Surrender: A Bitter Creek Novel

by Joan Johnston

Taylor shuddered. Maybe excavating the dirt in the ceiling wasn’t such a good idea. She turned on her side and arranged Brian’s T-shirt, which was nearly dry, under her head. It smelled like soap from the laundry—and the smoky soot from their faces.

  Brian hissed in a breath as he settled beside her, and she realized he must have jostled his injured leg. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Are you going to sleep in that headlamp?”

  “Oh.” She’d forgotten she had it on. And she wasn’t ready to turn it off. When she did, it would be dark. Completely dark.

  “Here. Let me help.” Brian sat up so he could ease it off her head. He laid it on top of her jeans and turned it off. “You saw where I left it. Right there beside your pillow. That way you can find it when you need it.”

  Taylor’s whole body tensed when the light went out. It was terrifyingly dark, and she babbled to keep the fear she felt at bay. “I can’t remember the last time I went to bed this hungry. What’s on the menu for tomorrow?”

  “If we eat half of what’s left of that steak and potato for breakfast, we can save the other half for dinner.”

  Taylor realized he hadn’t mentioned lunch. Which meant they were going to skip it.

  “I guess I’m finally going to lose that extra five pounds I’ve put on since March.”

  “March, huh? That five pounds have anything to do with your half brother Matt showing up out of the blue and taking over your dad’s ranch?”

  “Everything to do with it,” Taylor muttered.

  “I heard about the raw deal you Grayhawk girls got. It’s hard to believe King gave the ranch to a Black Sheep who hid himself away in Australia for twenty years and left you four girls out in the cold.”

  “Kingdom Come won’t belong to Matt until he’s lived there for three-hundred-sixty-five consecutive days. If we four girls have anything to say about it, he won’t last that long.”

  “Devon told me you let King’s Tennessee walker stallion into the pasture with Matt’s quarter horse broodmares. That was inspired deviltry. He must have been furious.”

  “We were paying him back for forcing Eve to move her wild mustangs off that pasture so he could put his mares there instead.”

  “Reminds me of all the tricks you Grayhawk girls pulled on us Flynn boys over the years.”

  “We aren’t called ‘King’s Brats’ for nothing.” Taylor heard the tremor in her voice. Merely talking wasn’t getting the job done. She was scared witless. “Brian?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Would you please hold me?”

  BRIAN HAD BEEN anticipating Tag’s request. He’d known, when she’d nearly refused to part with the headlamp, that she dreaded the impending darkness. He was perfectly willing to provide the support she needed to allay her fear. He just wasn’t sure he could stick with offering comfort, when what he really wanted to do was make love to her.

  He fought the desire to kiss her and caress her and bring them both indescribable pleasure, because making love—taking the chance of getting emotionally involved—would create its own set of problems. If there was any chance they were going to die, and the odds of living weren’t currently in their favor, the last thing he wanted to do was fall back in love with Tag. It would be easy enough to do. But that would be asking for a bitch of a heartache when he had to watch her die, or died himself, knowing he was leaving her all alone.

  Tag’s erratic breathing was loud in the silence, and Brian wasn’t nearly as detached as he wished he could be.

  “Come here,” he said at last.

  She threw herself at him, their chins bumping, her arms clinging to his neck, her body aligned with his from chest to hips as his arms slid around her to hold her tight.

  “Thank you,” she whispered against his throat. “I’m sorry to be such a baby about this.”

  He tried to lighten the situation by saying, “The pleasure is all mine,” which must have been clear to her, from the heat and hardness of his arousal pressing against her belly.

  She reached between them and traced the ridge beneath his thin cotton boxers with her fingertips.

  He caught her hand and said in a harsh voice, “Don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “This won’t help anything, Tag.”

  “It can’t hurt anything, either. I want you, Brian. Don’t you want me?”

  Their previous bout of sex had done no more than blow the foam off the beer, so to speak, and his body was clamoring for what Tag was offering. Even so, he might have refused her, except he’d heard, in her wistful voice, the girl who hadn’t believed him in high school when he’d told her he loved her. The girl who’d scoffed and said, “No one’s ever loved me. What you love is what I do with you…and to you.”

  He’d known she meant all the times she’d put her mouth on him and brought him to climax. To his shame, he hadn’t contradicted her. He’d been too shocked and embarrassed by what she’d said. And too young to realize the pain concealed by her mocking words.

  In the darkness, he took her head between his hands and brought his mouth to hers, feeling the softness, the willingness in her supple lips. He kissed each closed eye, then each cheek, and finally, each side of her mouth, before easing her head to his shoulder.

  His body was urging him to throw caution to the winds. His head was telling him that making love to Taylor Ann Grayhawk—when it wasn’t the direct result of surviving several harrowing, life-threatening events—was a really bad idea. He couldn’t believe what he was about to say.

  “I want to make love to you, but I don’t think we should.”

  “Why not?”

  He tucked a strand of hair that was tickling his nose behind her ear. It gave him a few moments to think of the best way to explain how he felt. “Considering our situation, it would be easy to do what we want and say to hell with the consequences. But there’s still a chance we’re going to get out of here eventually, and then what?” He blew one of her stray curls away from his cheek. “We haven’t been a couple for a long time. How the hell many years has it been, anyway, since we were together?”

  “I was fifteen. I’m twenty-eight. You do the math.”

  “Good lord. That’s a lot of years. I guess that makes what I’m about to say even more amazing. The time we spent together is stuck in my mind as tight as that row of Flynn cowboy boots you Brats glued to the mudroom floor.”

  “Really? I feel the same way.”

  He heard the amazement in her voice and realized she must have felt more for him than she’d admitted at the time. “The point is I have enough good memories from the months we spent together to be glad you’re the one who ended up in here with me. Like it or not, I suspect we’re going to get to know each other a lot better before we get out of here. If we ever do.”

  She made a hitching sound that might have been a repressed sob. He hadn’t meant to scare her with that last statement, but it was better if they both faced the facts.

  He continued, “Whatever happens—or doesn’t happen—between us, I want you to know up front that I’m never making a commitment to another woman.”

  “What does that have to do with our making love now?” She gripped his waist more tightly and said, “Maybe you’d better tell me why you’re planning to spend the rest of your life as a lone wolf.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “It is my business, if it’s keeping you from making love to me now.”

  Brian was sorry he’d said anything. He should have kept his mouth shut, ordered his body to behave itself, and held Tag until she fell asleep. No one knew the truth about why his marriage had broken up, not even his brothers. He was too ashamed to tell them.

  Tricia had been another stray he’d rescued, lost on campus and looking helpless. He’d offered to show her the way to the student union, and the rest was history. Looking
back, he realized he might not have been as much in love with her as she’d seemed to be with him. In light of recent events, it appeared she’d needed a savior more than a spouse. Obviously, it had taken her a long time to grow up. When she finally did, several years into their marriage, she hadn’t needed him anymore.

  “Well?” Tag prodded. “I’m waiting. What happened to make you swear off relationships with women?”

  Brian could feel Tag’s breasts snug against his chest and her soft belly pressed invitingly close, and he wanted desperately to make love to her. The problem was he knew he shouldn’t. So he told her what he’d never told anyone else—to remind him why he’d sworn off women.

  “Tricia left me because she fell in love and cheated on me…with another woman.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry, Brian. That must have been terrible for you, to lose her to someone else.”

  “Not just someone else. Another woman.”

  “Is that worse than her leaving you for another man?”

  “Hell, yes!”

  “Why?”

  “Because it means my whole marriage was a sham. Tricia couldn’t have loved me, if she was sexually attracted to women from the start.”

  “Maybe she loved you for all the qualities that make you a good person. Maybe she didn’t know how she felt about women when she married you.”

  Brian barked a laugh. “Don’t you see? If Tricia could fool me so completely, how can I ever trust myself not to make the same mistake again?”

  “So you’re giving up on relationships?”

  He heard the incredulity in her voice. What he’d given up on was any physical involvement with a woman that might lead to a deeper relationship. In a word, sex. At least, for the past year, while he’d been licking his wounds.

  “But you know I prefer men,” Tag protested.

  “Do I?”

  She laughed low in her throat, a sound that made his shaft pulse with need.

  “Trust me,” she said in a husky voice. “You do. And since getting out of here is something that seems unlikely at the moment, I vote we make love to each other as often as the mood strikes. Like now.”

  She sucked lightly on his throat, raising gooseflesh all over his body.

  There was no reason not to surrender. It seemed they both wanted the same thing. To live in the present. To take pleasure where it was offered and give it in return.

  Brian unerringly found Tag’s mouth in the darkness. She opened to him and their tongues dueled, even as their bodies wrestled for dominance. He grunted when he jarred his wounded leg as he tore at her panties.

  She laughed and said, “Don’t rip them! They’re all I have.” The playful sound echoed back to him from the length of the cave. Then she arched her hips off the ground, so he could easily slide the fragile silk down her long legs.

  He moved his hand upward along the length of her leg to cup the heart of her, loving the feel of her smooth, warm flesh. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for this. He relished the feast all the more because Tag was sharing it with him.

  She shoved his boxers down so she could hold him in her hand, causing him to groan as she smoothed her thumb over the tiny drop of liquid at the tip.

  He kicked the cloth out of his way, as she urged him with whispered words to put himself inside her, forgoing tenderness in favor of passion.

  But he was a boy no longer, and he owed her more pleasure than she was likely to get if he took what he wanted without giving her at least as much joy.

  So he held her hips down when she would have bucked beneath him, inflaming him further, and reached under the chambray shirt to cup her naked breast and tease the nipple.

  “Oh.”

  She said it with a release of breath that showed how surprised she was that they weren’t headed from kissing to climax in two quick steps.

  “Easy now,” he whispered in her ear. “We have all the time in the world to get where we’re going. And nothing and no one to interfere or stop us from getting there.”

  TAYLOR WAS CONFUSED by Brian’s behavior. In high school, she’d always, always focused on giving pleasure, rather than receiving it. Brian had never failed to hold her close afterward, which she’d craved far more than the sex they shared. His behavior tonight was different. He was focused on giving pleasure to her. And she wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

  Since she couldn’t see his expression, she stopped what she was doing and asked, “What’s going on, Brian?”

  He lowered his head to kiss her throat beneath her ear. “I’m making love to you. Slowly. So we can enjoy ourselves.”

  “I was enjoying myself,” she said with a pout that was wasted in the dark.

  A moment later he reached her mouth, his tongue dipping inside to taste and to tease, and the pout disappeared. She threaded her fingers into his hair and gave herself up to the novel experience of having Brian search out the best ways to arouse her. She writhed in his arms, her moans and gasps and wrenching groans filling the deep silence of the cave, as she waited for the moment when their roles would revert to those they’d played in the past.

  But the kisses didn’t stop. And Brian never headed for third base, let alone home plate. It was as though the two of them were teenagers making out, with no intention of doing anything more. She quivered when Brian touched her breast with the reverence of a boy tracing its shape for the first time. He outlined her ear with his tongue, causing her insides to clench.

  He’d never left a hickey on her neck in high school, because she’d shuddered at the thought of explaining one to Leah or Vick. But the gentle suction of his mouth on her throat became more insistent, and she felt her body responding to the intense pleasure-pain.

  Brian tore his mouth from her throat and threaded his fingers into her hair, shoving it away from her face so he could plant surprising, petal-soft kisses on her eyes and cheeks, before he finally found his way back to her mouth.

  His tongue dipped inside and withdrew, teasing, taunting. She moaned and opened her mouth wider, inviting him inside. She thrust her tongue into Brian’s mouth, while her hips writhed against his engorged shaft, trying to incite him to finish what he’d started. She’d never been so ready for a man, never desired a man so much.

  It didn’t occur to her to simply ask Brian for what she wanted, because she’d never done it in the past—with him, or any other man. Wanting something from another person meant making herself vulnerable to the pain of rejection. In her experience, it was better not to get her hopes up in the first place.

  She loved what Brian was doing and wondered if she would ever again be satisfied with moving from “at bat” to “home plate” without so much as a pause in between.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say Brian cares about me.

  Taylor found that thought terrifying. She wanted to get this interlude over with so she wouldn’t have to deal with all the unwelcome baggage that had been churned up along with it. Like knowing she was not the sort of woman to whom men got attached. Like feeling unlovable. Like knowing she was unloved.

  Taylor wondered if the rush of frightening emotions she was fighting, as Brian devoted himself to the simple acts of kissing and touching, was being magnified by the dark. Otherwise, she had no explanation for why her throat ached and her eyes had filled with unshed tears.

  “Brian,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I wish I could see your face.”

  “Why?”

  “So I’d know if you’re enjoying all this kissing as much as I am.”

  He chuckled, and pressed his hard, hot length more tightly against her. “What does that tell you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “That you’d rather be inside me?”

  He lifted himself up on his arms, and she could feel
his consternation in the sudden tenseness of his muscles. “We have all the time in the world. Why hurry?”

  Because I don’t want this to mean something when it doesn’t. Because I’m feeling too much. Because it hurts to want what I don’t believe I’ll ever have.

  She swallowed past the rawness in her throat and said, “I just want to be sure you’re satisfied.”

  “This isn’t about you pleasing me,” he replied. “It’s about us pleasing each other.”

  “Oh.” It was a sign of how little she’d asked for from the men she’d dated that Taylor found the concept of shared joy unnerving. Fortunately, because it was pitch-black, Brian couldn’t see how uncomfortable she was with the idea of giving up even a little of the control of their lovemaking to him.

  Unless Brian had changed a great deal, she knew the places on his body where he was most sensitive, and she did what she knew would arouse him, smoothing her fingertips over his sweat-slick shoulder, then letting her hand roam to a small spot under his armpit that she knew was almost ticklish.

  She felt him grunt and wriggle away, before lying still and inviting her touch. She slid her hand down his side to his hip, to the crevice between his groin and leg. Before she could do more than touch, she felt his hand cupping the heart of her, and his finger finding its way inside.

  “You’re wet,” he said.

  She was glad for the darkness that hid her sudden blush. No one had ever said such a thing to her out loud. It was the sort of frankness between partners that would have required knowing each other well, and Taylor had never stayed long enough with a man, or sought such intimacy, even with the three men to whom she’d been engaged. Very briefly engaged.

  Taylor wanted to be in a loving relationship. She wanted to be married and have children. But she was short on trust. She’d never been sure any of her fiancés would really hang around through thick and thin. She couldn’t shake the thought that the men who’d sworn to love her would run away at the first sign of trouble, the way her mother had. Or abandon her without a backward look to follow their personal dreams, as her father had.