by Vonna Harper
“You lived with her the whole time you were growing up?”
“Yes. Hard for you to comprehend, is it? I suppose if the authorities had known about me, they would have removed me but maybe not. My mother— Let’s say she had connections.”
Why are you telling me? What makes me dif—
“We moved a lot the first few years,” he continued. “Most of the places are a blur in my mind, and I prefer not to go back there mentally anyway. Of course when I was little I didn’t know that what my mother did to put food on the table was frowned upon in polite society and against the law. I just thought it was neat that I got to wear ‘in’ clothes.”
“No one at school knew?”
“If they did, I wasn’t aware. I remember… Once some boys asked who my mother’s sugar daddy was. I think most people assumed she’d inherited money. I got good grades and didn’t get in trouble so didn’t make waves.”
“But as you got older, you put things together?”
“Oh yeah. The light finally went on but it happened over time, bits and pieces of understanding so there was never a single traumatic moment. I accepted reality.”
His hand lay on the railing so she covered his with hers. As before she kept the contact light, impersonal. Underneath, her emotions churned. She was dimly aware of her body’s need to connect with his, but so far her reaction in that department remained under control.
“Did she love you?” she asked.
“In her own way, and as much as she was capable of.” His muscles under her fingers tightened. “By her own admission, she was a bitch in heat. She couldn’t help the way she was wired.”
Raised by someone without the capacity for true love, just like her. “She’s dead?”
“Cancer. She fought it for three years, but the beast won.”
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen, a man.”
She would have debated the issue if she hadn’t been concerned she’d distract him. “What did you do after she died?”
“Went to college. Maita, my mother made an obscene amount of money doing what she did. And she was a hell of a good money manager. We lived well, and she’d bought several acres near Sacramento about the time I started junior high. She had a house built, and I continued to live there while I went to college. Then developers started knocking on the door asking me to sell the land. I finally did.”
“And you used the proceeds to start the contracting business?”
Kade explained that he’d used his degree in animal husbandry to secure a job with a vet whose job it was to monitor the health of rodeo stock. The more he learned about the sport and what it took to make it succeed, the more convinced he became this was for him. After all, he had no one to account to. The proceeds from selling the property had been making money in investments, and he used that to buy out a contractor who wanted to retire. “I’ve never regretted the decision,” he said. “But this isn’t the whole story.”
She’d known it wasn’t.
“As you’ve learned,” he continued, “I have two sides. This is the part no one else knows about.”
“But people—women anyway—know what you do beyond feed livestock.”
“True. But they don’t understand why. I don’t think any of them cared.”
Leaning against his side, she draped his arm around her shoulder and wrapped her arm around his waist. They continued to stare at the livestock. “I do.”
He took a deep breath. “From the moment you told me about your childhood, I realized you’d found something you trusted about me. I control a lot of women’s bodies, but they don’t hand me their minds, and I don’t ask for them. With you, it was different.”
“Maybe it’s because we love the same thing.” She indicated the Brahmas. “The world those creatures represent.”
He didn’t immediately respond. She hadn’t considered the explanation before, but now it made sense. Only someone willing to supply bucking stock understood why she felt compelled to try to ride that stock. But their common ground went even deeper, back to their childhoods.
“You didn’t say anything about your upbringing after I’d dumped on you,” she said softly. “It bothered me.”
“I knew it did.”
She’d opened her mouth to ask what had kept him silent when he continued. “Maita, I learned a great deal about female sexuality from my mother because she didn’t try to keep her career from me, but it wasn’t just her. I mentioned that her friends were also hookers.”
“Yes.”
“My mother got sick about the time I became aware of the layers of complexity behind what she did. Just when my hormones kicked into high gear, the focus shifted from sex for a living to trying to keep her alive. Eventually she couldn’t work, but her friends stepped in to help keep us going. When one of them needed a reliable male around for protection, I filled the bill.”
“Oh.” Brilliant statement, just brilliant.
“I went from playing bodyguard to sometimes watching, especially when things got kinky.”
“The-the men didn’t mind?”
“They weren’t given a choice. Damn! I don’t know what’s so damn hard about telling you this.”
“Your mother was dying.”
Maybe it was her fingers pulling his shirt out of his waistband so she could stroke his flesh that kept him going. Maybe briefly standing on tiptoe and brushing her lips over his jawline helped the most. As the night marched on, and she felt more and more as if she was melting into him, he spoke of women who did the only thing they could to distract a young man first from his mother’s slow dying and then the aftermath of her death. They brought him into their world. And when he showed interest in the edgier, more dangerous aspects of hooking, they encouraged him. Under their tutelage, he learned the finer art of bridging the gap between capture fantasies and the real thing. Because they insisted on it, he learned how to judge a woman’s limits and never took anyone too far. He went from observer to student to practitioner to master of the dark arts.
“They trusted me because they’d known me since I was a child. I respected them,” he said. “I learned that the bar measuring so-called civilized behavior can be moved by degrees—for everyone’s pleasure.”
“And your profit,” she ventured.
He shrugged and squeezed her shoulder. “Eventually. That kind of evolved. Now you know why I’m where I am today.”
“You’ve told me everything?”
Soon they’d be heading into morning, but she had no more intention of pointing that out to him than she wanted those specifics. By now all the Brahmas were down and sleeping. A couple were snoring. Her shoulder had gone numb from the weight of his arm, and his flesh must be sore from her constant rubbing. “You know it all,” he muttered. “Every dirty secret.”
“It isn’t dirty. It’s been your reality all your life.”
“Maybe. How do you feel?”
“I’m trying to—” A yawn stopped her. She stifled it, but the second one came without warning. She couldn’t feel her legs. Although the day had been hot, she’d started to shiver. “Kade, I can’t think,” she admitted.
* * * * *
The rodeo organizers had given him the key to a groundskeeper’s place. It consisted of a small kitchen-living room and even smaller bedroom barely large enough for the double bed crammed into it. Still, Kade had determined that it was better suited for two people than her trailer. Although he’d been punch-drunk with the need to sleep himself, he’d all but carried Maita to it. He hadn’t known whether she’d agree to come in. When she did, he told himself at least she hadn’t been disgusted by his revelations.
Of course she might have been too tired to fully comprehend.
After using the bathroom, she slumped onto the bed and started to remove her boots. He finished the job then thanked her when she did the same for him. They both acted half-drunk as they stripped off the rest of their clothes. He’d pulled back the thin coverlet and shown her that at
least the sheets were clean.
“Wonderful,” she’d said on the tail of another yawn. “Better than sleeping standing up, which I think I could do tonight.”
They lay down facing each other, legs intertwined, her snuggled against him. He remembered starting to stroke the small of her back then nothing.
Now he was awake. Lying in the darkness, he couldn’t tell how much time had passed or what had interrupted his sleep. Beside him, she slept soundlessly.
Why? Why did I tell her what I did, dump everything?
Don’t you know? some alter personality demanded. You dumb shit, you’ve fallen in love.
Rocked to the core he started to sit up. His exhausted body refused to comply so he settled back into the mattress and lightly ran his hand over Maita’s spine down to the swell of her buttocks. He knew the feel, the texture, of her flesh. Well, why wouldn’t he? She’d been his, completely.
His mind seemed to skip a beat, then splinter. Thoughts piled one upon the other. Countless women flitted into view only to evaporate. They were tall and short, thin, muscular, heavy-set. All were naked. All wore restraints he was responsible for.
This was his life, woman after woman after woman. Endless delights. Control and power. Breasts and clits, thighs and bellies—all for him.
Until they left.
Until he left them.
* * * * *
“Kade? Kade, it’s morning.”
Technically dawn had just begun to break, but Maita knew he would soon have to go to work. She felt hungover from lack of sleep, and memories of what he’d told her last night had only begun to seep through the mental fog.
When he continued to lay there with his eyes closed, she crawled out of bed and used the bathroom. Maybe she shouldn’t feel self-conscious about being naked, but thinking he might need back his space and privacy after everything he’d revealed, she reached for her clothes on the floor.
“Are you leaving?” he asked.
“I need a shower and clean clothes.”
“And once you’re ready for the day, what then?”
His eyes said the question wasn’t a casual one, but she didn’t have an answer for him. After a moment, he got up and went into the bathroom to urinate. By the time he rejoined her in the miniscule room, she’d put on her blouse over her naked breasts.
“You can’t handle it?” he asked. He seemed unconcerned with his nudity. “Learning my mother’s friends taught me how to use pain to enhance climaxes is more than you needed to know.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to. I see it in your eyes.”
“Don’t try to do my thinking for me, Kade. We’re both operating on only a few hours of sleep. Let’s get this rodeo over with and then—”
“We have time for sex.”
“What is this, a proposition?” she snapped. She hated the way she sounded but couldn’t help herself. Fully awake now, she could no longer hide from the thought that had tried to intrude last night. The conditions she couldn’t live with and remain part of his world. “Have you ever courted a woman?” she asked. Damn it, she sounded like a shrew. “You know, flowers and candy.”
“What is this about?”
Having a heated conversation and trying not to touch in a room that wouldn’t make a decent prison cell was getting on her nerves. Damn him for waking up with an erection. Damn her for getting turned on from looking at him.
“About?” she repeated. Kade, I’ve never felt like this before, never thought I’d fall in love, never been so vulnerable. “Nothing that’s happened between us has gone according to the books. We’ve never had a normal date. We haven’t gone out for dinner, a movie, a drive.” Thank goodness she’d picked up her jeans. Otherwise she wouldn’t know what to do with her hands. As for him, he was running his hands over his thighs.
“I guess I don’t know how to do those things.”
Neither did she.
“Go,” he said when she remained silent. “Give yourself the space you need.”
She glanced at the door but didn’t move toward it. “What are you going to do?”
“What I know how to.”
“Here? Today?” She felt sick.
“Not that. I have a rodeo to pull off.”
“Oh,” she whispered.
“You thought—”
“How was I to know? I don’t have your schedule.”
“I told you, I don’t mix the two.”
“You’re right, you did. I guess I forgot.”
He reached her in less than two steps, but all he did was cup his hand under her chin, lift her face, and kiss her, briefly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have known telling you would be too much. But I couldn’t go on lying.”
He hadn’t lied. Until last night he’d omitted. “Whatever you want to call it, you got it behind you. Laid everything on the table. I-I appreciate it.”
His hands dropped to his side. Except for his cock, he sagged. “But you couldn’t handle it.”
“Of course I can!” she snapped. “I’m no hothouse flower, no innocent. I’m not appalled because you lost your virginity to your mother’s best friend while your mother monitored the activity.”
He looked surprised that she’d repeated what had taken him a long time to tell her. “Then what’s wrong?”
Everything. Nothing. I don’t know.
If she walked out that door, something would have broken between them. True, she could return once she’d pulled herself together, or he might seek her out later. But he’d placed something precious in her hands via his revelation. Either she acknowledged the gift, now, or he’d spend the rest of his life believing he’d been wrong to trust her.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she told him and slipped off her blouse. “I want sex after all. I want to fuck—you.” Not think. Not issue ultimatums. Just fuck.
“Why?”
“Isn’t that obvious? I’m horny.”
“And I’m handy?”
“What is this about?” she demanded. It occurred to her that he hadn’t taken his attention off her eyes. She might as well have been wrapped in layers of clothing for all he cared.
“I don’t know.” His shrug reached all the way to his ready-for-action cock. “Something hasn’t been said here.”
He was right, damn him. But she could only take this one step at a time. “I’m offering.” She cupped her breasts for emphasis. “Are you accepting?”
“If I do, will you tell me what you’re thinking?”
How well the man knew her, maybe better than she knew herself. “I want to,” she admitted. “But I’m not quite ready.” And having sex, at this moment, might be the only way I’ll know whether I can take the risk.
“I see,” he muttered although obviously he didn’t.
Instead of touching her, he continued to study her, slowly, as if savoring each inch of the journey. His eyes stroked her skin and heated her. Although she managed not to move toward him, she couldn’t keep her hands on her breasts still. She massaged them until her nipples hardened then lightly fingered the sensitive nubs. Her mouth didn’t want to stay closed. She felt feverish. She couldn’t make the distinction between labia and clit, and cunt juice lubricated her inner passage. It took so little for him to ready her for intercourse, nothing more than a hot gaze and memories of what he’d done to her. This man restrained. He controlled. He forced. And she responded—boy, did she!
Suddenly her belly knotted. Blinking, she realized he’d stepped toward her. She took a backward step but stopped when the back of her knees connected with the bed. Another step, this time with his hands on his cock. In her mind, the organ became a dildo. He’d run it into her, power it up, and keep after her until she surrendered everything to his assault.
Although in a small way she knew her imagination was getting the best of her, she didn’t try to free herself from the fantasy. Instead, she tried to put even more distance between them but only managed to lose he
r balance. She fell back, ass on the bed, arms behind her for support, legs apart.
“I thought you wanted this,” he said with the distance between them down to inches.
“I do.”
“Then what—”
“I don’t know, all right!”
He nodded. Then he gripped her waist and slid her to the middle of the bed so only her feet dangled over the edge. When he joined her, his weight on the mattress pulled her toward him. She tried to turn away but stopped when he slid a hand between her legs. His fingers searched, coming ever closer to her opening. Thinking to even the playing field, she reached out, but although she briefly captured his penis, he pushed against her breasts and knocked her onto her back.
With no thought to trying to get him to leave her pussy alone, she renewed her efforts to lay claim to his cock. When he made no effort to deny her, she easily closed her fingers over the hard, hot organ. At the same moment, his index finger found her opening. With practiced patience, he turned his attention to exploring her wet cave.
Stay with the program, damn it, she admonished herself. But how could she even think to rule him if she couldn’t keep her mind on anything except being stimulated. Her free hand gripped the tangled spread, and she arched her back, giving him access to her breasts if he wanted. Instead, he stroked and pushed, tickled and retreated. Of their own will, her hips moved without rhythm. She lifted her pelvis in invitation. He acknowledged by increasing his penetration to two fingers.
“Fast. So fast!” she gasped.
“Too fast,” he muttered. Still, he continued to work her, and she didn’t try to still her hips. She again struggled to concentrate on what she could do to his cock, but all her fingers wanted to do was hold him.
“More!” she insisted when he touched her clit. “Please, more!”
“If I do, you’ll explode. It’s too soon.”
Oh. She was still trying to judge his wisdom when he abruptly pulled out of her, gripped her hips, and flipped her onto her belly which forced her to release his penis. Uneasy and excited at the same time, she turned her head so she could study him. He knelt beside her, leaned low over her, and raked his teeth over her buttocks. The sensation came close to lifting her off the bed. If he bit—