by Mindy Neff
Stony Stratton proved it time and again with his horses.
Fred Callahan had proved it with Ethan and his brothers. Ethan felt he’d turned out to be a pretty good guy despite his faults. He wasn’t a drunk or misfit or murderer. His biggest fault was his inability to commit.
Actually, it wasn’t an inability. It was a choice.
He was perfectly happy with his life.
“You’re deep in thought,” Dora said softly from beside him. Her shoulder brushed his as they both gazed down at the sleeping baby on the blanket. “What are you thinking?”
“About flaws and bloodlines and the fact that the responsibility of raising a kid scares me spitless.”
“You just work with what you’ve got, Ethan. One day at a time and with plenty of love.”
She was facing him now, had her hand against his chest, over his heart. He imagined her intention at that moment was to soothe.
He didn’t feel the least bit calm. And he saw the minute she realized it, saw the surprise, the satisfaction and the invitation.
He stepped back. “No you don’t, legs.”
A faint shadow of hurt sparked in her blue eyes, and he realized his evasions appeared like rejections. But before he could backtrack and try to fix the damage—even though he didn’t know what the damage was—she smiled, confusing him anew.
“Ethan Callahan, you’re disappointing me something fierce, I’ll have you know. I hear all this talk about your reputation and come to find it’s all lies.”
His ego just couldn’t let that go. “Well, maybe not all of it. Is that fried chicken I smell?”
She opened the basket he’d unstrapped from the back of his saddle. “Mmm-hmm. Does it tempt you?”
He frowned. “Is that a trick question?”
“Excuse me?”
“You know. Like Eve tempting Adam with the apple. Are there strings attached to that chicken?”
“You mean am I attempting to lead you into sin?” She laid out chicken and crusty French bread, olives, a pasta salad and moist brownies. Then she looked up and held his gaze with a provocative intensity that nearly scorched. “Shame on you for thinking such a thing.”
Ethan took a deep breath. Her words denied, but her eyes told all. It was going to be a very long lunch.
He sat down on the blanket, bit into the chicken, nearly moaned. “You cooked all this, legs?”
“Surprise you?” She poured lemonade into plastic cups.
“I’m beyond being surprised by you. I think,” he amended, and popped an olive in his mouth. Her ability to keep him off balance was an intoxicating, intriguing gift, and he might well be speaking out of turn by claiming to be beyond surprise.
He looked up, caught her staring raptly and automatically reached for his napkin to wipe his mouth. “What?”
“It’s been said that olives are an aphrodisiac.”
He choked, waved her away when she attempted to pound him on the back. Yep. Definitely spoke too soon. She’d surprised him. And charmed him right down to his boots.
“Tell me something, legs. You’re bold, sexy and gorgeous, and you make the best fried chicken I’ve ever tasted—so how come some lucky guy hasn’t caught you?”
She gave him another of those direct, disquieting looks filled with sensuality. “I’m trying hard to let you.”
“Not by me. By a nice guy.”
“Why do you do that?”
“What?”
“Think you’re not a good guy.”
“Didn’t you think just that when you came here? Seems I recall something about you hanging around to see if I could sufficiently clean up my lifestyle before you’d entrust Katie to me.”
She shrugged. “So I didn’t know you.”
“You still don’t,” he said softly.
“Then why won’t you let me?”
“Legs, you don’t know what you’re getting into here. You’re an innocent—”
“Stop right there.” She held up her hand like a traffic cop. “I don’t know why you insist on stereotyping me, or where you get the idea that I’m so pure and prim and proper. I’m not a virgin, you know—well, not exactly.”
His hat lifted a good two inches as his brows shot up. “Well, don’t hold back.”
“I’m not. You’re the one holding back.”
He’d meant it rhetorically. Trust Dora to take his words at face value. “Just so we’re straight here, maybe you ought to tell me what you mean by ‘not exactly.”’
“I had a relationship in college, and we came very close to the actual consummation.”
He choked on a swallow of pasta. “See? It’s words like that that convince me I’m right and you’re wrong here. You’re an innocent, and I’m the big bad wolf. And because of that, neither one of us is going to go to Grandma’s house!”
The maddening woman actually laughed at him. Consummation for crying out loud. If that didn’t scream prim and proper he didn’t know what did.
“The wolf didn’t have sexual designs on Red Riding Hood.”
“The hell he didn’t. He was a wolf.”
She chuckled again, then put her hand on his knee.
His gaze shot to his fly to see if his arousal was as blatantly obvious as it felt. He was dying here.
“Ethan?”
“What?”
“Would you look at me?”
“I’m looking, legs. That’s the problem.” Through the cotton of her snug tank top, the lacy outline of her bra teased his imagination.
“What do I have to do to let you know I’m human?” she asked. “I have flaws and…and desires just like the next woman.”
He might have been able to resist if she’d been smiling. But the earnest entreaty in her lake-blue eyes would take a much stronger man than him to turn away.
He slipped his palm along her jaw, wrapped his fingers around the back of her neck and drew her closer. “I want to go on record as having said that I warned you.”
She nodded. “It’s recorded. Now shut up and kiss me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He brushed her mouth with his, then took off his hat, tossed it aside and hooked a palm around her hip, dragging her closer.
This was insanity, but he couldn’t help himself. She tasted of lemonade and smelled like wildflowers. She kissed like an innocent, yet still made his blood boil.
He shifted, eased her down on the blanket, followed her and angled her head for a deeper kiss. “Open for me.”
Her eyelashes fanned upward as she gazed up at him with a look that was anything but innocent.
Before he realized what was happening, she threaded her fingers through his hair and kissed him with a fervor that suggested she did this for a living. And did it very well. Her full lips fit his perfectly.
Sheer surprise fogged his mind when she raised her hips, pressing against his pelvis. He could control himself, he rationalized. He could stop any time. He would just spend a few minutes more indulging in the sweet taste of her lips. Nothing more.
Her tongue swept an erotic circle around his, and he was lost. Overwhelmed with greed and lust, and forgetting completely every one of his reservations, he shifted his weight, kneed her legs apart and pressed his hard arousal right where he desperately wanted to bury himself.
She moaned, and the sound fueled him, had his hand racing over her side, up and down, raising the hem of her flirty tank top. At last, he filled his hand with the incredibly soft weight of her breast.
And felt her stiffen.
It was only a split-second, involuntary reaction due to inexperience, but it had the same effect as tipping an icy-cold trough of water over him. He came to his senses, remembered where they were.
“This isn’t a good idea.” Total understatement.
“Yes, it is.” She still held him in the vee of her thighs, warm, moist heat radiating even through two layers of denim—his and hers. “I want to make love with you.”
Ethan smoothed her top back in place and sat up. He was scared to
death. That kiss stunned him like no other had and he told himself he ought to jump on his horse and run like crazy.
He’d never been with a virgin—even a “not exactly” one. His relationships had been mature and sophisticated, based on mutual desire with both parties knowing the rules.
Dora Watkins didn’t know those rules. She’d never had sex—casual or otherwise.
Yet here she was, this beautiful, maddening, exciting woman innocently giving him the green light to make love to her. What was she thinking? Hell, what was he thinking?
“An innocent,” he murmured, not really meaning to say it aloud. But despite that virtue, she packed a powerful kiss. One that would have spoken of experience if he hadn’t known better.
She drew herself up beside him and, without warning, punched him right in the shoulder.
For a minute he was too stunned to speak. “What the heck was that for?”
“For being such a prude.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. And for making me feel…” She waved her hand, obviously unable to come up with the choice word she wanted. “You know.”
He raised his brow, truly perplexed. “No.”
“Inadequate,” she finished.
Now that was an uncalled-for blow below the belt. He had a well-deserved reputation, and he’d never once left a woman unsatisfied.
“Are you saying that kiss didn’t curl your toes? Because baby, if that’s the case—”
“Of course it curled my toes, God bless it all. And I thought I was doing a fine job of curling yours, too, but obviously I’m deluding myself by thinking I have any such skills.”
He was still hung up on her “God bless it all”—wondering if she meant it literally or if it was some clean way of swearing—and it was a moment or two before he finally looked closely enough to see the stricken look in her blue eyes. She thought she didn’t turn him on.
“Ah, legs, you did too good a job.” He lifted her right into his lap, held her there when she put up a bit of struggle. His lips caressed her temple, her hair. “I want you so bad I can’t see straight, but I’m trying to be a good guy.”
“Did I say I wanted a good guy?”
His lips curved against her hair. “As a matter of fact, you did.”
“When?”
“Right after the auction, when you insisted you were moving in with me. You definitely maligned my life-style and my character.”
He saw her lips twitch. “For Katie’s benefit, not mine,” she said, and scooted off his lap. She picked up her sketch pad and quickly, expertly patched together bold strokes and clever shading, and within seconds had a grinning, lecherous-looking wolf on one side of the page and a serene meadow and creek on the other.
Ethan chuckled, shook his head. “Uh-uh. We’re not heating things up again, and we’re not going to Grandma’s house.” Even if he did totally lose his mind and make love with her, it wouldn’t be out here in the open with the baby sleeping next to them. For Dora’s first time, she deserved a bed and a lock on the door and the privacy to spend all night.
But he wasn’t going to give in. Preacher or not, her daddy would likely shoot him right between the eyes.
And besides the fact that Ethan was fairly partial to his face was the even more important fact that he’d never been with a virgin before. No sense in messing up his clean record now.
Chapter Eleven
By that evening, when the house was quiet and the day’s work done, Ethan knew that his clean record was about to suffer, after all.
The glass of scotch and water that was halfway to his mouth slowly lowered, hitting the teak bar surface with a sharp click when Dora paused in the doorway of the den.
Desire, edgy and sharp, shot up the inside of his legs, all the way to his groin. She wore a flirty little slip dress. And wouldn’t you know it, the silky, thin, barely-there garment was black.
Sultry, erotic, midnight-black.
How was a man supposed to stand up under this kind of pressure?
“You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t reach out and take.
“Yes.” Bold as you please, she stepped up to him, and placed her palm on his chest. “Your brothers are gone to town, Katie’s asleep for the night.”
Her hand slipped right over his heart. Had it moved anyplace else, he might have been able to resist. He couldn’t explain it, but somehow his heart seemed to be responding even more than his body.
“I want you to make love with me, Ethan. Teach me to make love to you.”
He groaned. His hands came out of his pockets, but still he didn’t touch. It took Herculean effort, but he was proud of his control. It seemed he had so little around Dora. “Why me?”
“Because you make me feel things I’ve never felt before. When I look at you, I can feel every place my heart beats. It’s like a pulsing heat and it’s driving me crazy.”
Most women would not have openly admitted that, and because the bold words came from Dora, Ethan knew that his control had just bit the dust.
She wanted him to be the one to teach her, and Heaven help him, he wanted the same.
He’d already decided that had she been anyone else, they could have enjoyed a mature intimacy while they were under the same roof.
She was offering exactly what he wanted. What he was used to.
So why did this particular time seem so different? So special? Why did this time, with this woman, seem so vitally important?
He placed his hand at her throat, tipped her chin up with his thumb. “Be very sure, legs.” His lips brushed hers, stoking the fire. “Because if we start this, I don’t think I’ll have the character, much less the ability, to stop.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “I’m sure, Ethan.”
His lips slid to her throat, her shoulder, then back to her pouty lips. She arched against him and wrapped her arms around his neck, standing on the balls of her feet. The only barrier between them was a thin layer of silk and a straining panel of denim that was about to burst its seams.
When she snuggled her hips even harder against him, Ethan felt his gut erupt in fire. She kissed him like a woman who knew what she was doing, her mouth open, her tongue matching and mating with his.
If this was hell, he decided, he was happy to be here.
Nevertheless, in a fleeting moment of sanity, he reached up and gripped her wrists, bringing her arms down to her sides. “We should slow down.”
“No, we shouldn’t.”
Her lips were swollen and glistening. With her arms down at her sides, the spaghetti straps of her siren dress slipped off her shoulders, the slinky material catching on the plump swell of her breast.
“You’re not wearing a bra.”
“I’m not wearing any underwear.”
“Oh, man.”
Dora gripped his hips to steady herself. She hadn’t meant to blurt that out, had intended for him to find out on his own. But honestly, foreplay had never been this intense, making her pant and throb and want to climb right up his body.
She ran the tip of her tongue up and down his neck, lightly sucked the pulsing skin just above his collarbone.
In a move that left her whirling, he took her lips again, pulled the straps on her dress farther down her arms and walked her backward. Her hips hit the long marble-topped table behind the sofa.
He hooked his hands around the backs of her thighs and lifted her onto the table, then stepped between her legs. Her dress had already ridden up, but Ethan pushed it even higher as he slid his palms erotically up the sides of her legs and cupped her bottom, scooting her right up against him, pelvis to pelvis.
Dora wondered if she was going to hyperventilate. She couldn’t seem to drag enough air into her lungs. And Ethan didn’t seem much better off.
He went still, rested his forehead against hers. “I ought to be shot.”
“Please, no. At least not until you finish this.”
L
aughter shook his shoulders. He leaned his upper body back, keeping his hands on her behind and their lower bodies intimately pressed, her silky dress hem gathered around her waist. “You are so refreshingly direct.”
“Comes from being a tomboy.” She gasped when his finger lightly, lazily stroked the swell of her breast, just above the material of her dress, back and forth, his gaze following the movement, then lifting back to hers.
“There’s not a single thing tomboyish about you.” He ran his hands up and down her arms, from her shoulders to the tips of her fingers, then treated her legs to the same erotically charged ministrations, taking his time as he stroked from her knees to the outside of her thighs, to her behind, then back down. “You have the softest skin.”
Soft or not, she only knew that it was burning like white-hot fire where her naked, throbbing body pressed against the length of his arousal.
She wrapped her legs around his hips, tried desperately not to whimper. “I seem to be showing a lot more skin than you.”
Without breaking contact, he crossed his arms, gripped the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it over his head. “Better?”
Dora was without words or voice as she placed her hands on his glorious chest, treated his taut skin to the same up and down motion as he’d done to her, mapping his masculine contours.
She brushed his nipples, heard him draw in a swift breath, saw chill bumps raise across his chest.
“Is that wrong?”
“No.” His jaw clenched, and a vein rose along his neck as though he was straining. “It’s very right.” He took her wrists and lowered her hands, planting them against the tabletop. “But this is your first time, and since you’ve entrusted your body to me, we’ll play by my rules.”
“And those are?”
“No touching, on your part, for a while.”
“I don’t know if I can—” She gasped as he tilted her head to the side and gave her a kiss that rippled clear to her soul.
“Yes, you can.” Ethan kissed her throat, her earlobe, then slid his lips over her neck and shoulder, felt her squirm. The movement nearly sent him over the edge. He was torturing himself, but he was determined to take it slow, to turn her mindless with pleasure, to ensure that when he was finally inside her, her body would be ready to accept him, to guarantee her first experience at making love would be unforgettably etched in her memory.