by Stacey Lynn
I pressed my hands to the bed coverings at my sides, clung to the sheets while he increased his speed, added a thumb to my clit, and I shattered into a thousand beautiful, jagged pieces beneath him. He leaned over me and swallowed the rest of my ecstatic cries with his mouth and his tongue all while his fingers worked me through the peak and beyond until my body shuddered and shivered beneath him.
Slowly, he removed his fingers and I gripped his biceps. “More,” I gasped. “I want you.”
He quirked an amused grin. “I was just getting a condom.”
“Right. Good idea.”
Was it okay to laugh during some of the best pre-sex you could remember? I didn’t know. I still couldn’t stop it. He pulled more than an orgasm from me when he touched me. He yanked away all my insecurities and uncertainties. In the days since Cooper had returned, and I’d told him everything, there was nothing between us except whatever we created.
I was honest with my fears and my guilt and my regrets. He was waiting for his finalized divorce papers to be delivered.
I planned on enjoying every moment I had with him until he left me, and even knowing it was coming, I couldn’t stop myself from falling.
This man in front of me, reaching for a condom, ripping open a packet and shaking his head at the messy pile of condoms in my nightstand drawer where he’d shoved them all the other night, was a man who entered my life when I didn’t want anyone around and he kicked down my walls and shattered my windows.
He was an unstoppable force.
And he was mine, for as long as I could possibly have him.
He came back to me, and my eyes fell to his hand wrapped around his length as he slid on the condom. I covered my hand with his because I couldn’t not touch him, he was so beautiful. A sigh fell from my lips and he pushed my hand away, bent over me and kissed me and then he was there.
At my center.
Sliding against me.
Sliding inside of me.
Filling me, and it was all so damn beautiful, my eyes fluttered closed and my lips parted.
“Yes,” I whispered, as he planted himself to the root and stilled. My hands went to his hips and held him in place. “Stay here. You feel so good.”
“If I moved now, it’d be over before it began.”
I wouldn’t even be disappointed if that happened. He’d given me enough and just this hint of how good he felt inside of me, the way all of my body responded to him on a cellular level, he could come right now and it’d still drive me crazing knowing it was me driving him crazy.
He rolled his hips. Shoved deeper. I groaned through a laugh. “Brooke brought some stamina enhancing ones if you need it,” I teased.
He nipped at my lips. “I’ll show you stamina, woman.”
And God, this was playful and fun and so sexy and beautiful. We connected like we’d been doing this for years, like our bodies were puzzles and had finally found their missing piece.
He moved, pulled back, and slid inside again, lifting my leg to the side to go deeper.
He set out proving to me exactly what he said he did. The man had some serious stamina, and all of it, every single moment connected to him was pure bliss.
He brought me to another climax, drawing it out and taking his time, words of praise and encouragement on his lips. His grunts filled the room, his eyes locked on mine. It was beautiful and passionate and when I came again, reaching that peak, my fingers dug into his lower back. His speed increased as he thrust into me, quick, hard movements that sent the aftershocks of my orgasm racing through me. And when he came, he called out my name, a string of curses, and settled his mouth on mine, before he gave me all his weight.
Thirty-Three
Cooper
After learning Rebecca was even more amazing in bed than I’d imagined she’d be, I continued learning new things about her every day.
Like, when the Fourth of July hit, the woman went crazy. She tricked out her house for Independence Day like my mom did for Christmas. I went to the feed store one day to pick up her order of mineral blocks and feed for the goats and chickens. In the two hours that trip took me, I came back and the house, inside and out, had exploded in patriotic decor the likes of which I’d never seen before.
Red, white, and blue towels and napkins and plates appeared in the kitchen. Red metal stars hung in sets of three above the fireplace, the front porch, and the side wall by the stairway. She’d set up a canopy of red, white, and blue twinkling lights outside, strung them around and above the fire pit and along the length of the back of her house from poles I had never seen. Lanterns had been popped into the edging of the landscaping around the back patio.
Everywhere I turned, stars were hung, flags waved from small poles along the front walk to the house and the gravel walkway to the guesthouse. There were pots of new flowers, all red and white spread along the wooden staircase leading to the front porch and door.
It wasn’t just the decorating that exploded. She jumped into a party planning frenzy, explaining to me two nights ago when she was quadruple-checking her shopping list for the upcoming barbecue party, that she hosted this event every year and she wasn’t missing it this year.
She had shoved the pencil eraser into her mouth and nibbled. That sent my mind straight to other things she could be nibbling and before she knew it, she was flung over my shoulder, plopped down onto the couch where I made love to her on top of a patriotic throw blanket.
God Bless the U.S.A.
Afterward, she flung it around her body and hauled her tight little ass upstairs to clean up and that memory of her, wrapped in stars and stripes, slapped me in the face as she came down the stairs this morning before we headed to the Carlton County 4th of July parade.
She was again, practically draped in a knock-off of our country’s flag but this was hella sexier than the throw blanket. Strapless and cinched at the waist, it was a one-piece with shorts that ended mere inches beneath the swell of her ass. And on her feet, she wore red leather thong sandals that perfectly matched her red and white striped toenail polish.
She called it a romper.
I called it a tiny little slice of heaven. It clung to her curves, showed a hint of her cleavage from the straight line of the top across her breasts. It showed off her sexy as hell legs.
I was still laughing at her and her sudden burst of insane excitement when we pulled up to the grass parking lot she directed me to for the best parking on the parade route. We were two hours early for the parade and the lot was almost filled. I’d dodged child after child, parents, and families, repeatedly through the streets, inching along at two miles an hour in her Chevy Silverado while people hustled along carrying folding chairs and blankets that almost matched Rebecca’s outfit.
“You are not wearing those,” I said, looking at her like she’d gone absolutely crazy.
“Of course I am.” She grinned and pressed something at the sides of a pair of sunglasses that had made a sudden appearance. And yes, they were red and white striped with tiny blue stars along the frames. They were three times too large for her small, typically cute face, and whatever she pressed made the stars blink in a rapid, wild manner. “What’s wrong with them?”
I buried my face in my hands fighting back a roar of laughter. “You have been holding out on me,” I said, pointing at her once I grabbed control of my laughter. “Brooke and Kelly are not the crazy ones. You’re their ringleader, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her face, what I could see of it, was of picture-perfect innocence.
Like I could take her seriously with blinking glasses. “Sure you don’t.”
Despite my urge to flee from her sudden arrival of crazy, I grabbed her hand and reached into the bed of the truck to get the chairs. At some point during the week, it became an assumption we’d come to the parade. I hadn’t even been asked, and it’d been so long since I went to one, I hadn’t even thought about it, but once she started talking about the party later,
mumbling her way through the planning of it and constantly recalculating the number of ribs and hot dogs I was sent to the store to purchase yesterday, I was drawn in to her excitement.
Apparently, so was everyone else in Carlton because the town had swelled to at least four times its typical size for a weekday morning. The streets were lined with chairs and blankets, a few small canopies had been opened to offer up shade. A slew of children of all ages ran around, some toddling by on chubby legs, while others raced up and down the now closed streets, tossing a football or Frisbees. Some sat on the curbs, sucking on popsicles, the red and blue juices dribbling off their chins. The mist of a poorly shot water gun dripped down on us and the streets were filled with joyful shrieks and happy squeals.
It was a scene I was certain had to be similar to the parades I’d attended in my childhood. But the last parade I went to was spent waving from a float on Thanksgiving Day in New York, and that parade, while wild and rambunctious and filled with kids was not anywhere similar to the scene in front of me. This was family and community and small town coming together, embracing one another freely, celebrating their love of their country and their excitement of a day off work, or a day off summer sports, where they’d most likely drink and eat a lot of hot dogs and brats, wave their flags, holler out the memorized words to a Toby Keith song or twelve, and they’d do it all with their friends and neighbors and families by their sides.
It was no longer any surprise why this day, above all other days in the year, sent Rebecca spinning like a lunatic.
We walked through the crowd, Rebecca next to me, and holding my hand. We were looking for Brooke and Andrew and their boys when reality smacked me across my face.
This was everything beautiful about small-town life.
She was everything beautiful I’d ever wanted.
The woman I’d marry. The woman who would have my children.
The woman who, for the rest of my life, I’d never have to worry about whether or not I could trust her because we’d both been through hell, and knew to appreciate it when God handed us something good again.
I pulled to a sudden stop, almost yanking her off her feet.
I didn’t apologize.
“What is it?” Rebecca asked, looking back at me. She lifted the ridiculous glasses off her eyes and squinted. “This isn’t where Brooke sits.”
“I know.” I slid the glasses back down and settled them on her nose. If she didn’t like what I had to say, I didn’t want to see it reflected back at me. “I just realized something.”
A tiny line appeared above the bridge of her glasses. “What?”
I kissed her lips and pulled back, grinning. I accused her of being a lunatic. I was pretty sure that title belonged to me. “I love you,” I said. “I just wanted you to know.”
I grabbed her hand and continued walking. She stuttered and tugged on my hand. I pulled down the brim of my KU hat. Occasionally, when I was out, I received the stares and fluttering eyelashes I was so accustomed to. Mostly, I realized, here no one cared who I was. They might have been curious, or excited, but other than Kelly and Brooke, most had manners enough not to go crazy. Instead, everywhere I went, I was welcomed with open arms and wide smiles, treated no differently than someone like Peter Whitman who’d lived here his entire life.
“Hey!” Rebecca tugged on my hand. She dug her heels into the asphalt street and growled at me. “Cooper.”
“What?” I looked back at her and grinned. “Don’t you want to find Brooke?”
I wanted her to know I loved her. I didn’t need a discussion about it. Sometimes Rebecca needed time to process everything, especially when it came to us, and I didn’t need a reply. I just needed her to know.
“I do want to find Brooke, but I’m wondering if we should flag down an EMT and get you checked for heat stroke.”
“Because I love you?”
“No!” She smacked her hands on her hips. “Because you just keep saying it in the middle of the street like it’s something you say to me every day and I don’t know how to handle it!”
I shrugged. She was cute when she was flustered. “Don’t know what to tell you. But I suggest you get used to hearing it.”
“Cooper—”
Ridiculous. “I love you.” I leaned in and whispered it in her ear. Goose bumps popped down her arm despite it being almost ninety degrees. “I love you and I mean it and I don’t know why I just blurted it back there, but I felt it and I don’t want to hide what I’m feeling with you. So I’m going to say it, and you don’t have to say it back. You don’t even have to feel it yet. I didn’t say it to hear you love me, I said it because I want you to hear it from me. That’s it, Rebecca. That’s all it is.”
Also because if she didn’t, if she wouldn’t ever say it, I didn’t want to know yet. We hadn’t talked about me leaving since I returned, and Max was handling an issue on a set based in Germany, so it wasn’t a good time to talk to him.
Her lips formed a pout. “You could at least kiss me when you say it.”
That I could do. I slid my lips along her jaw. “I’ll kiss you later,” I said, “when I’m deep inside you, taking you on your knees like I did yesterday. That was fun, right?” I nipped at her earlobe and pulled back.
Her hot pink cheeks had nothing to do with the heat. Neither did the pink on her chest. That was all me.
If it made me a bastard for liking that she got so turned on when I talked to her, I didn’t care.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice dry and hoarse. “That was fun.”
“Come on. You don’t want to miss the parade.” I readjusted the carrying straps to the chairs on my shoulder and grabbed her hand.
“And you say I’m the crazy one,” she muttered.
We walked one more block down the street, Rebecca occasionally stopped by someone calling her name where she’d wave and say hello before moving on before we heard a little male voice shouting her name.
“Auntie Becky! Auntie Becky!” Oliver jumped up and down on the curb, his hands waving wildly in the air. “Over here! Over here!”
“Just so you know, Ollie’s the only one who can call me Becky. I hate it unless it’s coming out of his sweet little mouth.”
“Got it. You love the name Becky.”
I grinned at her. She growled at me. Then she dipped down, picked Oliver up into her arms and was practically tackle hugged by Nathan. I went over and hugged Brooke, shook Andrew’s hand and set up our chairs while the boys chattered non-stop to Rebecca about all the floats they wanted to see.
Then I settled my ass into the chair.
“Want one?” Andrew asked, holding out a beer from the cooler next to him. “You’re going to need it.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” I sat with Andrew. We chatted. We stood when the Honor Guard led the parade, the National Anthem blaring from speakers in a pick-up truck following them. Then we sat, and for three long hours, I watched Rebecca act almost as manic as Nathan and Oliver did whenever candy was flung in our direction from floats and pick-up trucks and fire engines.
She left the parade with a bag of candy that weighed twice as much as theirs. And I was pretty sure at one point, she shoved Nathan to his butt racing him into the street to get a beer bottle koozie, even though she adamantly denied it all the way home.
* * *
My arm was slung over her shoulder and her head rested on mine. In my other hand, I held a beer bottle. Night had fallen, dinner had been eaten along with a half-dozen pies and cakes and cookie-type bars and more cookies. At least forty people still hung around, though many more had been around earlier. Apparently, most of the locals in town and those Rebecca grew up with came to this party every year and had been doing it since they were teenagers. She hadn’t mentioned it was such a long-standing tradition.
When we’d come back from the parade, Rebecca on a sugar high from all the flavored Tootsie Roll type candies, she’d put me to work pulling out a half-dozen large Rubbermaid bins from a storage area in o
ne of the barns. The contents of those bins…hula hoops and jump ropes, at least a dozen sports balls and mitts and bases and tons of other children’s toys were now scattered all over the lawn.
Kids were still squealing, running and chasing each other while most of the adults had broken off into smaller groups. We’d pulled out some of the square hay bales and placed them around the patio and the front, grouping them like benches, but most who came showed with arms full of food and desserts and drinks and their own folding chairs slung over their shoulders.
I’d been standing around with Ryan and some other men he knew, all of whom volunteered with the fire department, but when Rebecca had disappeared into the house for a few minutes, I grabbed her for a private moment on her return.
“You should have told me this gathering was such a big deal around here, I wouldn’t have teased you so much about you freaking out about it.”
“I sort of wanted you to experience it as it happened.” She tilted her chin up to me. “It’s my favorite day the year.”
“I sort of got that.”
“Today was one of the best.” The glimmer in her eyes softened and I twisted so I could kiss her. She said with her eyes what I knew she couldn’t say with her words. It was more than enough. My chest swelled, heat kicked up and spread through my limbs.
“Mine too.” I pulled back and aimed my beer at the mess of kids running around. Dirt kicked up to their ankles, hair that had once been in sweet little pigtails or braids now a disheveled mess. “Not to make shit serious when it’s been a great day, but did you and Joseph ever talk about kids?”
Her hand wrapped around my back tightened. She gave me the dark parts of their history the other night, but like a clam, she snapped shut afterward. I didn’t ask where that picture frame went, but I hadn’t seen it since. And at some point, she’d painted over the dented wall. Erasing all the evidence of him.
I didn’t want that for her. I wanted her to move on, to find something new again, and hopefully, that’d be me, but I didn’t want to pretend like he hadn’t existed either. At some point, she’d either find a way to forgive him and let him go, or she’d release what she couldn’t control and would never know, into the abyss.