Authors: Bethany Kane
“Are you sleeping with someone?” she said through her teeth, irritated by his confusion. This was Rill Pierce, one of the most gorgeous, talented, virile men on the planet, as far as Katie was concerned. Surely he shouldn’t be so dumbfounded when she asked about his sex life. The idea of Rill being celibate was just . . . ridiculous. True, he’d never flaunted his sex life, never brought a parade of females to the Hughes house while he was still a bachelor. Her assumptions had more to do with what Rill
was
than anything she’d ever witnessed. He epitomized masculinity. He practicality oozed sex from his pores.
He rolled his eyes. “Vulture’s Canyon doesn’t exactly provide a wide variety of choices in that department.”
“You’re not sleeping with Sherona?”
“
No
. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’m not really up for wooing a woman at this point, Katie,” he snapped.
His frustration must have overcome him because he sprang up from the couch and began to pace on the far side of the coffee table. “I told you from the very beginning you don’t understand how I live. You don’t get what I’ve become.”
“I get what you
wish
you’d become!” Katie spat, standing and facing him. “You wish you were a robot. You wish you didn’t have any feelings at all, so you convince yourself that you don’t. You drown your grief in alcohol. You avoid people who care about you. You don’t care about your friends; you’ve abandoned your work and the people who rely on you. You pride yourself on your detachment. You claim not to give a damn about the people in this town, even. But you’re not cold and aloof, Rill; you’re just running. You’re scared that if you take a moment and really focus on the loss of Eden, your grief will swallow you up whole. So you’ve come here to the woods to hide, and meanwhile your grief gets the better of you even as you try and escape from it. It binds you like a prisoner.
That’s
what you are, Rill. You’re a prisoner in these damn woods, and you’re the jailer as well.”
He’d stopped pacing midway through her rant and now stared at her, his face glazed with shock, his mouth hanging open.
The words had flared out of her in one fierce, leaping blaze, but now that she’d said her piece, she felt empty . . . deflated.
“I won’t let you destroy yourself,” she said quietly. “I know Eden meant everything to you—”
“You don’t know what Eden meant to me,” he interrupted darkly. “You don’t know why I’m here in these woods.”
“What?”
she asked sarcastically, her fury flickering to life if not blazing like it had a moment ago. “You’re the only one on this planet who knows what it is to love someone? You’re the only one who feels they’re in a living grave because they’ve lost that person?”
“You don’t know the meaning of love,” he shouted. “You don’t love anything but your fast car and purses so expensive they could support a starving village for a year. You’re a child.... You’re a fucking little girl, coming here and telling me how to live my life.
You
—preaching to
me.
Someone who quits her job on a whim and hauls ass halfway across the country for no good reason—”
“I’m thirty years old, Rill,” she interrupted, her voice trembling with fury. “I’m not a little girl. And I came here with
very
good reason.”
“A grown woman wouldn’t suggest something as ridiculous as us fucking each other.” His mouth slanted into a harsh line. “It’d spoil everything. Our friendship is probably already in ruins.”
“Then I guess the only direction we can go is forward.”
For several seconds they faced off in straining silence, both of them breathing heavily.
“I think you’re scared of touching me because you know it won’t be sterile and safe,” she challenged.
“Cut your crap, Katie,” he muttered, his accent thicker than refrigerated molasses. He stared at the fire before he shut his eyes as though the flames had scalded them. “If you stay here, I’m going to have you soon enough. I don’t think I can control it. I’ll take my fill of you, too. I don’t think you have any idea what that means, the state I’m in.”
She slammed down her glass of soda on the table hard enough to make the liquid splash onto her hand. “At least if you were fucking me blind, you wouldn’t be drinking yourself into a grave.”
She didn’t glance back at him as she stalked out of the room. At that moment, she couldn’t stand to look at Rill Pierce a second longer. She vibrated with anger.
How dared he accuse her of not knowing what love was? How dared he accuse her of coming here on a selfish whim?
How
dared
he?
He stood beneath the spray of frigid water and reached for his
drink. It was his first drink of the evening, and Rill knew it’d be his last. Neither a cold shower nor whiskey could dampen the memory of Katie sitting there in the fire-lit room. He was learning from solid experience Katie wasn’t expunged easily from his mind, period.
She’d been wearing some kind of stretchy gray skirt that hit her at midthigh and those supple leather boots that drove him nuts for some damn reason. The mild autumn had persisted. Her smooth legs had been bare. She’d looked as sinful as an unmade bed when she’d strutted into the diner this afternoon wearing that godforsaken skirt and a tight T-shirt that she’d knotted at the hip, her long, shapely bare legs on display for all the world to see.
When she’d sat down on the couch in the living room, the skirt had risen on her thighs. He’d resented the fact that he needed to talk with her about something as serious as her quitting her job—not to mention what he’d allowed to happen the other night—and all he could concentrate on was the tempting V between her legs. He knew firsthand the type of nonexistent underwear she wore.
All he could consider was how close he was to paradise.
Well . . . then why can’t we? We’re both adults.
He clamped his eyelids shut as lust shot through him at the memory of her speaking the words. She was such a wild thing, such a gypsy child. She didn’t know what the hell she was doing, offering herself to him like that.
She’s not a child,
a voice in his head reminded him, a greedy voice that he associated with his stiff cock.
She’s a grown woman. She knows the consequences. It’s her choice to make.
He shut off the water but he didn’t get out of the tub immediately. He stood there with his hand on the handle and his head lowered.
She didn’t know the consequences, but he wasn’t so sure he did, either. Maybe that was what made him so wary about touching Katie Hughes.
None of it mattered. None of his self-recrimination; none of his self-doubts. He’d have her. Maybe he’d be able to control his hunger once he touched her, but nothing . . . nothing could keep him away from her at this point.
He didn’t bother to quiet his steps on the stairs. Best she knew he was coming. She might have heard him breathing it was so quiet in the old house, and his lungs were heaving choppily from acute anticipation.
The dormer bedroom was swathed in pitch blackness. There was a tiny green light next to the bed—probably a clock. Rill used it to navigate through the room. He heard the sheets rustle and knew she was awake before he reached for the bedside lamp. He stifled a curse with effort when the dim light came on.
She lay on the bed naked, her hair spread out around her torso like an opened cape. She looked serene but watchful as she inspected him.
For two seconds, he almost turned and walked away. This was much, much bigger than he’d expected, and he’d bargained on plenty.
“While I’m here with you, don’t plan on touching anyone else,” she whispered.
He swallowed thickly and nodded. He couldn’t have spoken if he tried. The realization that her naked beauty had nearly brought him to his knees made him glance away in order to save himself. His gaze landed on the scarf she’d worn twisted around her neck with artistic carelessness earlier. Her eyes moved, but her head remained immobile when he picked it up and stepped toward the head of the bed.
“Give me your wrists,” he said gruffly.
Uncertainty flickered across her beautiful face. Not fear, thank God, just confusion.
“You have to let me be in control of this, Katie. It’s the only way I can do this thing.”
Her facial features tightened when he said that . . .
this thing
. He couldn’t even bring himself to put into words what was happening between them. She slowly lifted her arms above her head, the motion making her back arch slightly. He ripped his gaze off the vision of her round, pink-tipped breasts rising in the air, tempting him. She didn’t say anything as he bound her wrists together firmly. He gently pulled her arms farther over her head and used the scarf to restrain them to the wrought-iron headboard. He stepped back.
It was a little hard to look at her, she was so beautiful at that moment. For a few seconds he just stood there, a mortal in the presence of unearthly beauty, a worshipper at a shrine of sex and voluptuous pleasure.
“Don’t,” she whispered when he reached for the lamp.
He ignored her and plunged the room into darkness.
“Spread your thighs,” he ordered through a throat that felt as if hands were wrapped around it, squeezing. He knelt between her opened legs. He reached, his hands encountering the satiny smooth, warm flesh of her hips. Her subtle scent reached his nostrils. His cock throbbed viciously next to his thigh. He hadn’t bothered to put on underwear after his shower, but had merely thrown on his jeans and partially buttoned them before he’d come up the stairs to do this deed. As a result, his cock was trapped down his left pant leg. It felt like a hot poker burning the skin of his thigh, stretching the fabric of his jeans tight.
He lowered his head, a bee drawn to honey. He placed his lips on soft pubic hair and inhaled her scent. She whimpered. She was aroused. The cream on her labia moistened his mouth before his tongue gathered it.
He went rigid with need, like he was an animal that had just caught the hint of prey in the wind. She stiffened, too. He used his hand to open her labia wider, exposing the sensitive kernel of flesh hidden within the folds.
She gasped his name when he plunged his tongue into that forbidden fruit. When her taste fully registered in his brain, he was lost. He closed his eyes and ate her with savage abandon. Some part of his brain was exquisitely attuned to the sounds she made, to every nuance of tension in her sleek body. He sucked gently and stabbed at her clit without mercy with his tongue, but when her cries became desperate, he softened to a caress, gliding his tongue over that swollen flesh until she quivered like a leaf held fast to a branch during a wild storm.
He ran his hands from hip to belly to ribs, relishing every shiver, coaxing more out of her. It was intoxicating. Not just the taste of her sweet juices running down his throat, the entire idea of possessing Katie, of evoking those sexy little cries from her throat, of creating the uncontrollable quaking in her muscles, of tempting her pussy to give him more of her addicting cream. He twisted his face slightly, stimulating her sensitive tissues, glorying in how wet she was.
He wanted to thrust his finger into her slit. She’d be tight and warm . . . all creamed up for him. The thought made his cock jerk in his jeans, demanding freedom, demanding its due. But he knew if he slid his finger into that welcoming little clasp, all control would be gone.
If it wasn’t already.
Katie was like a wildfire. She’d snatch him with her delicious heat, pull him in like a moth to the leaping flames. She was a thousand times more addictive than whiskey. It was the reason he’d insisted upon tying her up. This was an ordeal as it was, to give in at least partially to his raging lust. If he had to endure her hands all over him at this stage of the game, he’d forsake everything. He needed to set some ground rules. He needed to
stick
to those rules.
He was
not
a slave to lust. He may share his mother’s and his uncles’ and a whole shitload of other Pierce ancestors’ wastrel genes, but he was different.
Instead of allowing himself to experience the delicious core of her heat, he turned his face and sucked her clit between his lips and teeth. Gently, he bit, determined to show her that even though he’d been too weak to resist her potent allure, he
would
be master of this situation.
But when he felt her body go rigid, when she screamed as pleasure gushed through nerve and muscle . . . when he felt her warm juices surge from her slit against his chin, Rill doubted he’d mastered much of anything.
Her climax was delicious, not just the taste of her flooding his senses, her catchy, surprised gasps and whimpers, the delicate convulsions that wracked her taut body. He couldn’t stop himself. He lowered his face and plunged his tongue into her pussy again and again, drowning in that sweet font, anointing himself with the essence of Katie.
Her trembling muscles sagged into the mattress and her climactic cries segued to anguished groans. He realized he was still drinking from her thirstily, exploring the narrow confines of her drenched slit with avarice.
When he recognized his greediness, he lifted his head, panting heavily. His face was slick with her juices. He wanted to slide his cock into her and ride her into submission. A feral need to utterly possess her, to even make her hurt a little, to force her to share in some of his sharp anguish, overwhelmed him.
He stood clumsily next to the bed.
“Rill?” she asked between pants for air.
He opened his mouth, but he couldn’t think of what to say. So he yanked at the knot restraining her wrists, turned and walked out of the room. If she said his name again, and he heard the vulnerability and disorientation in her voice, he wouldn’t be able to control what he might do.
Downstairs, he rushed into the bathroom and shut the door. Without turning on the light, he put his back to the door and fumbled with his jeans. His cock felt leaden. He jerked at it, his actions nearly as violent and desperate as Rill felt at that moment.