by Andrews, Amy
“Trust me,” he said as he joined her on the mattress, shoving the condoms under his pillow and dragging her close, “I wasn’t feeling any pain.”
“You were distracted, I’ll give you that.” She smiled at the thought as she snuggled into him. “I’m a little worried I could have done some permanent damage to your kidneys.”
He chuckled and it rattled through his rib cage and tickled her ear. “I’ll let you know if I start pissing blood.”
Juliet groaned, pressing her face into his shoulder, and he chuckled again, making soothing noises at the back of his throat as his fingers trailed up and down her arm. It was light and drugging and she returned the favour, her fingertip drawing circles around his nipple.
There was something cosily intimate about lying in the aftermath of a truly good orgasm, every inhibition loosened, every muscle lax. She hadn’t felt this relaxed with a man in a long time. Not since splitting with her ex.
And not very often with him, either.
Their sex life had been good, but the orgasms in that relationship had rarely hit these giddy heights. Neither had any from her revenge sex spree. None had inspired her to stick around for the aftermath.
Of course, that hadn’t been what those liaisons had been about. This liaison, on the other hand… She could definitely take some more of this. More of Ryder. And she still had seven weeks to go, after all.
The stroke of his fingers was rhythmic and lulling, and she sighed as her eyes drifted shut.
“Tell me about Juliet Morgan.”
She stirred at the low burr of his voice, her eyes drifting open, the pretty pastel lights throwing a warm, fuzzy glow around the room.
Or maybe that was just an orgasm-induced hallucination.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve known you for five days and apart from the fact I’ve seen you partially or fully unclothed twice and gotten you off three times, I feel like I don’t know anything about you.”
Juliet’s lips curved against the flesh of his shoulder. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
His hand drifted down her arm and onto her hip. “Not at all.” She could hear the smile in his voice. A voice as lazy and unhurried as his fingers. “But I’d like to know more before I get you off again.”
“Oh, goody, there’s going to be an again?”
His fingers brushed her ass then squeezed. “Count on it.”
Juliet’s heart beat a crazy little dance in her chest. It was stupid to feel so giddy around him. “What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know…” His hand released its hold, his fingers drawing patterns on the cheek of her ass instead. “How old you are.”
“Worried I’m secretly jail bait?”
“No…” His hand stopped. “At least, I wasn’t.”
“Relax.” She smiled as his fingers resumed their maddening patterns, stirring the embers, sparking the muscle fibres directly beneath to attention. “I’m twenty-five.”
“Where were you born?”
“In Brisbane. My mother moved to Sydney when I was a baby, after her and my dad split. You?”
“Out woop woop. In the far west of the state. Near Broken Hill. My family owns a big cattle property.”
“And you have four sisters.”
“Yep. They’re all still in the area. My youngest sister, Nell, helps Mum and Dad run the day-to-day farm things. The other three married locally and didn’t go too far.”
The affection in his voice was evident and somehow that just made him even more irresistible. “So you know how to ride a horse and muster and…stuff.”
He laughed. “Yes. I know how to do stuff.” He squeezed her ass again and muscles deep and low responded. “Country boys know how to do all kinds of stuff.”
Juliet just bet he did. Between the rugby and the cowboy thing, he had a whole lot of guy going on.
“What’s your favourite colour?” he asked.
“Depends on the day and where I am. I love the blue of the sky here and the yellow of the sun and the sand. But right now, I’m loving brown.” She rubbed her finger over the flat of his nipple. “This colour brown to be precise.”
His fingers dug into her buttocks and he drew in a husky breath. Juliet smiled to herself. “What’s your favourite colour?”
“Blue and silver, of course.”
She laughed. “Of course.”
He resumed his caress. “Why is a chick with a fine arts degree working in an animal shelter? No jobs, or is animal welfare your passion?”
“No, not a lot of jobs round for my degree, and while I am a passionate advocate for animal rights, the shelter is just a temporary job. I’m leaving to live in Italy in two months. Well…less now, actually.”
Ryder’s fingers stopped abruptly. The heavy weight of satisfaction evaporated from his bones. She was leaving? The country?
Talk about a buzzkill.
Something akin to panic needled his chest and that alarmed him. Why on earth would Juliet leaving the country in a couple of months be cause for panic? The longest relationship he’d ever had with a woman had been two months, so it should be perfect timing.
But the truth was…he liked this girl. He really liked her. And she was going to live on the other side of the world.
He shifted slightly, disturbing the pillow she’d made from his shoulder so he could look at her. “Really?”
She nodded. “Yep. My flight is booked. I’m just building up my bank account so I can travel for as long as possible before having to find work.”
“Wait.” He shifted again and her head rolled back some more so he could see her better. “This isn’t just a holiday?”
“No. I have an extended visa, so I’ll be there for a year. To start with. Maybe longer if I can swing it.”
Ryder frowned. “You speak Italian?”
She smiled. “Si.”
“Fluently?”
“Yes. I majored in it when I was studying fine art.”
“Oh…right.” Ryder’s mind was blown. In a completely different way to earlier.
And nowhere near as satisfying.
“That’s a big step.” He’d been lucky to travel overseas with rugby, but he’d never sought to do it for pleasure. Or adventure. “Picking up everything and moving to the other side of the world.”
“Cogli l’attimo.” The Italian slipped off her tongue and trailed seductive fingers down his abs. Despite his consternation about her leaving, hearing her speak another language was sexy.
They could definitely have fun with that.
“Seize the day,” she translated.
“Is this because of your mum?”
“Yes and no.” Her hair moved softly over his arm as she rolled her head back to use his shoulder as a pillow again. “We were going to go together after I finished school, like a gap year before I started uni. My friends used to think that was so weird, but Mum and I were really close. She’d been talking up Italy to me all my life.”
“But she got sick?” Ryder’s fingers sifted absently through the silky strands of her hair.
“Yes. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour toward the end of my senior year.”
A brain tumour. Crap.
“We went through all the treatments and she went into remission, and then she had a severe stroke.”
Ryder’s hand stilled, a hot spurt of sympathy burning like acid as he exhaled a husky breath. “I’m sorry.”
It sounded completely inadequate, but he didn’t know what else to say. What a truly shitty thing to have happened. He thought of his own mother, so fit and healthy and vital. How close he was to her. How much her death would devastate him.
His hand slid to Juliet’s shoulder and he pulled her closer, her head settling in the crook of his neck.
“The stroke. It was quite debilitating.” Her lips brushed his throat as she spoke, her voice quiet and meditative, like she’d gone back to that time. “But I was determined to keep looking after her at home.”
“Yes, I became her carer. With a lot of community support, thankfully.”
“That was very good of you. A lot of people might have put her in a facility of some kind.”
“No.” He felt the shudder go through her. “She’d looked after me single-handedly for eighteen years, why wouldn’t I look after her when she needed me?”
Ryder, whose grandmother had lived with them until she’d died when he was fifteen, couldn’t agree more, but the question seemed rhetorical, so he didn’t answer. He just waited for her to pick up the thread again.
“The cancer came back.” Her voice was husky now. “And…well, she lost the fight.”
A drop of warm moisture splashed onto his chest and Ryder squeezed her arm. He may be a man’s man, he may be known for his ability to drag an opponent to the ground like a lion drags a buffalo, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do tears.
Most guys he knew were about as useful as tits on a bull when it came to crying women, but growing up in a female dominated house had left him ably equipped to deal with emotions.
“How long did she…” He wanted to say last but wasn’t sure if that was the right word to use.
“She died almost two years to the day of her original diagnosis.”
Grief shrouded her voice. Ryder couldn’t even begin to comprehend what Juliet must have been through. “I’m sorry. That must have been a really crappy time in your life.”
“It was, but…” Her shoulder moved beneath his palm, her hand raising to her face, brushing at it, brushing at tears, he assumed. “We laughed a lot, too. And she made me promise before she died that I’d go to Italy, have my gap year. There was even a small inheritance to get me there.”
He frowned. Hadn’t she said it had been five years since her mother died? “But…you didn’t go straight away?”
She made a low noise in the back of her throat which may have been a growl. “I should have. I wish I had. Unfortunately…I met a guy.”
“Ah.”
“Owen. He was my first. Not a lot of time for boyfriends when you’re the sole carer for your terminally ill mother. He was eight years older than me and doing a PhD in Shakespearian poetry and I fell hook, line, and sinker.”
Her sigh was warm on his chest and Ryder hated him already. Shakespearian poetry. What a wanker.
“I was just going to do some conversational Italian classes, but he convinced me I should learn the language properly, become fluent, and I was eventually going to go to uni anyway, so…” Her ribs flared under his hand as she took a deep breath. “I enrolled in my fine arts degree, moved in with him, and wasted four years of my life and my meagre inheritance supporting us throughout because he was going to come with me when his studies were done.”
Ryder’s fingers tightened on her arm. Total wanker. “What happened?”
“It turned out I wasn’t sophisticated enough for him after he got his stupid bit of paper, and he walked out of my life. That was ten months ago.”
“What a…” A hundred different insults came to mind, but Ryder kept it tempered. “Deadshit.”
A half laugh huffed warm air against his neck. “I think I called him worse than that.”
“You’re right. What a fucking deadshit.” She laughed fully this time and a little of the tension in his body eased. “What did you do?”
“Well…there was a fairly dark period where I slept with a lot of guys in some kind of sick form of revenge. It didn’t really make his betrayal better, but it did expand my sexual experience exponentially.”
Ryder couldn’t help but wonder how magnificent she must have been back then, angry fucking every guy who crossed her path. A sudden thought struck him and tension crept back into his shoulders. “Wait, I’m not a revenge fuck, am I? You’re not still in love with him, are you?”
She levered herself up in an instant, her elbow grinding against his bicep as she propped the back of her head on her palm and eyeballed him. Strands of her hair fell forward over her shoulder. “Hell no. To both.”
Her absolute certainty was comforting.
“He was…using me. My inheritance paid the rent which meant he didn’t have to work. And with hindsight I can see he always preferred his literary friends to me.”
Ryder’s hand slid over her shoulder, pushing her hair back. “Which just goes to show you can have a PhD and still be dumb as fuck.”
“Yes.” She grinned. “I don’t…hate him, I don’t really feel anything for him. I’m more angry with myself, that I wasted so much of my life on him.”
He nodded. “What did you do then? After all the revenge sex?”
“Well, I had no money and there aren’t many jobs in my field of study, certainly not ones you toss after a year because you want to go live overseas. I’d volunteered at the shelter on and off and a paid temporary position came up, covering for someone’s maternity leave, and Margie offered it to me because she knew I needed the cash and didn’t want anything permanent. I found this place”—she glanced around her room—“and I moved in on the same day I started at the shelter.”
“Sounds like everything fell into place.”
“Yeah.” She smiled at him and a funny little pang hit him in the centre of his chest. “It did.”
Ryder’s hand trekked down to the curve of her hip. The golden brown of her tan glowed deep chestnut in the pastel light. “So…you’re leaving. In seven weeks.”
“In seven weeks and two days.” She traced her index finger along the seam of his lips. “Not that I’m counting.”
He nodded, his eyes shutting briefly against the sensations stirring in his body from her touch. “And where does that leave us?”
His eyes fluttered open. Fuck if he knew when he’d started thinking of them as an us. Firstly, he’d known her for five days and secondly, he’d never been the one to initiate this conversation himself. He’d never had to. Usually the chicks were all over it.
But not Juliet.
Did that mean she wasn’t particularly bothered whether she saw him again or not? Because that was bullshit. They weren’t done here. Not by a long shot.
Her finger slid from his mouth to his chin as her expression grew wary. “Us?”
He changed tack. “This.”
Her frown relaxed, her finger resumed its caress. “Well I’d definitely like to do this a few more times before I leave. Unless you don’t want to. Which is fine.”
Fine? Really? Was it really fine by her? Because it was not fine with him. His body was already a slave to hers, the evidence of which was rapidly growing between his legs with every lazy brush of her finger.
“Oh, I want to. I definitely want to.”
She smiled, her finger stopping in the middle of his bottom lip and pressing lightly as she slid it into his mouth. Ryder’s dick twitched as he sucked it and he groaned against her lips when she followed through with her mouth.
“There have to be rules, though.” She pulled out of the kiss, withdrawing her finger as well, sliding it down his chin and throat, leaving a wet trail.
“Rules?”
Her gaze locked with his. “This can only be sex. Just seven weeks of utterly debauched, completely strings-free sex.” Her finger moved south, swirling around first one nipple then the other. “No expectations. No commitments. No getting attached. No crying like a baby and asking me not to leave.”
Ryder laughed at the thought, but there was a husky catch to it as her finger trailed down his abdomen.
“I’m not going to fall in love with you,” she continued. “And you’re not going to fall in love with me. I will not give up my dream again, Ryder. Not for you, not for any man. Okay?”
She was suddenly deadly serious, her finger halted an inch from the head of his throbbing cock. He could see it right there in her eyes, burning fiercely.
She might not have hated her ex, but in that instant Ryder sure as hell did. Owen had made it impossible for Ryder to be
anything other than a seven-week dick. And he had to decide right now—her eyes were demanding an answer—whether he was okay with that.
He had no clue why he was even hesitating. It wasn’t like he’d ever had a problem with being used as a sex object before. Some women like to bag themselves a professional rugby player, and he’d been more than happy to oblige.
But Juliet was different. He already knew that. And if he said yes to this, he was agreeing to a physical relationship with an expiry date.
He wasn’t like a lot of the other guys on the team. Sure, he’d had a bloody good time with women, but he wasn’t averse to getting serious, either. He didn’t think a woman in his life would be distracting to his career. He’d always figured she would enhance it. Like his mum had done for his dad. And whilst he may not have been actively searching for that person, he was open to it happening.
What if Juliet was the one?
“Ryder?”
Her fingers drifted closer to their target, his abdominal muscles twitching beneath her touch. He half groaned, half laughed. “I’ve never met a woman like you.”
She raised an eyebrow. “A woman like me?”
“So bloody determined to call the shots.” Women had always been pretty damn happy for him to set the agenda. But from that first night when she’d told him she was test driving him, she’d had his nuts in a vice.
“I suppose women are all easy come easy go for you, huh?”
“What can I say?” He grinned. “They want me.”
Her finger slid down farther, and the sling of muscles in his pelvis tensed as she stopped about a millimetre from his cock, his groin tight with arousal.
“I want you, too.” Her fingers whispered over the head of his dick and Ryder’s hips jerked involuntarily. “But on my own terms.” Her whole hand got in on the act, wrapping around him and sliding down. “What do you say?”
She played dirty. If only that wasn’t such a fucking turn on. “Just sex.” He bit back a groan as she fondled him. “No expectations, no commitments, no tears. Check.”