A Dark & Stormy Knight: A McKnight Romance (McKnight Romances) (26 page)

“There are things I’d like to savor,” she
told him even as she stopped pushing. Sol was not going to let her dictate
their pace. Not in this position.

“I wish you could see this, honey.” He
dragged his head through her sensitive flesh. “It’s so hot being this close to
you, knowing I’m one thrust from being inside you. I love the way your flesh
pinks up and your lips plump, and there I am, as hard as I can get, on the edge
of pushing into you. I love the way my cock looks up against your sex. I love
seeing the head starting to enter you.” He matched his action to the words,
giving her the tip of erection. “It’s so damned hot.”

Listening to him describe it was hot. The
thick, lust-filled sound of his voice was even hotter. She pushed back again,
wanting to feel him, but he rolled his hips back, keeping himself from going
deeper. “Don’t worry, babe. We’ll get there,” he promised. “Oh, will we get
there.”

Still just barely inside her, he leaned
over her back, one hand on the ground to support himself. He reached around her
with the other and found her clit. His fingers drew soft circles around it,
driving her to the brink of insanity. She could feel the nub tighten, wanting
more. A moan came from deep in her throat.

He laid his fingertips on her clit and
pressed, gentle but firm. Georgia hissed in a breath. And then he started
pushing deeper inside her, so slowly. A snail’s pace. His fingers worked in a
slow rhythm against her clit as he entered her. Press. Release. Press. Release.
Her sensitivity heightened, the anticipation almost painful.

She thought she might come just from
this. “Oh, God. Sol.” But she didn’t. His calculated touches brought her to the
edge and kept her hanging there. Her arms quivered and she let herself sink
forward until she rested on her elbows.

“Can you spare a hand?” Sol asked.

She didn’t question why; her mental
faculties had deserted her long ago. Instead, she shifted her weight onto her
left shoulder and reached back. Sol abandoned her clit, a move she thought she should
protest. Before she could, he caught her hand in his and brought it between her
legs.

“Feel this.” He pressed her hand against
her mound then slid it toward the lips of her sex. She felt his shaft slide
between her fingers and into her hot, vulnerable flesh. When he pulled back, he
was wet with her juices. His hand rested on top of hers, feeling it, too.

“That’s us, Georgie. That’s you taking me
into your body.” He kissed her shoulder. “You bring me to my knees, baby.”

He was right. This was hot as hell. She
didn’t think she could form words. She was wrong. “Fuck me, Sol.”

He kissed her shoulder again before he
straightened up behind her. “Brace yourself.”

She dropped her hand to the ground and
pushed herself back up from her elbows, getting ready for what was coming.

He pulled back, almost leaving her body,
then slammed back into her, driving himself into her so deep and hard, she
almost felt the vibration in the tips of her fingers. They groaned in unison.
He did it again and again. “Oh, God.” And then he started in earnest. Hard,
fast, deep strokes that pummeled every raw, demanding nerve ending inside her
and left her gasping with pleasure.

When he threaded his fingers into her
hair and drew her head back, she felt his control of her. He could do what he
wanted with her. In this position, she had no way to stop him. Her
vulnerability stimulated her arousal.

His breathing had gone ragged and, every
few strokes, he made a guttural noise that heightened her carnal desires. If
she was physically defenseless, he was sexually vulnerable, a slave to his
desire for her, and that spiked everything another notch as his grunts now came
with every thrust.

She fed on his noises, just as she knew
he fed on hers. The ratchet inside her tightened. She was going to break into a
thousand pieces under his assault. It was going to be spectacular.

She felt it start then hang there on the
edge. Her mouth opened but she couldn’t draw a breath. Every thrust pushed her
closer to the edge. Small mewling sounds escaped her lips each time his body
slapped hers, but she still couldn’t pull in air. Then Sol growled and she fell
over the precipice, existing only in the shuddering pulses that wracked her
body.

###

Sol thought he’d never breathe normal
again. Her hand lay boneless on his chest over a heart pounding so hard, he was
afraid it would fail him. He didn’t know how he’d held on so long, except
through sheer, butt-ugly stubbornness. Determined to show her a better-than-”nice”
time in the way she’d asked for had nearly killed him. He’d had to blank out
all stray thoughts toward the end, afraid he’d think something sensual that
would trigger him and leave her unsatisfied. But he’d done it. He’d never seen
her come so hard. And that was all it had taken to nearly blow the top of his
head off.

If he’d fallen on top of her, he’d have
crushed her. Instinct, more than thought, had brought him to the ground beside
her. Even though he was sweating from all his exertions, he tugged her close
and smoothed her damp hair. He felt more than heard her breath hitch. Easing
back, he tried to lift her chin, but she pulled out of his grasp.

“Georgia? Honey? Are you crying?”

“No.” She sniffed.

Sol brushed his thumb across her cheek.
It came away damp. “Oh, God. Did I hurt you? I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean
to.”

“No.” She brushed her cheek. “You didn’t
h-h-hurt me. That was . . .” Sniff. “Spectacular.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I just . . . I don’t . . .”
She drew a shaky breath. “I don’t know,” she said on a wail that opened the
floodgates.

“Oh, baby.” Sol rolled her up in his
arms. He felt awful that she was crying, but he also felt good. Great even.

Her tears had to mean he’d touched her
heart, didn’t they? That he’d broken through that plate-mail armor she’d
wrapped it up in to keep him from getting close to her again. It shouldn’t have
taken him so long to figure out he should court her. His mama always said you
caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. Why hadn’t he listened?

He held her and rocked her until the
tears diminished. When he figured she was nearly done, he softly kissed her
mouth, her cheeks, her eyelids. “So I did better? No more, ‘that was nice’?”

Georgia gave a shaky laugh. “That was a
lot better than ‘nice.’“

“Good. It’s nearly sunset. I think we
should head back.” Lord knew he didn’t want to, but if they didn’t get back
before dark, someone would notice they were missing and send out a search
party.
That
could be embarrassing.

“Right.” Georgia nodded and started
gathering up her clothes. With her jeans in one hand, her shirt and bra in the
other, she said, “I don’t see my panties.”

They started searching. “Did you throw
them on the bank?” Sol asked as he scanned the bushes nearby in case they’d
gotten caught in the brush. He feared they were missing in action for good.

“I didn’t throw them anywhere,” Georgia
said as she pulled her jeans on sans underwear. “You took them off me. What did
you
do with them?”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember. I
was a little distracted.”

“You wouldn’t have let them float away,
would you?”

He shrugged sheepishly. Hadn’t she just
heard him say he’d been distracted?

She looked at him in horror. “Oh, Lord,
Sol. What if one of the kids finds them?”

“Then we blame Maddie and Zach.”

She hit his shoulder, but a second later,
she was laughing. “You tell no one—
no one
—about this. Ever.”

He laughed and grabbed her, so she couldn’t
hit him again. She struggled for a second, which was nice because she was still
bare from the waist up and it felt good to be skin-on-skin with her. When she
settled down in his arms, he dropped a kiss on her lips. “I swear. No one. Get
dressed, Georgie. You can walk around if you don’t want to get wet again. I’m
going to swim across.”

The water still held enough heat from the
day that he felt no shock when he dove in. On the other side, he pulled on his
dry jeans. Georgia was still carefully picking her way around the pool—he
should have remembered there were thistles in her path—when he heard a phone
trill. The sound came from Georgia’s purse, which hung by the shoulder strap from
her saddle horn.

“That’s probably Eden,” she called. “Would
you get it?”

Sol found the phone but the call had
already gone to voice mail. He tapped
missed calls,
but Eden’s name didn’t
come up.
Daniel.
Who the hell was Daniel?

Deep breath. He was not going to jump to
conclusions.

When Georgia picked her way over to him,
he turned the phone, so she could read the name.

She gulped and looked up at him as though
trying to gauge his reaction.

Sol cocked an eyebrow at her. He didn’t
want to think she looked and sounded guilty.

“He’s a . . . a friend. In
Dallas. In fact, he’s Deanne’s dad. You’ve heard Eden talk about Deanne, haven’t
you? Of course you have. I think you took both of them for ice cream once, didn’t
you? Or maybe it was pizza. Anyway, she’s Eden’s best friend. Daniel’s her . . .”
She stopped as if she’d realized she was babbling. “Her dad,” she finished
lamely.

Sol handed her the phone and walked over
to the bush he’d hung his shirt on earlier. He had no doubt Daniel was Deanne’s
father, but if that was all he was, Georgia wouldn’t have tried so hard to
explain him away. He was such a fool. He’d really thought her tears had meant
something good.

Instead, it was the worst possible news.
He’d known Eden’s best friend lived with her divorced father, but Sol hadn’t
suspected he was the competition. Worse, Eden and Deanne had been friends for
at least a couple of years, which meant the son of a bitch had been around long
enough to really get to know Georgia. The odds that Sol could drive him off
with his normal repertoire were virtually nonexistent.

She was silent while he buttoned his
shirt, put on his socks, stomped into his boots, and picked up his hat. He didn’t
break the silence until they were mounted and on the trail back to the ranch. “Truth
or dare, Georgia?”

A pause, then, in a small voice, “Dare.”

He pulled on the reins so hard, his horse
danced sideways. “What the hell? Why do you always take the dare? What is it
about being honest with me that freaks you out so bad?”

Her shoulders were hunched as if she was
trying to be invisible. “You don’t like my truths.”

“There’s lots of things I don’t like.
Being lied to is pretty close to the top of the list.”

“I haven’t lied to you.”

“But you won’t tell me the truth either.”

“That’s not so,” Georgia said, starting
to come out of that hunched posture. “You keep asking me why I left you, but
you never believe what I tell you because you don’t want to.”

“Now
that’s
not true.”

Her spine was straight now. “You’re
right. You used to believe me. Then one day you got it into your head that
there was some other reason.”

He gazed into her eyes for several long
moments. Enough to make her fidget in the saddle. Just a little.

“When you love someone,” he said, “you
know when they’re telling you the truth and when they’re not. You may not want
to admit it but you know. What you’ve said about feeling stifled, well, that’s
almost true. True enough that I spent a long time wondering why it didn’t feel
right to me. It was like my heart and my head couldn’t agree about what was
happening. Then one day, Daddy was talking about turnin’ off your brain and
listening to your gut. Soon as I did that, I knew there was more to it.

“So, Georgia, let’s try this again. Truth
or dare?”

He saw her jaw set and knew she was going
to pick truth, and no matter how much he didn’t like her answers, they’d at
least be honest.

“Truth.”

He wanted the truth from her, but
suddenly, he was afraid to hear it. Afraid she’d confirm all the worst fears he’d
tried so hard to deny, but after all these years, he couldn’t just say, “Forget
it.” It was time to face reality. But the question that came out of his mouth
wasn’t the one that had been making him crazy for years. “Why were you crying
today?”

Georgia’s jaw worked as if she were
tasting the words before she gave them to him, seeing if they were poisonous
enough. She met his eyes. “I was crying because I was sad. Because as nice as
this afternoon was, it’s the last time we’ll ever be together . . .
like that. If I want to get married again—and I am getting married again—I can’t
keep doing this.”

Sol felt as though he’d taken a mortar
round in the chest. He sucked in a deep breath then another. Gideon was right.
She was getting married again, and the way she said it, he wasn’t even in the
running.

He’d bet Daniel was. Had they already
talked about it? He’d heard people did that, though he didn’t understand why.
You either loved someone enough to marry them or you didn’t. What else was
there to talk about?