by Lora Leigh
Chester Jansen had always been certain a fortune awaited him just around the corner. He had searched for gold, for artifacts. He had nearly destroyed his small business playing the stock market, and he had constantly been taken in with fly-by-night moneymaking schemes.
“Alex did a good job raising you,” he pointed out.
“He did. Alex was already ten when I was born. He had learned to take care of himself, and he applied it to taking care of me.” She nodded as she arranged the chicken and side dishes before setting two china plates between them and pulling out the glass carafe of sweet iced tea and unscrewing the lid that covered it before pouring the dark liquid into drinking glasses.
“Neither one of you turned out too bad.” He accepted the glass she handed him, then watched as she began opening the food and placing the serving spoons into it.
“We survived.” She shrugged, glancing at him warily again. “He warned me about you when I was sixteen, you know.”
“Really?” Dawg drawled. “I’ll have to discuss that with him. What warning did he give you?”
“To stay away from the Mackay cousins.” She flashed him a teasing smile. “He said the lot of you were bad news to any girl who wanted love rather than nasty games.”
“And you didn’t want nasty games?” He smiled back at her wickedly. He had a feeling that some of those games she would have taken to like a natural once she had gotten older. She sure as hell took to them now.
She ducked her head for a long second before lifting it slowly and staring back at him in determination. “I didn’t want to be one of the Nauti Boys’ Toys. That’s what your women were called.”
“But you wanted to be my woman?” He needed to know. He needed to hear her say it.
Crista dragged her gaze away from Dawg’s and stared across the clearing to the serenity of the small cove they faced. Water lapped against the rocky shore with a soothing rhythm.
She had wanted to be Dawg’s woman. Even then, ten years before, at a time when she had no concept what it meant to be anyone’s woman. Her fascination for him had been soul-deep, and it had culminated in one heated night that had threatened to destroy her soul.
“I wanted to be your woman,” she admitted on a sigh. She hadn’t lied to him to this point. Lying was something she hated. She had hated it as a child, and as an adult, she hated it even more.
“What changed that, Crista?” he asked her then, his voice insidiously soft, gentle. “We had one night together, and instead of slapping me with a frying pan the next morning, you ran.”
She shook her head. Over the past few days she had figured that one out for herself.
“I was too young for you, Dawg,” she finally admitted as she turned back to him. “We both knew I was too young for you. I couldn’t handle what I felt for you along with what I thought you wanted from me. It was too much.”
“And now?”
“And now you’re blackmailing me.” And she loved him more now than she had then.
“If I hadn’t blackmailed you?”
There was something in his voice that pulled at her then. Something she was certain she would see in his eyes if she pulled the dark glasses from his nose.
She reached out and did just that. Slid them from his face as he watched her, met his darkened gaze and felt her heart trip in her chest.
He was staring at her like no other man ever had. Equal parts hunger and pain.
If he hadn’t blackmailed her?
“I would have caved eventually,” she whispered, caught, held by that look in his eyes. “One of those nights that I was driving around the marina just to see if you were there, I would have weakened. I would have walked out to your houseboat, and if you had been alone, I would have come to you.”
She had been weakening, and she knew it. Tempted by his smiles, his teasing, his determined irritation each time she rebuffed him.
“You came to the marina just to see me?” He reached out, his fingertips smoothing over her collarbone and sending heated spirals of need crashing through her system.
Crista licked her lips, and for once, she didn’t fight the need welling inside her. She didn’t fight the love she knew no other man would ever possess.
“Often.” She fought to overcome the breathlessness, the racing of her heart. “And I’d stop and see the lights on in the Nauti Dawg, and I’d have to make myself stay in my car. I’d have to fight the need to go to you.”
“You should have come to me.” His hand cupped the back of her head, and he pulled her to him. “You should have let me love you, Crista.”
Crista’s senses exploded when his lips touched hers. It wasn’t the fiery, hungry kisses she was used to. It was a slow, tender exploration. It was letting her get used to the feel of his tongue against her lips before he slipped inside. It was sharing the taste of himself even as he drew hers in. It was heated, sensitizing, it was a kiss that drove the breath from her lungs and left her moaning with the need for more.
Her hands braced on the cloth beneath them as her hair enveloped them, hiding their faces, their kiss, shielding them in a veil of intimacy as his lips pulled back just enough to cause her eyes to open as a whimper of denial left her lips.
“I would have pulled you inside,” he whispered, his lips brushing hers as he spoke. “I would have locked out the world and drawn you to my bed. I would have made certain you never wanted to leave it again.”
“I don’t want to leave it now.” She couldn’t hold the words in.
A distant part of her brain cursed her foolishness, cursed her weak heart and the part of her soul that had never released the memory of his kiss, his touch.
She watched as Dawg’s eyes dilated, darkened, then he was stealing her kiss. He ravished her lips, ate at them, and grew greedy on the taste of her. His tongue licked, his head slanted, and the kiss deepened as fireworks exploded through her body. Brilliant heat. Flames licked over her flesh and seared her nerve endings.
When he drew back, all the way back, they were both breathing hard and fast and fighting for control.
“Not yet.” His voice was a graveled sound of need. “Too fucking soon. You have a few hours before you can take it yet.”
“There are other ways.” She leaned forward, touching her lips with his again, and saw the surprise in his eyes. She whispered wickedly, “Come on, Dawg. Show me how nasty you can get.”
Show her how nasty he could get? Oh, she had no idea the fantasies he had of getting nasty with her.
“What about lunch?” He glanced down at the food she had laid out.
“Fried chicken tastes better cold,” she reminded him, and Dawg watched in eager anticipation at the slow little lick her tongue made at her lips. “We can always eat later.”
Repacking the food was a simple matter of snapping the lids back on the containers and resetting them in the basket. The basket itself was set to the side. Dawg found himself moving, forcing her down to her back as he came over her.
“I won’t be nice,” he warned her. “You might want to reconsider that little dare you just made.”
Letting loose his fantasies could have disastrous results. Because he had a lot of fantasies.
“It could get worse than a spanking and a butt plug that vibrates and ripples?” She stared up at him in amused disbelief, even as her hands pulled his shirt free of his jeans.
She was wild, wanton. Dawg could see it in her eyes now, and he wondered if he hadn’t somehow sensed that wildness inside her years before.
He held back, feeling her slender fingers pulling at the buttons of his shirt, releasing them one by one as she stared up at him with a challenge in her eyes.
He wondered how far she would go. How wild she would let herself get before she pulled back. And maybe a part of him had to know. He had no desire to share her, but that didn’t mean his sexuality had dimmed in any way. He liked his sex lengthy, hard, and nasty. Crista couldn’t have a clue exactly how hard and nasty he could get with her. But he could sh
ow her. He could show her, and try like hell not to scare her off while he was doing so.
Because scaring her was definitely something he didn’t want to do. But he wanted her. All of her, in ways that had his cock pounding in agony at the thought of it.
“I could definitely make it compete with the butt plug,” he assured her with a smile as her fingers smoothed the shirt back from his shoulders.
Dawg shrugged the material away, feeling the summer breeze as it whispered through the trees and caressed his naked flesh. It was nowhere as sensual as the feel of Crista’s fingers working at his belt, drawing the leather free of the buckle before pulling at the metal button that held the band secure.
“You steal a girl’s breath with your wicked ways, Mr. Mackay,” she drawled teasingly, that hint of Southern belle deliberately thickened as his zipper rasped lower.
Dawg felt helpless above her. He stared into her chocolate eyes, certain he should be doing something himself. Kissing her soft lips, drawing her clothes from her body, but it was all he could do instead to maintain the strength in his arms to hold himself above her.
His jeans were loose now; her silken hands gripped the waistband and began drawing it from his body.
“That’s only going to go so far,” he warned her with a grimace. “We still have to get rid of the boots, sweetheart.”
She smiled, a reckless, heated smile that had his balls drawing tight in anticipation.
“Lie down,” she ordered softly, her palms pressing into his abdomen. “Lie down, Dawg, and we’ll see if we can’t get rid of them.”
He lay down.
Giving a woman control had never been his strong suit, but he gave it to Crista. Because watching her, feeling her touch, was like being warmed in the winter. It wrapped around him and eased him into the sensuality rather than allowing him to throw his partner into it.
She cast him a heated look from beneath her lashes as she moved to his feet and removed his boots, then his socks. Then, like the wanton he dreamed of, she gripped the waistband of his jeans and began to drag them and his briefs down his legs.
It was agonizing, watching her undress him, seeing the pleasure in her eyes and knowing how hot it made her. As she tossed his jeans to the bottom of the red checked cloth he was lying on, his brow arched.
“You’re still dressed, Crista.”
She looked around as though gauging the privacy of where they were. As he started to speak, her hands gripped the hem of the little shirt she wore, and she drew it over her head.
She wore nothing but a thin lace bra beneath it. One that framed her perky breasts and almost revealed her tight, hard nipples.
Watching him with slumberous, sexy eyes, she rose slowly to her feet and dropped the cotton capris as she pushed her sandals off her feet.
“Leave the panties on.” His voice was harsh as her fingers hooked into the little elastic band of the thong she wore.
Her lips tilted again. Knowing, sexual.
“What about the bra?”
“Lord have mercy.” He sighed. “Take it off.”
She released the clip between her breasts slowly and let the cups fall away from the hard-tipped mounds before shrugging it from her shoulders.
And there was no mercy to be found. There was sunlight spilling through the trees overhead and washing her creamy flesh in golden rays of heat.
When she came to him, Dawg couldn’t help but suck in his breath at the complete sensuality of her flowing movements. She wasn’t embarrassed. She wasn’t playing coy. She was hungry, and she was going to feed on the sexual, sensual intensity blazing between them.
Her lips came to his. Her hands gripped his wrists, holding them at his head as her breasts brushed over his chest. Her nipples were like fiery brands, her lips as they sipped at his, nipped, laved them with lust, were extensions of the hunger raging between them.
Dawg’s cock was so hard, so fully engorged it was painful. Each brush of her nipples against his chest had him flexing, his body raging to take control of the sex play and to bury his dick as deep inside her as he could get.
“You’re riding the line, fancy-face,” he growled as her lips pulled back, the curtain of her hair embracing them in an intimate world all their own.
Crista felt Dawg’s wrists flex beneath her hand and glimpsed the powerful muscles of his biceps as they rippled.
“I’m not riding anything yet, Dawg,” she reminded him teasingly, her head lowering so her tongue could lick at the powerful cords of his neck.
Her hands smoothed along his arms as she braced herself on her knees on each side of a powerful thigh. His cock pressed against her hip, his hard chest stroked her nipples with each breath. And beneath the lace of her panties her pussy was creaming furiously.
“Keep it up, and you’re going to be riding more than you should be handling for another few hours,” he warned her tightly, his hips flexing beneath her, pushing his cock more firmly against her hip.
The heavy male thigh she straddled shifted as well, bringing a gasp to her lips and a surge of sensation to the swollen clit it pressed against.
“Other ways,” she whimpered. There were ways she was dying to try. Long-dreamed-of acts she needed to experience with him.
“Other ways.” His voice was filled with challenge. “Better get started on those ‘other ways,’ fancy-face. I’m a dying man here.”
He was sexy as hell, too. Stretched out on the overlarge picnic blanket, his eerie green eyes gleamed back at her from behind lowered lashes.
Crista lowered her head again, her lips and tongue finding a flat, hard, male nipple and working it in her mouth. A muted groan came from his chest. His arms moved as though to reach for her.
“Stay for me.” She pressed his arms back to the checked cloth. “Just a little longer, Dawg. Let me have this.”
She needed it. Needed him. Needed to taste and explore and fill her senses with him.
“Crista, sweetheart, you’re killing me here.” He was breathing rough and heavy, but his arms stayed in place as her lips moved to the opposite nipple and tormented the pebble-hard flesh.
Giving it a final lick, she moved lower. Her hands stroked his heavy thighs, inside and out. Her lips kissed, her tongue licked a sensual, meandering path down his chest and firm abdomen.
Hard muscles flexed beneath her lips. His thighs bunched; the thickly crested head of his cock gleamed with moisture as her fingers finally gripped the stiff shaft.
Crista knelt between his thighs and stared up at his body, tracking the damp flesh and finally meeting his narrowed gaze.
“I get to have dessert first,” she said with a slow smile.
Her head lowered, her tongue licked over the straining crest, curling over it as a low, hungry growl rumbled in his throat.
“Sweet Crista,” he groaned. “That sweet little tongue is like fire.”
Dawg’s hands knotted in the cloth beneath him. He was dying. Stretched out on a rack of sensation that had sweat building along his body and his balls tight with anticipation.
He watched as she smiled again. A drowsy, sexy little smile a second before her lips opened and she took the pounding head of his dick into her tight mouth, sucking it slow and easy. Her fingers caressed and stroked, tortured and tempted, until his hips were thrusting into her grip, fucking her lips as the heat built around them.
“Come here.” He reached for her. He’d be damned if he would take the torment alone. “Turn around here, darlin’.”
Her lips never left his cock. But her body turned and sweet, lace covered flesh came closer to his hungry lips. For the first time in his sexual life, Dawg found himself without patience, without careful deliberation.
One hand gripped her leg, lifting it over his head before both hands gripped her hips. Fingers gripped the lace and drew it slowly from the newly waxed flesh between her thighs. Dawg stared up at the bare folds, luscious pink and gleaming with her juices. Sweet, soft little droplets hugged her flesh and had him licki
ng his lips in anticipation.
“Oh yeah.” He sighed, pulling her closer. “Come here, baby, let me show you how good it can be now.”
It was one of the sexiest things she had ever envisioned.
Crista caught her breath as Dawg licked over the saturated folds between her thighs. The protective curls that had once covered her there were gone, and the sensations were enough to make a woman insane.
There was nothing now to insulate her from the rasp of his tongue or the soft licks he bestowed upon her. His caresses only made her hotter, only made the need rising inside her bloom to desperation. To greed.
He licked and sucked with gentle movements, never abrading the sensitive folds but soothing them, whispering over them, consuming them as her mouth sucked greedily at the head of his cock. She was determined to make him just as desperate for satisfaction as she was becoming.
She swore the breeze whipping around them was spiked with fire now. Dawg held her hips easily, controlling her frantic need for movement against his mouth. His tongue burrowed through her slit, licked and moved to curl around her clit.
He stroked, sucked, and lashed at the fiery little nubbin with hungry licks and greedy suckling lips until the inferno inside her began to blaze out of control.
Strong fingers separated her rear cheeks and caressed the narrow cleft there.
Breathing was impulse; the cries that tore from her throat as she sucked Dawg’s cock were involuntary. All she knew was the heat racing through her veins, the flames licking over her flesh, and the ache building with each lick of his tongue between her thighs.
The taste of male passion and heated flesh filled her senses. The feel of his tongue rasping, thrusting, and licking overwhelmed her.
Nothing mattered now but the pleasure. Her pleasure. His pleasure. The race to release and the need for completion. It was a like a fever in her blood, that need that consumed and overwhelmed everything else.
Her fingers stroked and pumped the stiff flesh of his cock. She sucked at the throbbing head. Her tongue lashed and stroked and tasted the heated male passion, while his tongue drove her to distraction. Stroking and thrusting and fucking inside her as his fingers caressed and pressed against the tender opening between her rear cheeks.