Their kisses grew more frantic, heated, and needy. He pulled back just long enough to tug her halter top off, then his mouth fused to hers as his hands began a thorough exploration of her skin. Soft, smooth, hot. He reached the Lycra of her bikini, and the breath left his body, his cock becoming even harder, something he hadn’t thought possible.
He took her nipples and pinched them through the fabric. Her answering whimper was enough to snap whatever self-control he had left.
“Get rid of all this,” he growled before stepping away.
She watched him with her dark eyes as she untied the top and dropped it to the floor before stripping off her shorts and the bottom half of the bikini. Then she stood in front of him, and it was more beauty than any man had a right to look at.
“Bath,” he instructed her, and she turned and stepped into the cast-iron tub before lowering herself into it. The steam that rose from the surface quickly turned her skin rosy and damp, giving him the urge to lick the moisture off her.
With a deep breath he unlaced his board shorts, dropping them to the floor so he was standing before her in nothing but a prosthesis. She reached out a hand and ran it from his thigh to the artificial limb.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” she whispered into the dim room.
He tipped his head toward the ceiling, overcome with emotions he couldn’t even label.
When he looked back down, she was watching him, her hand idly rubbing little circles on his knee.
“I’m thinking that if it brought me back to you, it was worth it,” he told her with a sad smile.
Then he took the final step. Sitting on the edge of the tub, facing away from her he removed the prosthesis, setting it aside before rotating on the edge of the tub and swinging both legs into the water. He used his powerful arms to lower himself into the water facing her. She shifted to accommodate him before taking his stump in her hand and rubbing it slowly.
He settled back against the tub and watched her. His stump ended about four inches below his knee joint. The skin was puckered, and a large red scar wrapped around it, still angry in the way that only fresh scars can be.
“It’s ugly,” he said flatly.
“No,” she whispered. “It’s part of you, and you’re beautiful.”
He snorted. “Baby, it’s okay to tell the truth. I’m fully aware of what an eyesore it is.”
She grabbed the stump a little more firmly than was technically comfortable for him. He stiffened. But then she raised his lower leg out of the water and bent over it. She pressed her lips to the scarred skin, the severed bone below, the damaged nerves, and torn muscle. She kissed the ugliest parts of him, and it undid him. His eyes burned, and he lost whatever self-control he’d been clinging to for the last few weeks.
“Jesus,” he hissed before reaching across the bathtub and grabbing her around the waist. He pulled her onto his lap where her slick center pressed against his erection and her full breasts fell into his hands.
He kneaded and worshiped, his mouth everywhere his hands weren’t. She arched her back and cried out as he rubbed his thumb across her clit.
“I need you,” he sighed into her hair.
“Yes. God, yes,” she gasped.
He lifted her by the waist, and she reached down to grasp his shaft in her hand. It felt like heaven. But then she rubbed the tip through her folds, and he realized that there were things beyond heaven. Beyond the stars and the skies and the world as he’d lived in it all these years.
“Take me, T. Take me inside.”
She lowered herself over him as he thrust upward, causing them both to groan in ecstasy. Water sloshed and their skin squeaked against the tub’s porcelain surface, but they hardly noticed as he began a slow rhythm in and out of her. Smaller thrusts at first that grew harder and wilder as all her heat and flesh surrounded him.
“Fuck, baby,” he growled, his balls tingling and hard. “I’m not going to last long.”
“Oh God, oh God,” she panted. Then he shifted, bending her back slightly, causing his cock to rub harder on that perfect spot that he knew would send her flying.
She flew apart almost instantly, crying out his name and pulsing around him like warm thick honey. It pushed him over the edge mere seconds later, and he gritted out his release as he throbbed inside her over and over until he wasn’t sure he had anything left to give.
When they both came back to earth, they were pressed chest to chest, his head buried in the crook between her neck and shoulder, his hand tangled in her hair. She pressed her face into his shoulder and gave one final shudder that had him gasping as he chuckled.
“Don’t start with that now, or we’ll be in here all night,” he teased.
“Like you’d mind,” she murmured, kissing his earlobe.
“True, but you don’t want all my pretty skin to wrinkle up.”
She laughed. “So I guess we really do need a shower now.”
“Yeah, just don’t expect me to do you up against the wall, I’m kind of unbalanced for that.”
She climbed off him and looked down with a wicked gleam in her eye. “Not if you put your aqua leg on,” she teased.
Challenge accepted.
17
“Vaughn?”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you like camping out so much?”
Vaughn looked at the stars overhead as he and T.J. lay in one of his dad’s pastures near the house.
“’Cause it’s big out here,” he answered.
He turned his head to look at her in Ty’s blue down sleeping bag. “Don’t you like it? You always say yes when I want to go.”
She rolled to look at him, and something in his tummy rippled around. The way the moonlight reflected off her hair was so pretty, it almost made him forget about the stars.
“I like it too,” she said. “I just wondered why you like it.”
“Why do you like it?” he asked.
“Because we get to do it together,” she answered.
T.J. opened her eyes midmorning, the sunlight streaming through the light curtains of the hotel and San Francisco’s urban sounds outside. She started to stretch, then felt a large, hot presence at her back. She smiled to herself. The man had earned a sleep-in. He’d managed to give her two orgasms in the bathroom, one of those while holding her up against the shower wall—who knew there were so many uses for an aqua leg? Then he’d gotten her off twice more in bed until they’d both fallen into a dead sleep at two a.m.
Yes, the new-and-improved Vaughn was rocking it, and she decided that new-and-improved T.J. rewarded such stellar behavior. So she quietly scooted down the bed until she was eye level with his exceptionally talented and rather attractive nether regions. She eyed his erection, all smooth and velvety, with just a touch of lubricant on the tip, waiting for her to give it a lick.
“Are you just going to stare at it, or did you have something more in mind?” Vaughn’s sleepy voice came from the head of the bed.
She grinned. “Just formulating my plan of attack,” she answered, running one finger up his shaft and causing him to sigh in pleasure.
“I have a plan already. Get up here.”
She started to scoot toward him, but he stopped her. “Maybe I should have said, ‘get your beautiful pussy up here.’ This is your ‘one new thing’ to try for the day.”
Oh. Oh! T.J. could feel her face heating, but she was also smiling so wide, her cheeks hurt. She carefully turned so she could straddle his head, and Vaughn murmured something that sounded like “fuck me” as he wrapped his big hands around her waist and pulled her down onto his face.
Fuck me indeed. She gasped as he ran the flat of his tongue along her slit. So. Good.
But she reminded herself that she was supposed to be helping out with all this, so she took his shaft in hand and wrapped her lips around him, licking her way down from head to base.
She felt his breathing pick up as he sucked and licked her, finally sliding two fingers inside and se
nding a shock of pleasure through her. She nearly bit him, but managed to turn it into a gentle scrape of teeth instead.
His hands stroked her ass, plunged in and out of her and took her to the precipice of an outrageous orgasm. Meanwhile, she worked him over, pumping, swirling, swallowing him as deep as she could.
Finally, as she was just about to come, he moved her off his face and sat up, her ass still in his hands in front of him. “I’ve never been so glad I have a knee joint left,” he whispered harshly as he knelt behind her and thrust in.
She cried out, the invasion on such sensitized flesh enough to tip her over immediately. He kept pumping even as she contracted around him, until he too came, ending up slumped over her back, both of them breathing as if they’d run a marathon.
He pulled them down to one side, not even slipping out of her when he did it.
Stroking her hair as they spooned, he whispered, “Now you wore me out again. Let’s nap.”
She murmured her agreement, and they both fell back into a blissful sleep.
For as long as they’d been friends, T.J. and Vaughn had done three things—worked the ranches, camped and swum outside, and watched movies. And T.J. loved all those things, she really did, but something told her that if she and Vaughn were really going to be different this time around, they had to break all the patterns. They were doing a pretty good job in bed, both of them older and more adventurous than they had been in high school. But now that experimentation needed to extend past the bedroom—and the bathroom and the potting shed.
“So what’s our plan today?” Vaughn asked as he came out of the shower and hopped to the bed, where he sat to put his prosthesis on.
“I thought we could go eat lunch in Chinatown—dim sum. Then maybe see Coit Tower.”
He stopped midway through removing his towel to get dressed. T.J. looked wistfully at his firm, ripped chest and lamented the need for him to cover it up.
“Really?” he asked. “You want to do all that tourist stuff? I was thinking we could go to Golden Gate Park, maybe rent a boat, and take it out on the bay.”
She sighed. Yes, that was what old T.J. and Vaughn would have done, and it would be fine, but they’d know no more about San Francisco when they left than they did right now. In all the years she’d lived within a few hours of the City by the Bay, she’d only ever been there to the airport and a handful of shopping trips with her mother. She wanted to experience the city, not the ocean. She could get the ocean back home.
“Well, that’s what old us would have done. Don’t you think new us should try something different?”
Vaughn looked pained but resigned. “Sure. Whatever you want, baby.”
She watched him for a moment, then it came to her. “Okay, new plan. Chinatown for lunch, then a surprise.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do I need to worry?”
“Not a bit.”
“Do I need to bring any extra legs with me?” he asked.
“Nope. You’ll love it, I promise.”
He still looked doubtful, but he finished getting dressed and grabbed her hand to lead her out of the hotel.
They Ubered to lunch because T.J. said they’d want to save their walking for the post-lunch event. It rankled Vaughn a touch that she assumed he couldn’t walk to Chinatown and still do whatever else she had planned, but in all fairness, San Francisco was beyond the normal walking requirements. The steep hills made it more difficult, and city blocks were long. He was starting to learn that somewhere between feeling incapable of anything and trying to do everything was his new reality. Yes, he was differently abled now, but he was also still capable of most things in everyday life, and the less he focused on it, the less anyone else did.
At lunch, he proved to T.J. that he could break the mold by eating one of everything on the cart instead of sticking with the familiar. But when he took a plate of braised chicken feet, her jaw dropped.
“You’re not.”
“I am,” he answered, grinning and picking up one of the somewhat rubbery three-toed feet with his chopsticks.
“Oh God,” she whimpered. “That’s so disgusting.”
“Come on, T.,” he teased, holding it up in front of her face. “You’ve been raising chickens your whole life. You eat them all the time. Why is this any different?”
“I don’t know.” She wrinkled her nose. “But it definitely is.”
He shrugged and pulled a toe off, popping it into his mouth, chewing slowly as she looked at him in horror.
And he had to admit, it was…not the best. The spicy Asian barbecue sauce that coated it disguised any flavor of the foot itself, but the texture was appalling, chewy but mushy at the same time. Even the tiny bone that he had to extract from his mouth was nearly soft enough to chew, and he suspected that in some exotic places they probably did.
When he managed to choke down the mouthful of meat and skin, he reached for his water glass, and she broke into riotous laughter.
He gulped half the glass then put it down to glare at her.
“If you could have seen the look on your face,” she said, her eyes starting to water.
“But I did it,” he answered, grossed out but still impressed with himself.
She shivered in revulsion, then handed him a sesame-coated bean curd dumpling. “Here, this will make it better.”
He grabbed the little ball of doughy sweet goodness and smiled at her gratefully. “Admit it, though, old Vaughn wouldn’t have done that.”
She gave him a smile so sparkling that his heart lurched, and he knew he’d eat a thousand of those disgusting chicken feet if he could get that reaction out of her.
“I’m impressed, and I really like new Vaughn.”
He smiled back. He did too.
T.J. had been so thrilled with her brainchild for how to spend the afternoon. But now, as they approached their destination, she felt anxiety creeping in. She’d never known Vaughn to do something so sedentary and indoor oriented. Sure he painted pictures himself, but go to a museum? She’d never witnessed it, although she supposed he must have had to in college. It would be pretty hard to get an art degree without visiting a museum or two.
“You sure you know where we’re going?” he asked as he held her hand on the sidewalk of Third Street.
“Yes,” she answered, rolling her eyes.
“Just checking,” he muttered.
“And here we are,” she announced as she pulled him to a stop in front of the entrance promenade to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The plaza space had an oblong decorative fountain that led to the reddish-brown concrete building with the large round tower that looked as though someone had taken a knife and sliced an angled piece from it.
He looked at the building and then at her. “Really?” he asked.
“I thought you might be interested. Since you’ve been painting more lately.”
“You don’t mind? You won’t get bored looking at art all afternoon?”
Even though his words were cautious, she could see the glimmer of interest in his eyes. And he probably didn’t realize that his hand had tightened around hers, his excitement radiating down through his fingertips.
She smiled at him, her heart soaring with the knowledge that she’d chosen right.
“I’d love it, actually. I love museums. I used to go to the local one all the time when I was in college.”
He blinked. “You do? You love museums?”
She laughed. “Yeah. How did you not know that?”
“I’m not sure. I guess I never really thought about it. Old T.J. and Vaughn don’t go to places where there are museums.”
She squeezed his hand gently. “Maybe new T.J. and Vaughn need to do that.”
“Maybe they do,” he answered thoughtfully. “Maybe they need to do a lot of things that they never did before.” Because maybe new T.J. and Vaughn really were different people than they had been all those years ago.
18
Vaughn’s heart raced as he thrust i
nto her, he was shaking and sweating, and he wasn’t sure he could hold off much longer. He’d had sex before—twice—with Karen Anderson, and it hadn’t sucked, but it sure as hell hadn’t felt like this.
“Hey,” he gasped, “are you okay?” He pulled back, and while he didn’t intend to push back in so quickly, it was like his dick had a mind of its own.
“Uhn-hunh,” she managed to groan as her neck arched and she shifted her foot that was planted on the floor of his truck.
They were wedged in the backseat, and he knew it wasn’t terribly comfortable, and it definitely wasn’t where he would have chosen to take T.J.’s virginity, but damn if he’d been able to control himself once she’d offered herself up to him. What had started off with him dragging her out of another guy’s arms at Winter Ball had ended up as an all-night make-out session. They’d gone from their first kiss to sex in about three hours, and Vaughn’s self-control was waning rapidly.
“T.,” he grunted as he withdrew yet again and struggled to overcome the tightening in his balls. “I want to make you feel good. I want your first time to be special.”
“It does feel good,” she cried out. “Lots of good.”
“I want you to come,” he whispered in her ear. “Tell me what makes that happen for you.”
Her eyes popped open. “Um…”
He stopped pumping, finally distracted enough that he could control himself for a moment.
“It’s okay,” he told her, caressing her face with his index finger. “Everyone gets themselves off sometimes. Tell me what you like.”
She turned a furious shade of pink, and he rubbed his nose on hers. “It’s just me,” he murmured. “We tell each other everything.”
Vaughn's Pride: California Cowboys Page 15