by Tessa Bailey
“I don’t know.”
A smile broke across her face. “That’s okay. It’s your first time.”
“Were you part of that tragedy, Grace?” Aaron didn’t know where the suspicion sprung from or how he picked it out among the million questions and thoughts rocketing around his skull. But there it was. “I think you were.”
It took him a few beats to realize she wasn’t breathing, but she drew in a heavy dose of oxygen before he could shake her. “Moments, Aaron. This is one of them. Come live in it with me.” She brushed some snow out of his hair, soft fingertips grazing his ear. “Please?”
Fucked. No other way to describe the situation he’d been sucked into. His body was winded and exhilarated, adrenaline seeping into his bloodstream and warming him, making him hot along with Grace’s nearness. He’d been thrown into a vast ocean without a life jacket, and she was reaching out with something resembling help, but it was so foreign and nothing like he’d ever experienced that gripping on to it was difficult. Slipping. It kept slipping. What finally forced him to hold the fuck on was Grace. She was in the same ocean. Maybe she was always there. What if having him reach out and clasp on was the rescue she needed?
Aaron operated from a different plane of consciousness, sliding one hand into Grace’s hair, the other around her back. He twined the fragrant, but mussed, strands of hair around his fingers and tilted her head back, watching as her eyelids drifted down, catching snowflakes on their descent. Nothing in his life had ever appeared more vivid, more real, than her panting, parted lips, inviting his mouth down. And he went, because there was no choice to make, melding their open lips together, followed by a wet mating of tongues. A groan he’d been holding in since they’d first crossed paths fell from his mouth like a ten-pound rock. Kisses in fields beneath a light snowfall should be sweet. They should be.
Only, he didn’t have any idea what the fuck sweet meant. Especially when it came to physical interaction with a woman. Nor was he feeling anything resembling such a dainty description. No, with her lips struggling to get wide beneath his, attempting to handle each slanting assault from his mouth, Aaron’s cock surged, rousing in his briefs like a prodded snake. But with his eyes closed, he could only see the smiling girl spinning madly in a snowy field—like some mystical fairy—and denial had him breaking the kiss.
“Grace,” he growled into her mouth. “We don’t make sense. You…” God, he couldn’t keep his thoughts straight with her body curved around his, tightly, like they’d been glued together. “You see this field and you see a place to run.”
“Yes.” Didn’t it figure with the most insane shit coming out of his mouth, Grace appeared to follow him without a hitch? “What do you see?”
“Nothing. I see nothing.” His hand cupped the right side of her ass, settling the notch of her thighs over his dick, need spreading like an epidemic. “That’s not true. I see a place where no one would witness it if I took you on the filthy ground.”
Her head fell back, as if her neck had lost power. “I think that means we make perfect sense,” she said on a bursting exhale. “It’s so much better when you say your thoughts out loud and I don’t have to guess. Have I mentioned that?”
As if an unspoken command had been issued, their mouths met again, worked each other’s in a furious, damp slide. Aaron’s arm around her back tightened. He was so thirsty for the untamed taste of Grace that he bent her all the way backward, rolling his hips against her without an anchor, no wall to push her up against save the wind. God, more. He required all of her against him. How had he gone this long without it?
The wicked spike of testosterone in Aaron must have affected Grace somehow, because she turned into a hot, frantic bundle of sex in his arms, trying to hug his hips with the insides of her thighs. Trying to drive him out of his mind with the soft warmth of her pussy, making him groan every time it brushed his lap. No condom. I don’t have a condom. The agonizing realization was a blessing and a curse at the same time. A blessing because Grace was better than what Aaron wanted to give her. Which was to pull her leggings down, so he could deliver a knees-buried-in-the-dirt fucking that she’d feel for weeks. A curse, because…Aaron could feel how bad she needed it—almost as badly as he did—even if it would be bad for her.
Beneath her.
Faceless ghosts from another time and place…the sting of being called a betrayer tried to steal his focus, but ignoring them was easy with Grace’s mouth under his. The threatening memories only served to make him more aggressive, though, as if Grace could cleanse him, impossible though it was.
“Aaron,” she moaned, breaking away from the round of furious kissing. Eyes blind, breath racing, thighs sliding up and down the outside of his legs. “Aaron, oh my God, please…”
Aaron’s fingers were working the buttons of her coat before his brain could command him to stop. There was no ignoring her plea for relief; it stole his remaining ability to reason. To remember why touching her, satisfying his curiosity, was bad. Against the rules. With a curse over the heaviness in his groin, Aaron flattened his palm on her stomach, sliding into the front of her leggings. “Okay, hippie.” He encountered dampness layered over smooth, hairless skin—a fucking jerk-off fantasy come true. She was a mess of want, the evidence wetting her sex, moistening the purple leggings. “Fuck, Grace. If I had a condom, nothing would save you now. Not after feeling this.” He found the entrance of her body, shoving two fingers far as they would travel, both of their bodies jerking at the perfection of that connection. His groan was so ragged, he didn’t recognize his own voice. “I knew you weren’t wearing underwear. Maybe you wanted help getting dressed. Do you like the idea of me sliding a tight pair of panties up your thighs? Tugging the edges right and left until your lips are covered?”
“Yes.” She went up on her toes and the move slid her curves over his muscles, courtesy of the death grip his arm had on her body. But she slipped back down in a boneless drop when Aaron began drawing his fingers in and out. In and out. Stopping to tease her clit with a twisting knuckle, feeling it swell with such tangible pleasure, no reservations. “More, more, more,” she whispered, gaze growing so glassy Aaron wasn’t sure she could see him anymore. And he was nervous without her focus, because he’d been dropping into the middle of the fucking ocean with only her presence to keep him afloat.
“Hey. Grace. You need to look at me, dammit.” His fingers thrust home and held, urgency climbing up his spine like insistent claws. “Be…here with me. Don’t do this to me and just leave.”
The green of her eyes snapped, her teeth digging into that full bottom lip, but there she was. She found his forehead with her own, grinding them together just a little, and the pressure was welcome. So fucking welcome. As if she’d known that simple action would calm the foreign war taking place on the soil of his brain. A brain to which she’d found an undiscovered trapdoor and crawled inside. “I’m here. Your fingers feel so good. I can’t believe you’re touching me like this. I wanted you to.” Her gorgeous little body started to shake, her teeth clenching the same time as her pussy started to seize up around his touch. “I wanted to hold your hand in the woods, too. But this is better. Better. I’m going to…”
“Christ. Do it. Go on, Grace. Fill up my palm with the best you’ve got.” Aaron ducked his head to suck a trail up the side of Grace’s neck, unable to resist a bite beneath her earlobe. Another one. “Girls who get so wet from kissing shouldn’t leave the house without underwear, should they? No. And they definitely shouldn’t leave the house with someone like me. I don’t hold hands. I shouldn’t be allowed within ten feet of you.” He spoke the words angrily into her neck. “This is what I do. I return you home with a dirty secret.”
Half of him expected to be pushed off, away from the hottest female flesh he’d even sunk his fingers into. He wished for it, even though he knew he’d come crawling back, begging to finish the job. Finish her off. None of that was necessary, though, because the words he’d meant as a warning se
emed to hoist her over the precipice, her walls closing in to milk his fingers in nothing short of exquisite torture. Because fuck, he needed to feel that squeeze, that trickling fall of moisture around his cock so bad, he tilted his head back and growled into the falling snow.
“Aaron,” Grace moaned, fisting the lapels of his jacket. One hand slid free, up his throat and into his hair, yanking his head down to engage in an open-lipped kiss. Their tongues didn’t touch, thank God, because he might have taken out his dick and begged her to use that tongue where it counted. “Ohhh,” she breathed, her body going totally limp in his arms without warning, their mouths disengaging.
And there he was, dipping a girl backward in a moonlit field, her back bent so far that her hair brushed along the ground. As if they’d been dancing, instead of him finger banging her, telling her obscene things to make her come. “Grace—”
“Shhh.” She extended her arms up toward the night sky. “Two moments in one night. That’s something, isn’t it?”
His throat ached worse than he’d ever felt it. “I need to get you home.”
With a sigh, she straightened and gained her feet, planting a lingering kiss on his lips and floating toward the Suburban. “Okay.” Her eyes sparkled, legs wobbling, as she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Let’s go, Grandpa.”
Chapter Eight
Grace smiled when she crossed her legs in the passenger seat and felt a tug of discomfort at the juncture of her thighs. She hadn’t lied to Aaron about her sexual experience. No, she would never to that. But quite some time had passed since her first two years of being semi-experimental in art school—and neither one of the two boys and one girl she’d been physical with had been experienced as Aaron, apparently. When she thought back to those sweaty dorm encounters, she could only recall her thought process. Should I pretend it feels good? Is he or she pretending it feels good?
There hadn’t been time for those awkward worries in the field because she’d been struck in the head by a falling lust crater the moment they’d locked lips. She pressed her nose up against the passenger’s side window, half expecting to see her prone form, lying spread-eagled in the grass, sending her a thumbs-up.
The image made her laugh as Aaron climbed into the driver’s side, starting the engine while casting her a look of concern. “Something funny?”
God, she wanted to straddle his lap and—do something to snap him out of the funk he continually fell back into, just when she thought they’d broken free. Maybe a two-finger poke to the eyes, à la the Three Stooges. Or a knock-knock joke in his ear. A kiss. Maybe…maybe that would work. The thought of it caused her smile to fade, the pulse between her legs to pick up again. “It feels like your fingers are still inside me.”
Aaron froze in the act of putting the Suburban in gear, his jaw flexing in the near-darkness. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
Grace had expected him to say that, but she hadn’t foreseen the twinge of pain in her middle following. “Why not?” Needing to move, she tugged the seatbelt across her body, buckling it with a loud click. “Because you’re going to work for my father?”
She could hear him thinking in the long pause that ensued. “Among other things,” he said in a low voice, pulling the Suburban back onto the road, into the snowflakes that were beginning to taper off. “You’ve never asked me why I’m here. What I’m doing sneaking into pancake breakfasts in Iowa. Do you think that behavior is typical of me?”
“No.” She tilted her head, regarding his strong profile in the passing streetlights. Light, dark. Light, dark. “I guess I was returning the favor, since you never asked me what I was doing inside the school at night.”
“Well, ask me now.” He delivered the order in a near-shout, seeming to surprise himself, then settling back into the driver’s seat with a raked hand through his hair. “Ask me why I needed to be snuck in the back door, instead of walking through the front like everyone else.”
“Not everyone else. Not me.”
That seemed to upset him, but he didn’t comment. Not directly. “Ask, Grace.”
Her chest experienced a sudden hollowness. “No. I don’t want to.” Why wouldn’t he look at her? Had she imagined that connection they’d forged in the field? “What would it matter?”
“It would. Matter.” He steered the Suburban onto the highway, the engine struggling to comply with the request for an increased pace. “It matters what happened to you, too. Whatever the…tragedy was. Matters. If you want to live believing life is a series of moments, you have to account for the past moments, too. They don’t just fade with the newer, prettier ones.”
Heat stole up Grace’s neck as she turned in her seat. “Actually, you’re wrong. They do fade. But you have to work at it. You have to try.”
“I don’t want them to fade.” She heard his hands tighten around the cracked leather steering wheel. “I don’t need to make them weaker for the sake of comfort.”
“Is that what you think of me?” Grace whispered. “That I’m weak?”
A touch of horror made it into his gaze as he cast her a glance. “No. I think we’ve found different ways to be strong. And I think the method I use makes me very bad for you. Everything you feel is so…huge.” His throat worked. “I try not to feel anything at all. My way leads to people being hurt. Isolation through alienation.”
In the intimacy of the humming Suburban, Grace was tempted to ask Aaron about what had brought him to Iowa, as a man trying so desperately to regain his luck. Because it was the opposite description of the man who drove so capably, who’d touched her with such skill and had a quick answer for everything. But some intuition told her, Grace, you’re better off not knowing. And she’d learned the hard way never to ignore her intuition ever again. So she sat back in her seat, staring out through the windshield to regroup. Pretending she hadn’t essentially been broken up with by someone she wasn’t even dating.
“What is your job going to be for my father?”
Grace asked the question so casually, never expecting the answer to be so catastrophic. Talking politics tended to give her a stomachache and frustrate her. People were people, not numbers and polls and pie charts. Maybe that was why she’d never considered Aaron’s position with the Pendleton campaign or given much thought about what he’d be accomplishing, side by side, with her father. But when he spoke, the answer changed everything. Everything. So much so that she was hit by an urge to fling open the passenger’s side door at the first stoplight and run for her life.
“My focus will be on the eighteen to twenty-five demographic.” His tone had gone from challenging to practiced. “Using the way they think, the mediums they utilize, to bring them over to the Pendleton camp.” He threw her a tight smile. “They want to vote for him, they just don’t realize it yet.”
Ice formed along the inner walls of Grace’s lungs, forcing her to breathe in labored drags. Speaking was out of the question. She’d known, on some level, that the Pendleton campaign must be trying to reach the younger voters through various forms of social media—which she didn’t personally use—and attempting to make her father appeal to a younger audience. Of course, with the presidency at stake, the campaign would employ every trick in the book to get the right hole punched on Election Day.
But she hadn’t anticipated it being Aaron’s role in the Pendleton campaign. He would essentially be influencing—maybe even tricking—young people into wanting a certain outcome. How was that different than what she’d experienced at YouthAspire? Or on the couch of her psychologist in Austin, who’d fed Grace her parents’ rhetoric through patient suggestions?
It’s wasn’t. It was worse, because it was on such a larger scale. Not just a camp full of kids who didn’t get enough attention from their parents and were willing to believe anything for positive adult reinforcement. Not just a girl trying to talk through her memories and make sense of them. No, this was everything she’d been fighting to get over. Right there in front of her.
Whe
n she’d been sent to YouthAspire at sixteen, back when it had been a leadership camp—a far cry from the youth shelter and recreation center it had recently become—the infiltration of ideas had started slowly. As daughter of a prominent politician, younger sister of a popular student at the local high school, Grace had been a target from day one. The counselors had flocked around her, sat with her at every meal, given her choice of bunkhouse, extra free time. Even at sixteen, she’d gleaned their goal. To bring more registrants the following summer, perpetuate the YouthAspire name, and ultimately, make more money. And she’d wanted to help. She’d wanted to spread the word about their unique teaching format, which included lectures from corporate professionals, workshops designed to increase the campers’ understanding of leadership. Teach them how to be a winner. How to make the correct decisions.
Aaron would be doing the same thing.
God, when she thought back to how easily she’d been led, the memories threatened to overwhelm. So much that when the Suburban hit a bump, she startled, palms flying up to cool her cheeks.
“Hey. Hippie.” Aaron’s concern reached through the fog, but it wasn’t a welcoming distraction. She didn’t want to let him distract her, the way she would have done in the past, as a young girl. With such trust. Making her wonder if she’d learned a damn thing from her experience. “I don’t think you’re weak. All right? You misunderstood me.”
She forced her hands down, laying them flat on her thighs. “I know.” How far were they from home? “It’s okay.”
A beat passed. “You don’t seem okay. Should I…pull over or something?”
“No,” she said too quickly. “I just want to go home.”