resting there against the truck’s steering wheel.
Feeling miserable and exhausted, he must have dozed off in the darkness. He awoke with a start to the sound of someone knocking on his truck window. Groaning, he saw it was Jack staring at him through the glass. He was so busted. How was he going to explain this?
Trey rolled down the window with what he was sure was a very guilty look on his face. “Hi.”
Jack shook his head and laughed. “You two stubborn fools are just incredible.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You and Carly, that’s what. You’re in love with her and either too stupid to realize it or too stubborn to admit it.”
Trey sat there, chastised, and let Jack call him both stupid and stubborn. What could he say? It was true. He glanced at the clock. They’d been in her apartment for nearly two hours. What did it matter? Even if he did admit his feelings, to himself and to her, it was too late now.
Folding his arms, Jack twisted his lips into a scowl. “Well? At least admit I’m right.”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I really am happy for you two. I know you care about her and you’ll be good to her. She deserves a nice guy like you.”
Jack shook his head. “Get out of the truck.”
Obviously Jack was going to hit him again. That was all right. He deserved it. Getting out, he braced himself for the blow.
“Get up those stairs, you fool.” Holding the door open for him, Jack pointed toward the entrance to Carly’s.
Trey shook his head. “I don’t… Why?”
“Because she doesn’t want me, Einstein. She wants you. She always has.”
Trey swallowed hard and saw a ray of hope for the first time since Jack had told him about his date with Carly. “You and she… You didn’t…”
“No. Even if she hadn’t been bawling her eyes out over you, I still wasn’t going to sleep with her tonight. It’s our first date, plus it’s only two nights after she’d been with you. That’s not how I roll, Trey. You know that.”
Still in shock, he managed a nod. “I know.”
Jack continued. “Besides, when she’s kissing me, I know she’s thinking about kissing you. I’m not willing to be anyone’s second choice.”
God, Jack really was a nice guy. “But you said you were falling in love with her. You were talking about marriage.”
He shrugged. “Hey, I’m a lover. What can I say? I fell in love with every girl on the pep squad in high school too. I’ll get over her, but you better treat her right or so help me God—”
“You’ll punch me again?” Trey gingerly touched his bruised chin.
“Yeah, only this time maybe I’ll actually knock you down.” Jack laughed and then got serious again. “You deserve her more than I do, you know.”
Trey shook his head. “I doubt it. Why would you say that?”
“She told me how that day, when I didn’t know the color of her eyes, you knew. I guess I was always too busy looking at other things.”
To be perfectly honest, Trey himself had looked at those other things too.
Jack grabbed him in a hug and then shoved him toward Carly’s door. “Now hurry before she falls asleep. Poor thing’s all plum tuckered out from crying over you.”
“Thanks, Jack.” Slamming the driver’s side door, Trey realized he’d left the key in the ignition and the truck unlocked. Not caring, he ran across the parking lot.
After sprinting up the stairs two at a time, he was faced with Carly’s door. Steeling his nerves, he knocked.
“Did you forget something, Jack?” She opened the door, looking just as Jack had described her, plum tuckered out with eyes red from crying over him. And he had never been so happy to see her.
“Hi.”
Her eyes opened wider at the sight of Trey standing at her door rather than Jack. “
Um, hi.”
Suddenly Trey felt like a shy schoolboy who didn’t know what to say to a girl. “Can I come in?”
Carly backed up enough for him to step through the doorway. Once inside, he couldn’t wait anymore. He just spilled it all.
“Jack says you’re in love with me. Is it true?” She looked horrified, so he rushed on. “Because I really hope it is true. Carly, I’m so in love with you it hurts to breathe.”
Her face crumbled as she started to cry and flung herself at him at the same time. Wrapping his arms around her, he buried his face in her hair.
“Is this a yes?” He mentally crossed his fingers, hoping, until she nodded against his chest.
Relieved beyond all comprehension, Trey pulled far enough away to capture her mouth with his. She returned his kiss with the intensity of a drowning woman looking for oxygen.
When he finally had to stop for air, she laughed tearfully. “That’s what a kiss is supposed to feel like.”
Confused, Trey frowned. “I agree with you. Why? Was there ever any question about that?”
Carly shook her head and touched his face. “No, not really.”
About the Author
As an award-winning author of contemporary erotic romance in genres including military, cowboy, ménage and paranormal, Cat Johnson uses her computer so much she wore the letters off the keyboard within a year. She is known for her creative marketing and research practices. Consequently, Cat owns an entire collection of camouflage shoes for book signings and a fair number of her consultants wear combat and cowboy boots for a living. In her real life, she’s been a marketing manager, professional harpist, bartender, tour guide, radio show host, Junior League president, sponsor of a bull-riding rodeo cowboy, wife and avid animal lover.
To learn more about Cat Johnson, please visit www.catjohnson.net. Send an email to [email protected] or join her MySpace at www.myspace.com/authorcatjohnson or her Facebook at www.facebook.com/authorcatjohnson. Follow Cat on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cat_johnson.
Look for these titles by Cat Johnson
Now Available:
Rough Stock
Studs in Spurs
Unridden
Bucked
The heart wants what it wants…
Rough Stock
© 2009 Cat Johnson
Bronc riders Mason and Clay have shared both good times and bad as best friends, but they never expected to share their boss’s daughter, April. Can two friends love one woman, body and soul, without it destroying them?
The heart wants what it wants. For April that means not choosing between the two cowboys she loves, no matter how wrong it may seem inviting them both into her bed.
Life sends the three lovers in opposite directions, but a devastating injury brings them all together again. Their relationship now is no less bittersweet—or complicated—than before. Once severed, old ties leave scars that are tough to heal…
This book has been previously published and has been revised and expanded from its original release.
Warning: When you choose a man who thinks 8 seconds is a long time, perhaps you need two of them. In other words: Watch out, this book contains hot ménage sex with two cowboys and the woman they love.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Rough Stock:
The sudden appearance of pale, silky, feminine stomach stopped Clay Harris dead in his tracks. His greedy eyes devoured the smooth, firm skin shadowed beneath the newfound lushness of her breasts.
He swallowed hard. “April Elizabeth Carson. What do you think you’re doing?”
She paused to look at him, one hand stopped in mid-motion as it tugged the hem of her shirt up over her bra—her white, thin, lacy bra. “What? It’s hot. I’m going swimming.”
Clay’s best friend, Mason Smith, shot him a meaningful glance, a wide-eyed look of fear mingled with anticipation. “Um, shouldn’t you go home and change into a suit first?” Mason suggested.
“Why? The house is so far and I’m hot now.” Her guileless pale blue eyes proved she didn’t have a clue what she was doing to them.
Clay knew exactly what Mason was thinking when he made the suggestion about the swimsuit. Their good old buddy April, who they’d met when they came to work for her father five years ago, was hot all right, but not in the way she’d meant when she said it. She had filled out over the past school year. April had turned eighteen and out of the blue transformed from an underweight, gangly teenage girl whom they had always treated like one of the guys into someone who was all female. One look at her and all of her new shapely curves and there was no denying it.
Clay swallowed hard. She was going to whip off her T-shirt and shorts and dive into that lake in nothing but her bra and underwear, like she had done at least once or twice each summer whenever the heat got unbearable. But this time, unlike the others, his raging eighteen-year-old male hormones would not be able to ignore it. Nor would she be able to ignore his hard-on, which was already starting to wake up just at the thought.
“Shit,” Mason drawled out softly next to him as April did exactly as they feared, and what Clay suspected they both secretly wanted.
Stripped down to white bikini undies and the lace bra that looked nothing like last year’s plain cotton tank-top style one, April pulled the elastic band out of her ponytail to release a tumbling cascade of long blond curls, and then dove into the clear lake water.
Hell, this was way better than sneaking peeks inside the skin magazines when the store clerk wasn’t looking, but April was their friend. Now that she had turned into a woman, enjoying ogling her just seemed wrong, not to mention very weird.
Clay felt the already stifling Oklahoma heat around him ratchet up another notch. He wasn’t convinced it had anything to do with the weather, even though it had never been quite this hot during the last week of the school year before. Now was a hell of a time for the weather to go wonky, Clay thought, as he and Mason watched April’s progress.
She swam beneath the surface, gliding as easily as a fish through the water, before surfacing with a splash and a shake of her long, wet hair. Fish? Hell, she was more like a mermaid, and every man’s wet dream.
“Aren’t you two coming in?”
Hands buried deeply in both pockets, Mason surreptitiously adjusted himself within his jeans and glanced quickly at Clay. “Um, we need to get to the farm and start breaking that green horse your daddy just brought in or he’s gonna tan our hides.”
Barely comprehending Mason’s excuse over his own lusty thoughts, Clay nodded at whatever his friend had just said.
“Fine. I’ll get out. It’s no fun swimming alone.” With a pretty pout worthy of a centerfold, April stood, the water sluicing off satin skin that Clay longed to run his hands over, his tongue too while he was at it.
She began walking toward them, her water-soaked bra and panties so see-through she might as well have been wearing nothing. Though somehow this was more enticing.
Clay swallowed again and nearly choked. He realized he had no spit in his mouth, even though he seemed to have plenty of sweat on his palms. He wiped them on the denim covering his thighs while what he really longed to do was reach down and adjust himself, because the seam of his stiff jeans was not doing his now wide-awake hard-on any good.
Before them, April bent over to grab her clothes off the grass, revealing the tops of two creamy breasts. Clay had barely noticed the plump globes above the scalloped edge of her bra before. He’d been too distracted by the dusky traces of her nipples through the wet material, not to mention the barely visible outline of the pale curls beneath her undies that proved she was a natural blonde.
Mason hissed out a breath next to him. “Crap, Clay. This just ain’t right.”
Clay didn’t take his eyes off April as she dressed, wiggling and jumping to get her clothes on over wet skin. The act was somehow as enticing as a striptease, only in reverse. As April sat on the grass to pull her boots on, Clay asked, “What ain’t right?”
Mas
on, the dark-haired, brown-eyed compliment to Clay’s paler dirty blond, blue-eyed appearance, glowered. “You know damn well. She’s our friend.”
A quick sideways glance told Clay that in spite of his sudden moral protest, Mason hadn’t taken his eyes off of April either. Clay grinned at him. “Yeah, but now she’s our really hot female friend.”
Mason finally broke his gaze from the sight that consumed them both to look at his buddy. He let out a resolution-filled sigh. “Yeah, she is, but how do you reckon we decide which one of us gets to take a shot at having her?”
This cowboy is looking for more than just an eight-second ride.
Bucked
© 2009 Cat Johnson
Mustang Jackson does two things well—ride bulls and love women. So the injury that takes him out of the arena leaves him only one way to make a living. Unfortunately, getting paid to be a stud in front of the camera isn’t as fun as private conquests. When he catches sight of little Sage Beckett, minus the glasses, braces and pigtails he remembers, doing time in his hometown suddenly gets a lot more interesting.
Sage had a crush on Michael long before he started using that ridiculous nickname “Mustang”. Though from what she’s overheard about his string of buckle bunnies, the man more than lives up to it. In the past he always looked right through her. Now that he’s home again, she’s determined to capture and tame this wild stallion, no matter what it takes.
She intends to satisfy her curiosity and move on, but with every touch she’s less sure she’ll ever purge him from her system. Once corralled in her arms, Mustang finds himself thinking that domestication may not be so bad after all.
Except, once she finds out about his side job, she may not stick for the next go-round.
Warning: Contains one well-hung cowboy riding much more than just bulls, some ménage action in front of and behind the camera, some whips and chains and some red-hot cowboy loving.