Hot for Pepper (5 page)

“More,” she repeated. Mostly without shame.

“Still more? I think you’re using me.” He pulled out slowly, resisting her efforts to hold him inside. “Promise to do it again?”

“I’m not trying to use you.” Pepper twisted her fingers in the bunched-up fabric of his shirt. Gentle teasing was at odds with her collection of possible Mitch behaviors. Everything about him seemed different this visit. No brooding silence, no hostile stares, no very obvious avoidance of her.

Frowning, she tilted her head back and met his eyes. “Did something happen?”

He squeezed her behind and returned to his back, taking her with him. Aftershocks jolted along her nerve endings. Pepper bit her lip to contain a moan.

Below her, Mitch’s smile reappeared. “You can’t tell?”

“I meant to you. Did something happen to you?” He did something to make his erection twitch. Her eyes widened at the small movement. Her fingertips itched to slip into his jeans and test the texture of his hard flesh. She ignored the urge. “I mean before you came home. You’re different. Is anything wrong?”

Emotion flashed behind his eyes, quickly suppressed. “Maybe something did happen but no, nothing’s wrong. You worry about other people too much.”

“Everybody should have someone who worries about him.”

“Or her?” His eyebrow arched.

“As long as they don’t confuse worrying about with over-protecting. Or controlling.”

“Got someone particular in mind?”

She shrugged and tentatively relaxed her weight into his embrace. Mitch folded one arm beneath his head and the other across her back. She did have someone particular in mind but she’d learned from the pool incident not to bring Andy between them when their bodies were so close.

Instead of naming names, she improvised. “Thanks for coming with me tonight instead of forbidding me from going.”

“Woman like you, I figured I should choose my battles. Remember tonight when I do try to forbid you from doing something.”

She snorted softly. “Like what?”

“Hmm.” His lips brushed her temple. “Like wearing panties tomorrow.”

“There is no way I could obey you. That’s completely unreasonable.”

“No? Not even knowing we might find ourselves alone in that closet under the back stairs? Remember that closet?”

Breath short, Pepper nodded against his shoulder. Mitch’s palm swept down her back, over her buttocks. He stroked between her legs from behind and she arched forward. No escape.

“Not enough room in that closet for two people to do much besides stand upright. If we’re stuck in there and you’re wearing panties, how am I going to get inside you?”

“That’s not going to happen,” she whispered.

Mitch flexed his hand, compressed her sex. Pepper shuddered.

“Are you sure about that?” He released her only to push beneath the waist of her jeans, over the crease of her behind, and locate her fluttering entrance.

Pepper’s mind blanked. Beg him to keep going or order him to stop? She curled her toes against his calf and tried to think.

Mitch drew slippery circles around her rim, so highly sensitive she thought she might be able to come again from that stimulation alone. She mentally shook herself and shook her head. “Stop, please. This isn’t…just stop.”

“You’re wrong. It is.” He backed off as she requested but didn’t take his hands away entirely.

“No, it’s not.” She pushed up and tipped off the sofa, gathering her feet beneath her. With her back to Mitch, she fled to the kitchen and hid at Kelly’s tiny table. He didn’t follow.

Head in her hands, she tried to make a list of all the reasons why she couldn’t be attracted to him. The list was pathetically devoid of points. He wouldn’t let her hide behind “sister” anymore. His actions destroyed her long-held belief in an unrequited passion between him and Andy. And she couldn’t keep pretending her desire for him hadn’t ruined her for anyone else.

4

Shortly before dawn, Mitch woke her from a restless sleep slumped at the small kitchen table.

“Kelly’s home. I’m driving,” he said, no room for argument in the claim.

Neck stiff, head heavy with the remains of unsettling dreams, Pepper didn’t argue. She slurred a farewell to Kelly and allowed Mitch to lead the way to her car.

He touched her freely. The heat of his palm at the small of her back, at her waist, on her elbow, all spoke of territorial claim. That heat helped shake her from the fog brought on by sporadic bouts of sleep.

At the car, he stood beside the open passenger door while she buckled her seat belt.

Pepper tipped her head back to meet his eyes. “How is this supposed to work if you’re my lover instead of my brother? What happens on holiday weekends? At barbeques where everybody I’ve ever known notices the way you look at me?”

He closed one hand around the edge of the car door and rested the other on the roof. The posture stretched his olive t-shirt tight. Pepper curled her hands into fists on her lap. Lord help her, she wanted to touch him.

“I suppose what happens depends on what you let me be,” he said after a considering minute.

She lowered her gaze to her knees. “I don’t understand what my options are.”

Mitch stood there another minute, silent, before he closed the door. Pepper watched him round the front of her car. He filled the narrow confines when he wedged himself behind the steering wheel.

“I don’t want a fuck buddy.” He started the ignition.

Chest tight, she looked out the passenger window. Mitch turned on the radio. The cheerful voice of the morning news fell below Pepper’s frequency. Snatches of conversation with Mitch replayed in her mind, oblique phrasing and needful tones. She combed her fingers through her hair, rougher than necessary, hoping the tug against her scalp would jump-start her brain. No such luck. Her thoughts just circled, focused on want. She wanted him.

I want him
. Pepper blinked at the tug of awareness from her abdomen, shook her head slightly. Those words weren’t right.

Maybe, instead—
I want you
.

“Pepper.”

Her head jerked up. She registered the red circles of a traffic light, the unmoving car, the weight of Mitch’s stare across the narrow space between the seats. Something hot glittered in his eyes.

“Mitch?” His name emerged as a whisper.

His hand clenched on the gearshift between the seats. “Say that again. Say it to me.”

The traffic signal changed. She cleared her throat and averted her eyes. “It’s green.”

He cursed beneath his breath and accelerated with the flow of morning traffic. Pepper unscrewed the cap from a bottle of car-temperature water and swallowed a large gulp. Plain water didn’t do much to medicate her nerves, but it helped loosen her throat. At the next light, she touched his forearm and said, “I want you.”

His nostrils flared slightly and his jaw tightened. “Now?”

Pepper nodded.

He glanced away, a narrow-eyed check of traffic in the intersection ahead, but looked back to her an instant later. “Don’t change your mind.”

“Okay,” she said weakly.

Mitch’s eyes raked her body, a fierce not-touch that left her skin tingling from her scalp to her knees. She swallowed another gulp of water while he watched. He reached for her, the backs of his fingers skimming her ear before he tucked her hair behind the curve.

Pepper lowered the bottle and looked away. “The light’s green again,” she said past the rush of blood in her ears.

Mitch dropped his hand to the gearshift. “Yeah. You need a damn automatic.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” He shook his head and her car rolled forward with the rest of the traffic.

She watched him for a few minutes, noting his tense grip on the wheel and the forward-only focus of his attention. Mitch’s short, dark-blond hair was mussed from his stint on Kelly’s sofa. His jaw bore the bristly, golden mark of twenty-four hours without a razor. Otherwise, he was perfect—broad shoulders too big for her little car, long legs splayed as he worked with the space he’d been given. The inseam of his jeans rode muscular thighs, and… She bit her lip, silently cursed her choice of a manual transmission. If the gear shift weren’t between them, she’d be able to—

“Whatever you’re thinking, stop,” Mitch muttered. “I can’t pull over here.”

Cheeks hot, Pepper jerked her focus to her hands. Her fingers twisted together on her lap, itching to touch him. Or herself. His scent overwhelmed her senses, primed her body for his hands. Again. She regretted not taking advantage of Kelly’s floor.

But maybe she could take advantage of something else. “There’s an access road about a mile up. It doubles back into a little tunnel beneath the freeway.”

He didn’t reply. When he sped past the access road, Pepper bit her lip and turned her face away. She stared blindly out the window, uncertain and confused. During the night, before she scurried away, he’d been interested. Unwilling to take no for an answer, not that her refusals had been very strenuous. This morning, she’d gotten the impression his control had frayed. Especially with her statement of consent, her suggestion of opportunity. Why had he passed up the opportunity?

Ten minutes later, she still hadn’t found the courage to ask. The scenery out the window had changed, however. She frowned at the trees crowded close to the two-lane road and glanced at Mitch. He still wore an expression of intense concentration as he slowed and executed a turn onto a narrow, dirt-packed lane.

Moistening her lips, she asked, “Where are we?”

“The south edge of Hallsford. There aren’t any security cameras out here.” He guided her car away from the main road, the going slow as he navigated around the occasional dry-packed rut. “You can’t reach the house from this direction without wading across a creek.”

Secluded. Mouth dry, she checked the passenger side mirror, noted no sign of the road they’d left behind. “How do you know about this?”

“Ever wonder how Carlton never had to look far to find me when I ran?” He parked beneath the thick canopy of an overgrown tree and climbed out of the car.

Pepper fumbled to release her seatbelt while Mitch rounded the back of the car. He had her door open before she freed herself from the chest strap, had his fingers tangled in the back of her hair before she placed both feet on the ground. Her knees were jelly but she managed to stand.

“I’ve never thought of you as a sister.” Mitch released her hair and stripped her shirt over her head, leaving her bare from the waist up except for her bra. “My urges to protect, defend, provide for you—they don’t come from the same place as my urges to do the same for Candace.”

Pepper nodded dumbly, trying to process words, touches, heat. Mitch’s thumb stroked a line from her shoulder to the outer curve of her breast. Her nipples peaked instantly, tight inside the satin cups of her bra. A strangled sound rumbled in Mitch’s throat. Hungry. She shivered despite the sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead.

“I want you to say it now.” He splayed his hands over her ribs, one deep breath away from touching her breasts. “Say I’m not your brother. Mean it.”

“You’re not my brother,” she whispered, fighting past reluctance to hurt, straining toward need to feel his hands on her. “I don’t want you to be my brother. I want…”

“What?” He asked when she stopped.

“Be my lover.” A flush burned her cheeks, different from the heat soaking her panties and stinging her fingertips.

Mitch’s mouth was on her skin before she finished the last word.

Too many sensations at once—the scrape of his morning beard, the wet stroke of his tongue, the press of his fingertips digging into her waist. Pepper’s head sagged. Her chin touched the crown of his head—drove his tongue lower.

He licked a slow path over the cup of her bra before closing his teeth around her nipple. She gasped, clenched her fists in the back of his shirt. Undeterred, Mitch shifted to claim her other nipple. Instead of biting, he sucked—a hard, deep pull that drew a line straight to her navel and beyond.

As if making room for more of that hot pleasure, he thumbed the snap of her jeans and lowered the zipper. “I want these off.”

He raised his head and caught her parted lips, delved into her mouth without the prelude of a tease-retreat game.

Like before, in the pool, she opened easily. Her brain seemed programmed to him, to accept and respond and want.

Overwhelmed, out of breath at the realization, she broke the kiss and buried her face in the hard angle of his shoulder. Gulped air that smelled like him, pushed her hands beneath his shirt to feel his skin.

Mitch peeled her jeans and panties from her hips. “Kick off your shoes, Pepper. Let me see,” he murmured in her ear.

Naked. She was going to be naked in the woods with Mitchell Scott. Pepper dug her fingernails into the muscle at the small of his back. He flinched forward, hard against her belly, and she grinned.

“You’re acting like a teenager.” She kissed the base of his throat.

“So? Shoes off. Don’t make me snap your bra straps.” His palms slid over her bare bottom, squeezed. Pepper sucked a sharp breath, remembering the same touch earlier. The pleasure that had followed when his fingers slid between her legs. Eager to invite that again, she toed out of her sneakers and released him long enough to shove her jeans to her knees and lower.

Mitch stroked down to grip the backs of her thighs. “I’m not going to have you standing up. Put your legs around my waist.”

“But you are going to have me, aren’t you?” she breathed, abruptly afraid he’d decided to stop.

“Baby, yes.” He bent his knees, grasped her thighs and straightened, lifting her effortlessly.

Pepper threw her arms around his neck. With his help, she twined her legs around his waist and drew a sharp breath. His arousal rose tight between them, unmistakable. “I can feel you.”

This was different from the pool. Without the buoyancy of the water, her weight rested solidly against his chest. The tight ridges of his abs flexed against her stomach when he backed away from the car.

“I can feel you,” she repeated, trying to shift her weight, to pull him closer between her legs. Her bikini bottom had hidden so much. Spread bare around him, she felt everything. The seam of his fly, lodged tight against her wet flesh, rubbed every nerve ending with each stride.

Concentrating, holding her breath, she angled her hips to catch friction on a specific spot. Little sparks of pleasure lit one after the other. Her head fell back and she moaned, fingernails cruel at his nape as she tried to hold him still, tried to find the peak he’d shown her during the night.

“Christ.” Mitch stopped moving. He opened his mouth over her exposed throat, sucked hard.

Pepper started at the unexpected near-pain and whimpered, jerked against him. The tiny movement shoved her over and release burst. Heat spread through her limbs and robbed them of strength but Mitch caught her. One strong forearm beneath her bottom, the other across her back, he jostled her higher against his chest.

“Next time,” he whispered hot at her ear, “next time, you’re going to do that on my cock. Beautiful as you are, I don’t know if I can take it again without being inside you.”

Pepper rubbed her face in the crook of his neck and acknowledged him with a nod. Apparently satisfied, he continued. Too soon, he stopped and pitched forward, depositing her on the engine-warmed hood of her car. Unbidden alarm surged in her chest, tightened around her lungs. She clutched at his shoulders. “Mitch?”

“Let go.” He kissed her ear, ran his palms down her thighs to her knees. “Let go so I can see you.”

Instead of obeying, she tightened her hold. “I’m not sure I like this,” she confessed, half beneath her breath.

He tensed and lifted his head to meet her eyes. With visible effort, he forced the frown from his brow. “What don’t you like?”

“This is—I’ve never—” She cut herself off, shook her head in a futile attempt to clear it. “I was on top of you. Or standing in front of you.”

“You don’t like being on the bottom?” He braced his hands on the hood at either side of her head and straightened his arms, lifting away and breaking her hold.

She hugged her ribs. “It’s not a very powerful position.”

Her face heated. Feeling silly and on the verge of ruining something, she lowered her eyes and shook her head once. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

Mitch loomed silent above her, his breathing steady in their quiet pocket of woods. After a few breaths, he spoke. “Even when you’re flat on your back you have me by the balls. Don’t tell me you feel powerless.”

His voice held a ragged edge. Pepper uncrossed her arms and pressed her palms to his ribs, absorbing his words. Doing her best to bury anxiety beneath want, she slowly uncurled her legs from his waist and placed her feet on the hood.

Mitch pushed up and stood between her raised knees, robbing her of his heat and hardness. She opened her mouth to object but new heat replaced what she was missing. His eyes blazed down at her, green and gold like the leaves overhead.