by Taylor Berke
A small, feminine hand softly pushed the door open from the inside. Jackson let his rifle fall from his shoulder as he took off in an all-out run as Billie came into view. She flashed Sly and Nat a brilliant smile as she took notice of her Neanderthal running like a wild maniac in her direction. Jackson grabbed her up and ran off with her to safety behind one of the trucks.
She hung on to him for dear life as she prayed that she hadn’t just survived one ordeal to start another as her love ran way too fast with her precariously hanging in his embrace so far from the ground. Billie just breathed in his sexy scent as he clutched her almost painfully tight to his chest.
Jackson couldn’t even formulate words for a moment. It was Bill, who came to supervise the emotional release that his son was sure to have at any moment, who was the voice of reason.
“Honey, are we sure glad to see you. You have blood on you, sweetheart. Can you show me where you are hurt?”
Billie looked over in confusion. She wasn’t really hurt. Before she could get any words out, Jackson gently put her down and began running his hands all over her, right in front of his father.
“Jackson, I am not hurt, baby.” No verbal response.
She tried to take his hands off her rear. “Jackson, listen to me. I am not really injured honey, just a scratch, I promise.” The look on his face told her that he was close to losing control. She noted that he continued to not acknowledge any of her comments. She frowned as Bill began to laugh as Jackson pulled the front of her shirt out to look down at her chest to assure himself that the blood was not coming from her gorgeous, plump breasts. She knew that Jackson would view that as a tragedy if they were damaged. Bill wisely and quickly had turned his back as Jackson had started to pull up her skirt hem to see if there were any, ah, feminine injuries.
“Jackson!” she very firmly yelled out. That got his attention.
“If you ever get in a vehicle with another man other than me, I swear that I am going to spank that sweet ass of yours for a week straight and you will never sit down again in your life! I have never been so scared in my life, baby!”
Billie nodded only in the effort to help him calm down.
“Where is all this blood coming from, baby?” he gently managed to growl out. He pulled her into his arms and began to softly rub his hands from her head down to her ass and back up again. Over and over she watched as Jackson tried to reassure himself that she was okay. Bill moved closer and put his hands on both their backs in a protective, fatherly way as he let out a sigh.
“It’s mostly not my blood. It’s Gwen’s. She is okay, though.” She figured that he would find the place that Len’s knife had cut her anyway, so she didn’t try to hide it from him. That was all she could manage as the intensity of the situation began to crash around her. Suddenly, Billie realized that she was safe and sagged against Jackson’s strong, comfortingly hard body.
Jackson tried to suck her in as he bent over, pulling her now-sobbing body as tightly as possible against his. He saw his father reached over and took the gun he had just noticed from her shaking hand.
Sly and Nat had just walked back out of the cabin, guns holstered. “All clear. They are dead,” he yelled out.
The men ran over to Billie and Jackson to see for themselves that she was okay. She barely felt that loving pats that the men gave her and Jackson. Bill cleared his throat out loud and decided to handle things from here on out to calm Billie down.
“Um, honey. You want to tell us how you managed to get his gun? I am just gonna die from waiting to hear this one!”
A loud rumble of male laughter encircled Billie and Jackson. Billie looked up at Bill and Sly with watery eyes. She knew she shouldn’t care at the moment but she had to rub her eyes with a non-bloody section of her shirt. She must have had raccoon eyes with the mascara that had to be running down her face.
“I have never been so scared, but somehow I got control of myself,” she began.
“Go on, baby,” Jackson said, starting to rejoin the world of the living as she explained what had happened.
She looked up into his gorgeous face, one that she hadn’t been totally sure that she would ever see again. “I tried to convince Len to let me go but that plan wasn’t going very successfully so I moved on to plan B.”
Jackson let himself move away from her a few inches so he could look directly into her eyes. He had a sneaking suspicion that she did something he was not going to love at first.
“Plan B was to buy myself more time by convincing Len that I might be willing to, you know, instead of him being, well, forcing himself on me.” The men around began throwing around curses and expressing their anger. Only Sly and Bill remained calm. Sly asked her politely, if she could, to please continue.
“Well, I unbuttoned my blouse…and I convinced him to let us all have a drink together.” Jackson took off verbally with a string of vocabulary that would have had his mother slapping him for a year, but Billie figured that he was allowed to say whatever he wanted to. She had been terrified and revolted at the same time while she had to bare some of her intimate self to that slimeball.
“Go ahead, honey, tell me the rest,” Sly encouraged her. Sly himself was a big, muscular man, intimidating like Hunter because he was quiet more often than not. He normally had a great sense of humor and was a gentle man. It showed in how he encouraged her to proceed.
“I just tried to do what I thought Jackson would want me to do. Think and talk. So that is what I did. It saved my life.”
Jackson’s eyes softened and didn’t even bother to hide the love and warmth that was emanating from them as he listened patiently.
“While Gwen and Len went out to argue outside for a moment, I just…”
“You just what, baby?” Jackson asked, taking her chin in his hand.
When he got that look, Billie went a little weak and felt compelled to do whatever this vital man wanted. “I took the sleeping pills that I still had in my purse from when Matthew died. I haven’t needed to take them since I moved out here and met you, honey. So I just quickly crushed them up and put them in their beers. Apparently, revenge against you made them very thirsty. They aren’t dead, just sound asleep.”
The only sound was the wind dancing through the trees. All the men just looked at her in shocked disbelief. Nat went and confirmed that they were indeed breathing. He came back out grinning from ear to ear letting everyone know that he had slapped cuffs on the sleeping beauties.
Sly shook out of the shocked stupor first and yelled over to Jackson, “Hell, Jackson, if you act like an idiot much longer and don’t marry this woman the first chance you get, well, then I am going to!”
Jackson held Billie close to him as though his life depended on it. The gaze in his eyes told her that his terror and wrath had been exchanged for undisguised love and adoration. It was so naked for everyone to see, it made her heart flutter.
“There will be zero chance of that happening, Sly. She is mine.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jackson lay with his hands behind his head in the tangled disarray of Billie’s bedsheets. After what was an endless marathon of crazy loving throughout the night and a good portion of the morning, he amazingly didn’t even feel tired, just really, really relaxed. He couldn’t exactly say the same for his poor bedmate. She lay curled into his side, breathing deeply against his chest where her head lay. Mine, he thought. He had almost lost the greatest thing to ever happen to him in his life. There was no way that was ever going to happen to him again. She was going to have to give up medicine and ride double with him on Lachlan every day to tend the ranch. She was never going to be more than a foot from his body ever again! He knew that she might protest a bit at his happy little utopia-like dream but he found it amusing and comforting. He inwardly shuddered at how close the psycho twins had come to taking away this remarkably intelligent, sexy, and gorgeous woman from him. He lowered his arms to wrap around her in comfort, probably more so for him than for her.
Suddenly he heard something that actually concerned him, ripping him from his negative recollections. His crazy nemesis and waste-of-two-years-of-his-life ex-wife were in jail, but he tensed up as he heard noises that made him more wary than a crazed man armed with a gun.
He knew he was hearing the sounds of his mother, aunt, and who knows what other women who were downstairs making enough food and noise to wake the dead. How the hell had they gotten in here? He would stand down a million Len Drexels any day, but he didn’t have the nerve to go downstairs and face all those cackling women. He was pretty sure that they knew why he and Billie were still in bed at eleven a.m. and that they knew that it had nothing to do with her ordeal, directly. He had to laugh to himself.
Just then, Billie snuggled her warm, soft body against his. To his disbelief, he could feel himself getting hard yet again. He didn’t think it was possible after six, no maybe seven rounds of incredibly satisfying sex since last night much less the countless number of orgasms he gave his love with his hands, mouth, and cock. It must be true, he thought. The right woman really did give you superhuman strength.
With a devilish glint in his eyes, he leaned down to kiss her forehead, her nose, and both cheeks softly before pressing them to her gorgeous lips. She smiled sleepily against his chest as he open mouth kissed her in the very sensitive spot that was just below her ear, swirling his tongue lightly over the lobe. Jackson shifted over her body as he kissed down the column of her neck, allowing his increasingly heavy breath to blow over his trail of damp kisses. His hands skimmed down her sides, the backs of his callused fingers running from her neck, to the sides of her plump breasts, down to her waist, and back up to gently cup and worship the abundant globes. He allowed his teeth to graze over one erect nipple while he gently pinched the other, both eliciting arousing moans from Billie. He felt almost light-headed as she arched her back in pleasure as he suckled at her breasts. They tasted of feminine delights that had him like a starving man as his first feast as he sucked on one then moved back to pay attention to the other.
Billie felt herself dripping her arousal yet again at his secretive wake-up attack on her body. She felt deliriously high, almost floating as he slid down her body further, kissing and adoring her the whole way. He let out a growl as his mouth brushed over her bare mound, running his tongue along the junctions of each leg to her soaking pussy. She saw his heavenly lips curl into a naughty smile of pure delight as he inhaled her feminine scent. Just then, he dipped his head and thrust his tongue up her tight channel, causing a light squeal from her. Without warning, he began to lave the outside of her wet lips, running his tongue from anus to clit while thrusting three fingers into her welcoming pussy. The rough texture of his tongue on her clit sent sharp bolts of pleasure radiating to her feet. Her back arched off the bed in delight at his attentions that were causing her to writhe in anticipation. Jackson ran his fingers from his other hand down the crack between her cheeks, pausing at her sensitive rosette. Tingles of rapture began to shoot through her as he inserted his index finger deliciously to his second knuckle. She let out a low moan as he began thrusting his finger slowly in and out of her back channel in time with the thrusts and sucking of his tongue. How did he know just how to touch and lick her to bring the maximum amount of pleasure? His reputation was so well deserved.
Jackson’s cock was so hard he thought it just might crack and fall off if he didn’t get inside of her soon. He sucked her clit into his mouth and furiously began to rub his fingers up into her G-spot with a singular determination. He looked up to see her mouth open in a soundless O as she let out a piercing scream of intense pleasure. To Jackson, it seemed to go on and on, until she lay weak and sweating under his ministrations.
Jackson had never tasted anything as sweet as his love. With a purely predatory grin, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth as his eyes met hers. He then quickly moved up her body to slide into her warmth with one smooth stroke of his erection. He felt scalded by the wet heat of her and immediately began pumping into her dripping pussy.
Billie basked not only in the feeling of being joined intimately with Jackson but at the feel of his hard abs and chest rubbing erotically against hers. She wrapped her long legs around his muscled waist as she felt his hard buttocks clenching with effort as he pummeled into her hot depths. The bed shook with his savage thrusts as he began to groan in pleasure. It was obvious that he intended for her to join him in ecstasy again as he ground his hips in a rotating fashion against her swollen and ultrasensitive clit. His actions sent her into another sharp orgasm as shards of pure delight mixed with a small bite of decadent pain shot through her limbs.
He felt her clench around his hard cock just enough to make him explode as well. Jackson had to clench his teeth at the raw pleasure pounding through his body. He pulsed out streams of his hot cum into his love until he was wrung dry with intense satisfaction. He gently lay his considerable weight down onto her body as they both tried to slow their erratic breathing.
He was aware of the exact moment that he knew she became cognizant of the sounds that were filtering up from the kitchen downstairs. He felt her stiffen and struggle to sit up as she processed what the giggling and bawdy laughter meant.
“Jackson! Did you know that there were people downstairs this whole time? Oh my! I will never be able to show my face again! Who exactly is down there?” she asked from behind her hands, which were covering her face.
Jackson slid himself up to lean against the carved headboard, while pulling her now-rigid but just-pleasured body up into his arms. “Well, let’s see. It sounds like my mother and Aunt Florence. I think that Julia is the one down there telling the really dirty jokes and maybe that is the mayor’s wife talking with Mabel. See, nothing to worry about,” he joked.
Billie shuddered and tried to bury her head under the blanket.
* * * *
It was some time later that Jackson was able to coax her out of the sensuous shower that they took together and forced her to have pity on his growling hunger pains. He led her down the stairs with his wet hair while wearing a shit-eating grin on his face in an effort to try to take the brunt of the attack. No such luck. They were met with hoots and off-colored remarks, however politely offered, about the late hour, the screams that rocked the house, or general air of satisfaction on Jackson’s face. The ladies let out peals of laughter at the never-ending blush that graced Billie’s face. After a bit, the tone became more emotional as they all took turns kissing and hugging her as they thanked god that she was able to come away from the experience relatively unscathed. Billie hadn’t thought she was that upset over the ordeal, but it must have been the overwhelming cascade of love from the women that had her sobbing against Lillian with Florence and the other women crooning soft, motherly comfort to her. It helped. A lot. Jackson stood on the periphery just watching helplessly as Billie broke down and the military action of the women that immediately moved in to help her.
She lifted her watery eyes to hug each woman tightly and then walked over into Jackson’s strong embrace. He stroked her back soothingly as his aunt looked at him with a warm smile. It was Julia, however, who brought Billie back to laughing again as she just had to mention that their exact positions were the reason that they were so late in coming out of the bedroom in the first place. One thing led to another, as they all sat around Billie’s huge dining room table eating a lavish brunch spread, and soon talk led straight to babies.
“Lillian, you must be so overjoyed at the prospect!” Julia laughed out with glee in her voice.
“What prospect, you crazy woman?” Lillian chuckled back.
With a sideways glance at Billie and Jackson, she said, “Well, the grandchildren, of course!”
An uproar began at the table with questions of how long Billie had been pregnant being tossed around. Jackson looked just as confused
as Billie, who shrugged her shoulders and looked to Lillian as she shook her head in denial.
“I think you have finally lost it, old woman,” Florence said to Julia.
With a naughty gleam in her eyes she practically crowed out, “With all the noise we heard from upstairs earlier, I am sure that this house will be filled with adorable babies in no time whatsoever! They sounded like they were pros!”
Even Jackson turned a blush now.
Kill me now was all Billie could think.
* * * *
Jackson sat astride Lachlan several weeks later looking at the woman who changed his whole life and healed his heart. She sat on a blanket in the field behind her house wearing a white flowing sundress that was belted to show off her curvy figure. Contentment filled him like never before as he imagined her belly swollen with his babe. He nudged Lachlan’s sides as they rode down to his destiny. She looked up to observe him with undisguised love. He climbed down and lay down next to where she sat. As she leaned in to give him a soft kiss, he heard her sigh. He had been teased all day by the other men about how distracted he had been and suffered through their usual vulgar comments. He knew it was time.
“Did you have a good day, baby?” he questioned her.
“I did actually. I baked you some fresh muffins after work and have been relaxing here ever since, waiting for my cowboy to come love me,” Billie answered with a smile.
Jackson sat up and took her hand. “Baby, you do know how much I love you, right?”
At her nod, he continued. “I never expected to meet a person like you. I was expecting some man named Bill to move in over here. Little did I know that some crazy woman who fell from the sky would rock my world and capture my heart. I cannot live without you and don’t want to try. I don’t want to live another day without you. If I could bind you to me physically, I would. However, in lieu of that sort of joining, perhaps you will accept that I promise to adore and protect you forever. I love you with every fiber inside of this dumb cowboy and promise to take care of you until my dying day. I thank god that you were brave enough to move out here all on your own, but you aren’t alone anymore.”