He levered himself upward immediately, and she looked up at him and felt every resolution dissolve into a swamping feeling of desire.
I can't fight this.
Her throat got dry; she licked her lips.
The motion of her tongue arrested him. If she got on her knees, she would be at just the right height to taste him; she could own him with her mouth and hands. She was so beautiful, kneeling there. Truck watched her face, watched her response, edgy with the need to have her again. He wanted to feel her hands cup him, caress him, take him home.
Heat rose all around them. She swallowed hard. How could she let him go when he was practically begging her to feast on him?
The sexy lady embraces every facet of her sensuality and tries new things.
She heard the words so clearly in her mind. Hadn't she written them?
Without missing a beat, she reached for him.
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IF ONLY there didn't have to be the moments after, she thought, when the excitement died down and the heat dissipated. But how could you sustain that kind of high in the midst of sorting through your underwear and clothes and trying to get dressed without looking clumsy?
It never worked for her, even though Truck was unusually graceful at it.
Because he was so experienced?
The sun was now down on the horizon. Truck was packing everything up and securing it with a tarp. Words seemed superfluous. Carrie climbed down from the roof first, hanging tight, not trusting her quivery legs.
She didn't wait for him either. She wanted to flee from him, and she wanted to run to him, and she hated those contradictory feelings.
“Carrie...”
She stopped and turned to face him, lured by that delicious little break in his voice.
Truck stood just by the ladder, his T-shirt slung over his shoulder, his fingers hooked into the waistband of his jeans, as dangerous as the devil, and twice as devious.
“Here's the deal,” he said, his eyes glimmering with a positively wicked light. “Sex for dinner.”
She froze. “I'll make sure I'm never hungry,” she said tightly.
“And I'll make sure you're ravenous,” he countered. “Today was just the appetizer. I haven't even begun to whet your appetite.”
“I'll starve first.” She knew exactly what he was doing.
He smiled that awful complacent
arrogant
male smile. “How long will that satisfy you? I think you'll be famished in a day, Carrie. I think you want it just as much as I do. So I guess we'll see who craves nourishment first.”
He swirled his shirt off of his shoulders and yanked it over his head. “MeâI'm hungry. I'm going out to dinner.” He flicked his hand at her. “See you, Carrie.”
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MEN
! Fine. Truck had no conception of what she was going through, no idea about the choices she'd had to make. No clue what her life had been like before she'd come back to town or how much she'd given up. Just as well. A sexy lady could get a man like him out of her system in no time. And good sex didn't have to have anything to do with it.
Right. Or love.
On the other hand, after spending the afternoon in his arms, her bed seemed awfully cold and lonely. But Carrie didn't like the alternatives either: ignore himâ
impossible
âor get involved with himâ
impossible.
The next awful step was to suggest they could be friends.
Actually I thought we were in love...
Heat washed her face as she remembered his words. What did he think they were in now?
Heat. Sex. And she'd desperately wanted him, so what did that do to all her fuzzy logic about involvement?
This
was
involvement.
Okay, I won't fight it. I'll be involved. I just won't go out to dinner. I'll do the sexy lady bit: How could any man resist?
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HE MIGHT AS WELL be a thousand miles away as just up the road from her, Truck thought as he maneuvered his car into the garage at the back of the house. She wasn't going to let him any closer than he'd gotten already.
God, Carrie was something. Now he knew why he had waited, why no other woman had ever done it for him, why he'd come back to Paradise. He didn't believe it was fate. He was beginning to think it was inevitable.
The problem was, he still had to capture the castle. And his warrior princess had pulled up the bridge across the moat. She was not making it easy. Oh, she was worth it. Truck was still wrung out from this afternoon, and he already craved more. He was not going to let her just walk away either. Not this time. Not ever.
He dropped onto one of the chairs on the enclosed porch and stared out across the road at the pond. There wasn't much to see at this hour. just the clear, starstudded sky, the looming trees across the road, the flick of a lightning bug. And it was quiet, except for the crickets, the faint honk of a duck, a distant engine as a car raced up the Pond Road.
Truck liked the quiet, the peace, the sense of space and containment both. He liked working with his hands and
caring for Old Man. He liked the town, the people, the life he'd chosen far from the fast lanes of Chicago where he'd first started out.
Where he'd almost been devoured by his resentment of Carrie's rejection and his suppressed feelings of abandonment; where he'd become utterly self-destructive and out of control.
The career had gone firstâhis abortive desire to be a journalist. You couldn't cover a beat when you weren't sober. And half the time he hadn't been.
He hadn't been much different than Carrie, he thought. He couldn't count how many women he'd had, how many meaningless encounters, how many nights he'd spent in someone's bed whose name he couldn't remember the next morning, women he eliminated from his life without a shred of remorse, women from whom he'd run away.
A man found his soul in the strangest places.
In the bathroom of a plane, throwing up his guts, on the way home to deal with his father's tragic accident. In a hospital room, praying for Old Man to live. In the kindness of strangers who transferred their affection for Old Man onto his worthless only child and forced him to become a man.
In the depths of the pond on a quiet autumn day as he paddled a canoe out to the center and watched the sun go down. In the heft of a tool precision-crafted to do precisely the job you needed it to do. In the joy of fitting the pieces of a puzzle together and making it whole, whether it was plumbing, making love or your life.
This he had learned sometime somewhere in his twenty-seventh year, when he returned to Paradise to take over the business and take care of Old Man.
Truck heard the unmistakable sound of Old Man's wheelchair rolling across the living-room floor.
“You out there?”
“Yep.”
Old Man appeared on the threshold. “So, you finished up in Searsport?”
“Yep.” Truck knew that wasn't what Old Man wanted to know.
“Been working down at Carrie's then?”
Bingo. “Uh-huh.”
“How's she doing?”
“She's fighting every inch of the way.”
“It's hard to keep 'em down on the farm, that's for sure. There's nothing like the pull of the big bad city. You think she'll leave eventually?” Old Man asked idly.
“She thinks she will.”
“Too bad.”
“Things change,” Truck said softly.
“Change is hard,” Old Man said.
“We all change,” he said to Old Man.
“One way or another,” Old Man agreed. “Bring Carrie up to dinner sometime soon. I'll tell Jolley.”
“Ill do that,” Truck said.
Old Man reached out and touched his arm. “Good night, son.”
Truck squeezed his hand. “Night.” He listened to the wheels in the darkness as Old Man returned to his room He felt the knife edge of desire cut into him, but he
wanted
to feel the tormenting ache, the desire. It was his secret, his insatiable hunger for Carrie, and it was his to revel in. He felt the heat, the thickness of the night air. More than anything he wanted to climb in Carrie's bedroom window right this very second. She'd wake up,
she'd want him and she'd take him, and then she'd let him ride her hard.
Fantasies and dreams
â
...Actually, I thought it was love...
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IT WAS HOT, it was late, and Carrie was wide awake, her body covered with a sheen of perspiration.
This isn't fair. I don't want to think about him, I don't want him, I don't...
I do. If he came in that window right nowâif...stupid fantasy... ifâI would...
She drew in a hissing breath. She had never felt so voluptuous. That was the thing that awakened her, her body swelling and stretching with this intense yearning, priming her, making her wet, hot and ready before she was even aware of her need.
Ready for what? Fantasies and dreams?
He could have been with her now. He could have stayed the whole night right in this bed.
If she knew magic, she'd conjure him up in a heartbeat, naked and throbbing, and blinded by his overwhelming need for her body.
What was he thinking? What was he doing? Why didn't he come?
Dangerous feelings. Shameless desires, especially for one as determined as she was not to have a relationship, not to make a home here.
It was crazy to want him. Insane not to consider the ramifications.
Wasn't it enough she had spent that glorious afternoon with him on the roof, for heaven's sake?
She didn't want to answer that question.
It wasn't enough.
She shook herself. The truth was, living
in Paradise was making her stir-crazy. She had too much time on her hands and too much libido.
She wished he would come...
She awakened again hours later, joltingly aware that there was someone else in the room, and that for some reason her arms were immobile.
She pulled against the restraints, twisting and bucking her body, fear coursing through her. Then her eyes became accustomed to the dark, and she saw him, standing at the foot of the bed, watching, and she stopped her writhing as he waited, looking dark, sensual, hungry, driven to the edge...
Yes
... Her breath caught as she pulled at the restraints, feeling the soft stretch of the material, and the dawning comprehension that she was fully in control. Yes.
Her excitement grew. He wanted her. He couldn't help himself. He was over the edge...
He wore nothing under his jeans but his rampaging desire for her. He climbed onto the bed, his naked need joining with hers.
“I'm hard for you.” His voice was barely above a breath. His body was slick with sweat, burningly aroused.
She made that helpless little sound as he rocked against her.
“Is this what you want, Carrie?” He pushed deeper and she gasped. “And this?” He pulled this time, a long lingering stroke outward. “You want what I have?”
Her body liquefied, expanded, took him deeper as he braced himself above her at just the angle to watch her undulations and her pleasure.
He pushed farther, rotating his hips, squeezing himself tighter and tighter against her so she felt the unmistakable mating of their bodies.
“Don't move.” Did he say it? Did she?
She was so open to him, so connected; she couldn't conceive of another reality but this sensual joining in the dark.
He was positioned at her very center, the rock on which she rooted. He didn't have to move; she took him, bearing down on him, writhing back and forth, against him.
And the thing that made it even more exciting was the binding of her hands so that the movement of her body defined her pleasure; and the way he lay canted over her, watching her, moving with her in short, little strokes so she could just feel his pumping hips.
Just right. Just...rightâas she bore down on the rhythmic thrusts. Just right...how did he knowâof course he knew...her breath came faster as the tension built, as sensation piled on sensation like whipped cream on cake, and just a firm swipe of the tongue would do itâthere...and
there
; her body quickened, she held suspended for one fraught moment and then she let go.
He caught her, driving into the waves of her climax, pulling it from her and pulling it from her until she begged for mercy, until he could pull no more and the only thing left was to give himself up to her desire.