BIG MAN

by Penny Wylder

  I get my bags situated in the truck bed which he’s left unlocked—I’m going to have to get used to that again, I think for a second before I remember that no, I don’t have to get used to it at all, since I’ll be leaving for the big city again in just a few more days. As I’m about to climb into the truck, a shout stalls me.

  “Sasha?” a guy hollers.

  There’s a whistle as I stop and turn around slowly.

  “It is,” the guy says again. I don’t recognize him. “Sasha Bluebell in the flesh.” He’s across the street, but when I make eye contact, he steps off the curb and starts strolling toward me. “Damn. You’ve filled out.” His gaze drops across my body. Unlike when Grant does that, this feels sleazy. Irritating as hell, especially when he licks his lips after.

  I don’t remember him, but that’s clearly becoming a running theme. “Excuse me. You are?” I ask, planting my hands on my hips.

  Unlike most people who seem annoyed or irritated when I don’t recognize them, this guy’s smirk only deepens. “Aaron Smith. You don’t remember me? We went to junior high together. Though…” He shakes his head with another grin—and another long, lingering look at my body, which makes me cross my arms across my stomach and glare. He’s still walking closer. Just a foot away now. “You definitely looked a lot different back then. Fair enough. Bet I did too.”

  You probably weren’t a scrawny creeper with greasy hair and a lecher’s grin, I think. Then again, what do I know. “Aaron. Nice to see you. Afraid I was just leaving.” I grab the handle of the passenger side door.

  He grabs my hand, pins it against the handle. “Aw. You leaving so fast? You only just got back into town from what I hear.”

  “Yeah, well, never was my favorite place,” I manage to growl between clenched teeth. “This is reminding me why.”

  His eyes darken. “What’s the matter, Sasha? Too good for us country boys now?” He leans in, and I catch a whiff of something horrible on his breath. Rotten egg scent. “Or do you just need a good roll in the hay as a reminder of how good we can be?” he asks with a wink.

  My stomach churns. I wrench my hand free of his and open my mouth to let him have it.

  But before I can, a deeper, angrier voice interrupts. “Leave her alone.”

  Grant.

  Aaron’s gaze darts over my head, and he drops his hand. Though he doesn’t back off. “What’s the matter, bored of the local fare, Werther? Got a taste for fancier gals now?”

  “None of your fucking business, Smith,” he replies. Unlike Aaron, his tone isn’t antagonistic or angry. Grant doesn’t need to threaten anyone to be intimidating, I realize. He just… is.

  “No need to snap. I wasn’t criticizing your taste.” Aaron winks again. “Big city girl is a looker, if not a keeper.”

  “You know what’s also none of your fucking business, Smith?” Grant asks. I turn to find him smiling serenely. Utterly unconcerned. Only his eyes give him away. There’s a red-hot fire burning in them. It’s the kind of glare no sane person would fuck with. “Ms. Bluebell. Who, by the way, is a person, and not the inanimate object you’re making her sound like right now.” His lip turns up, his nose lifting in a faint sneer of disdain. “Though with guys like you chasing her around this town, I’d hardly say anyone can blame her for high-tailing it out of here first chance she got.”

  My eyes widen, even as my heart beats faster. Fuck. No guy has ever defended me like that before.

  Aaron, for his part, is scowling now. But even he seems to know better than to fuck with Grant. He’s about a third of Grant’s size and doesn’t look like he’s got any muscle to speak of either. “Fuck you too, Werther,” he mutters as he turns away.

  “Great to see you as always,” Grant calls at his back, rolling his eyes and storming past me to toss his groceries in the truck. “Little fucker’s begging to get his ass wiped across this street if you ask me,” he mutters as he swings back around to open my door for me. He locks eyes with me for a second, something apologetic there. “Do me one favor. Don’t judge us all by that rotten shit-shaped apple.”

  “I don’t,” I answer without thinking. I can’t tear my eyes from his. Can’t stop my heart racing either, at the thought of the way he just defended me without even so much as lifting a finger. Though I know he would—I know he’d have kicked Aaron’s ass if he had to in my defense.

  That only makes it even hotter.

  There’s a long, tense moment as we stand there, breathing the same air, my head tilted back so I can stare up at him fully.

  Then Grant pulls away, strides back around to the driver’s side of the truck without waiting for me to climb in and shut the door behind me like usual.

  I pull myself into the cabin and try to ignore the way my fingertips quiver; my hands shake as I buckle myself into the seat.

  We take the drive back toward the farm in silence. I chew on the inside of my cheek, not sure how to break it. When we finally make the turn up the dirt road toward the farm itself, I take a deep breath and force the words out.

  “Thank you,” I say. “For defending me.”

  “I’d defend anyone from that asshole,” he replies. “Aaron Smith hasn’t been worth a damn since the second his poor mother was unfortunate enough to squat him out.”

  I laugh softly and shake my head. “Still,” I continue. “I… Thanks.”

  We drive up the dirt road in bumping silence for a while. I glance back down at my jeans—the same jeans that my ass showed in earlier this morning. The jeans that I traipsed around town in after Grant. No wonder Aaron tried to pull something.

  I shake my head. “I should be more careful, probably.”

  He glances sideways at me without responding, then guns it a little faster. The house pulls into sight up the road.

  “I mean…” I tug at my jeans. “Like, with my outfits and everything. I should be more careful about drawing attention to myself…”

  Grant doesn’t answer until we pull into a parking spot next to the cabin. When he puts the truck into park, he turns to cast a long look at me, gaze dropping to my jeans and then back to my face. “You’re right,” he says, reaching to undo his own belt.

  I blink. “What…”

  “You shouldn’t draw attention to yourself,” he speaks over me, faster, sounding frustrated now. Maybe even angry.

  I frown.

  “Drawing attention to yourself could cause trouble you never expected. More than you asked for.” His dark eyes catch mine, and there’s something white hot in them now. My belly clenches, even as my pussy responds by going tighter, feeling wet. “Drawing attention to yourself could make it really hard for a man like me to avoid bending your sexy ass over and fucking you right here in the dirt.”

  My mouth drops open. It takes a second for me to find my voice. When I do, I have to take a deep breath to keep it from trembling with desire. “You’re… being too forward, Mr. Werther.”

  He barks out a laugh at that, so sharp and close that it makes me jump in my seat slightly. “Mr. Werther. I think we’re past that now, Sasha. Or was that not you I caught this afternoon, sneaking around the house stealing peeks at my big dick in the shower?”

  My cheeks flare red-hot. Fuck. He saw that?

  He grins, as though to answer my internal question. “Tell me, did you like what you saw? You certainly hung around looking for long enough.”

  Unbidden, unable to help myself, my gaze drops to his lap again now. There’s a bulge in his jeans, though judging by his size earlier, it’s hard to tell if he’s already hard for me or if that’s just how fucking big he is, even when he’s not hard yet. “I…”

  “Or were you nervous?” He raises an eyebrow, studying me. “Scared of the big country man and his huge cock. Huh, Sasha?”

  I can’t do this. I can’t stay here or I’m going to say—or do—something I fucking regret. I grab my handle and fling the door open. Throw myself down from the passenger seat and ball up my fists. I try to think of a retort, something
to shout. But he’s right. I did sneak around watching him shower. I can’t exactly call him out for being crude now.

  Especially not when my pussy is wetter than it’s been in months at hearing him say all that. Hearing him talk about fucking me in the dirt, about how big his cock is…

  So I just turn my back and storm up toward the house.

  There’s a slam as Grant shuts his own door. “That’s right,” he calls across the yard. “Scared little city girl. Run on home to the big city before you get hurt out here in the real world.”

  I growl under my breath as I reach the front door. I fling it open with a crash and stomp inside, furious. I slam it behind me again, hard enough that the frame creaks in protest. I ignore it and stomp right through the house, grabbing the tool bag on the way through. Damn. I left the nails I need to finish the roof back in the truck.

  Doesn’t matter. I’ll work on something else in the meantime. Anything to get me out of this house and away from that asshole.

  Drawing attention to yourself could make it hard to avoid bending your sexy ass over and fucking you.

  I shiver. Dammit. Why are my panties so fucking wet at the thought of that? What kind of asshole talks like that to his business partner?

  That’s what we are after all. That’s all we are here. Business partners, trying to be professional while fixing up this hellhole and selling it to the highest bidder. He has no right to assume anything about me, to talk about fucking me, just because…

  Just because you perved on him in the shower?

  I grimace. All I did was peek a little. I was curious. So sue me. But he’s way out of line.

  That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I hole up next to the rosebush that’s taken over the tool shed out back and start to work trimming away the weeds that have interwoven between the thorny branches. If I don’t trim this thing back, it’ll take down the walls of this shed in a summer or two. So I sink myself into my repair work, and do my best to ignore any thoughts about the asshole I left standing beside his stupid truck.

  5

  Grant Werther

  Fuck. I probably took that too far. But what the hell was I supposed to say with her sitting right there in my truck smelling the way she does, so fucking intoxicating, and dressed in those barely-there booty shorts that make me hard just looking at her.

  It was hard enough shopping today without getting so hard I’d draw stares from every mile around. I had to keep avoiding her in the hardware store and again at the grocery, because the way her sexy, tight little ass played peekaboo in those jean shorts made me think about how tight she’d be if I bent her over the backseat of my truck and thrust my thick dick inside her wet little pussy…

  Fuck. There I go again.

  Dammit, Sasha. She drives me insane. No matter how much I try not to think about her, I can’t stop.

  Probably because she’s always right there in front of me, wearing some sexy, skimpy little shorts, bending over and flashing that pert, perfect ass of hers, or pouting in that way she has when she’s debating which tile she wants to lay where…

  Damn. Here I go again.

  I clench my fists. I’ll jerk one out in the shower later—the same way I’ve been aching to ever since I caught her peering through the shower door at me, trying to catch a glimpse of my dick. Seems like she caught a peek of more than she bargained for, to judge by the way she ran inside after I called her out in the truck.

  Well, good. She should run. I’m more than she can handle. In more ways than one. Size-wise, country-man-wise, hell, just every way. She’s not ready for a wild man. She likes tame, placid little city boys.

  She should run back to those boys before she winds up getting hurt. Before I wind up hurting her. Because I would. A city girl like her, god, the things I could do to her… She’d be in way over her head, and she’d lose her head, and then where would she be left? Pining for a country man who she never wants to see again, because just like this whole town, Sasha Bluebell has always been too damn good for me.

  I shake my head and finish hauling the last load of groceries and hardware supplies inside. Out back, through the little window over the kitchen sink, I spot Sasha out by the shed. She’s abandoned the roofing for now, probably because I still have all the nails she needs in here, and she’s clearly not ready to be in the same room as me for a while, let alone talk to me.

  But she’s still working, I’ll give her that. City Girl has some backbone after all. Not to mention some work ethic.

  For a moment I hesitate at the sink, just watching her reach up to yank down the stray vines growing in and between the rose bushes. She’s cutting back some of the roses too, but in a careful way, shows she knows what she’s doing. I’m surprised. I didn’t think that girl had any of her Mama in her—only her runaway Daddy. But watching her now, I can see the Maryanne my Pops was best friends with. The woman who owned and ran this whole farm by herself, without asking anyone for help. Even when Pops bailed her out of the hole she wound up in after a few too many crop blights, Maryanne was proud. She swore she’d buy the other half of the farm back off him one day.

  She’d have done it too, I have no doubt, if the cancer didn’t get her first. Scary how diseases like that creep up on you. One minute she’s hale as an ox, and scary as one to boot. Ready to take on Pops, me, hell, half the town if she had a mind to. Everyone hereabouts loved her—it’s part of the reason people blamed her daughter so much for running off and leaving her alone. But you catch Maryanne letting anyone in this town say one bad word about her baby Sasha in earshot, and you’d have had yourself a real fireworks display. Maryanne didn’t stand for any of that. She was proud of her daughter.

  My chest aches watching Sasha now. I shake my head and ignore it.

  Sasha isn’t her mama. That much is clear from her attitude, her city-slicker outfits, her fancy car, those ridiculous damn high heels she wore yesterday. At least she abandoned those today, thank Christ.

  But Sasha is getting more and more interesting to me nevertheless. Not least because just now, as I’m watching over the kitchen sink, she yanks a whole branch of crawling vine free and bends over to stuff it into the garbage bag she’s working with.

  Which provides me with a picture-perfect view of that ass, the bottoms of her cheeks peeking out the bottoms of her short, short little jeans.

  Fuck.

  I can feel my cock digging into the kitchen cabinets, I’m so hard.

  Unable to resist, I slide a hand down to my zipper.

  I shouldn’t. Especially not here. But Sasha is busy with her work. She tosses her head, long blonde curls flying, and fuck, what I wouldn’t give to have those curls wrapped around my fist. To pull them tight and watch her neck arch, her perfect cupid’s bow lips parting with a loud cry as I buried my cock inside her tight pussy.

  I unzip my fucking jeans.

  She keeps working, oblivious to the man in the kitchen.

  But it’s only fair, I think. She peeped on me in the shower. She stood there for at least a minute while I rinsed off the soap, keeping my cock in her view all the while because I knew what she came for, and to be honest, it turned me on to see her watching. But she started this.

  Besides, she’s not even naked right now.

  Fuck, imagine her naked.

  My cock is so hard that by the time I pull it out of my boxers, it’s practically jumping in my fist. I wrap my fist around the base and start to pump along my shaft, slowly, imagining taking Sasha by the hips right now. Pushing her down onto her hands and knees in the dirt where she’s working. Bending her over that bag she’s stuffing with leaves and weeds. Yanking those ridiculous excuses for shorts down until they puddled around her knees. Pushing aside whatever skimpy underwear she has on and positioning my big, thick cock right at the entrance to her soaking wet pussy.

  I’d make her beg first. Oh, yes. I’d make her scream for me. Tell me how much she wants me. Beg me to fuck her until she can’t walk straight.

  Onl
y then would I finally push the tip of my thick cock between her lips. Slide inch by inch into her pussy, and enjoy the way she moaned and groaned as her tight walls expanded to take me.

  I stroke myself faster, faster. It’s almost embarrassing how fast I near the edge, how I have to back off and move my hand slower for a while, think about running my hands over her ass and digging one hand into that luscious long hair, in order to stave off the peak from hitting too soon.

  Finally, though, I can’t hold it off any longer. I grab a wad of paper towels from the sink and come into them with a groan, teeth gritted, eyes still fixed on the window, on Sasha.

  She’s working away, completely oblivious. She has no idea the kind of effect she has on men.

  On me.

  I shake my head and sigh. I’d have thought that would satiate me somewhat. But I only feel more riled up than ever now. I want that girl something fierce. But damned if I’m going to take her. Not with all this mess going on.

  Don’t mix business and pleasure, I remind myself as I finish cleaning up and toss away the evidence. I cast one last glance at the window before I go to behave. To finish my chores for the day and head back out to sleep in the bed of my truck for another night.

  But that’s when I freeze.

  Because this time when I look outside, Sasha isn’t working.

  She’s turned sideways. For a moment I think she must have lost something. She’s bent double, hands on her head.

  Then she sags forward, onto her knees, and I fling myself at the door. Something’s wrong.

  I sprint out back, door crashing behind me. I’m already on the lawn by the time she drops to all fours.

  “Sasha!”

  She doesn’t respond. From the way she’s bent though, head almost touching the dirt, it can’t be good.

  I reach her side in a few seconds, and breathe a sigh of relief when she turns her head, at least far enough to study my shoes.