Authors: Anne Calhoun
thoughts.
“Everyone thinks the worst part about being at Elysian Fields was the superficial things,” she said,
keeping her voice low. “Not being fashionable, or keeping my hair long, or not going to college, or not
having sex. And it was bad . . . although I didn’t know that until later. What I did know is that any time I
felt sad, or angry, or hurt, I was chastised for it. Anything but a joyous countenance is considered being
disrespectful to parents or authority figures. Even a sin. Everyone assumes I left to have sex, to choose my
own husband, to direct my own life. And I did. But I left because I’d been disciplined when I felt anything
else. I wanted to feel. To have experiences that made me feel.”
She shook her head in frustration. It was impossible to explain to someone from the outside who’d
always lived with a wide range of emotions available to them. “I wanted to go to things like this, with
someone like you. I wanted to get angry, sad, happy, pleased, hurt. It’s so simple, and yet it’s so
complicated.”
He didn’t respond as the first act of the second round, two brothers who played guitar while one sang,
took the stage. It slowly dawned on Rachel that Ben had moved them not only because he didn’t like sitting
in the middle of crowds. He’d distanced them from the stage. She watched emotion ripple under his skin,
watched him try to hold it back. She was in no position to name what he felt, but the look in his eyes broke
her heart.
When the emcee called the next break, Rachel looked at her mother’s slim gold watch, something she
wore only for special occasions. “We should head back fairly soon,” she said quietly.
Ben glanced at his phone, then looked at her, eyebrows raised. “It’s not quite ten,” he said. “You want
to go back to my place.”
Another question phrased as a statement. “Yes, please.”
He took her hand and they rose, making their way through the crowd to the parking lot exit. She
expected him to drop her hand once out in the warm night air, but he didn’t.
“This is a pretty tame group,” he said, looking at the orderly crowd. “You want to see people pushing to
the edge, you should try No Limits on a Saturday night after Texas wins.”
The bar again. She smiled. “Or I could just have sex with you.” One corner of his mouth lifted as he
held her door for her. When he got into the driver’s seat, she asked, “Do you play an instrument?”
She asked because while he’d maintained a facade of indifference for most of the performances, when
guitar players took the stage, he changed. The poker face, the mask hardened, protecting something. There
were no longing wistful looks, just the sense that he was forcing himself to not give anything away. She
recognized that particular demeanor, the look of a person trying to ignore a hole in their soul. She’d lived
within it most of her adult life, pretending not to care about things that mattered to her, pretending that a life
lived in service to the Lord and denial of the self was enough.
“Ben?” she said quietly when he didn’t answer.
He flashed her that slashing smile, warning of unbearable pleasure and danger. “You ready to feel?”
“Yes,” she said. “Please.”
Chapter Fourteen
Ben rol ed his shoulders to work out the tension brought on by sitting through a painful reminder of
what could have been. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him and Sam up on that stage, if things had worked out
differently. At the same time he wracked his brains to come up with something that would make Rachel Hill
feel something.
It wouldn’t take much, because Rachel still looked like she’d taken a tackle on her blind side every time
she had an orgasm. Every time he had an orgasm, for that matter. She took none of this for granted, and
when you didn’t need new and different to get a kick out of sex, what should he do?
What did she want?
No fucking clue. Or was he just clueless about how to give her what she wanted?
When he saw her on the bunkhouse porch, dressed in white and looking like something out of a
country music video, he’d forgotten the basics of driving, like braking before he ran into a building, and
had to slam on the brakes to stop the truck in time. As he got out of the truck, anticipation had
overwhelmed him and he’d flashed back to the nights when he used to pick up a girl, eager for the night to
get started. When he’d tucked the rose she held the whole way into town into her soft, loose French braid, a
hint of perfume and warm skin drifted from her nape to his nostrils. The comment about the cooking
asphalt was a lie, intended to cover the odd hitch of his heart.
When was the last time he was eager to go out with a woman? Hell, nowadays he wasn’t even eager to
get laid. It would happen, and if it didn’t, his phone held a long list of numbers to text in search of a warm,
willing body. He knew when he’d stopped feeling. He knew why. For over a decade he’d set up his life on
autopilot, substituting adrenaline for emotion.
The woman beside him wanted both. For good reason. People went without sex all the time, but to
punish this beautiful, alive, curious woman for any emotional expression outside joy and contentment was
like locking up the falcon she resembled.
That’s what she reminded him of—a bird of prey, tawny eyes, a dozen shades of gold and brown like
feathers in her hair, fierce and beautiful and strong. Capable of locking talons around a vulnerable creature
and carrying it away.
She’d chosen him for the way he made her feel physically, nothing else. From the very beginning she’d
chosen him because he wouldn’t care. She knew who he was. What he was.
Great. She likes you, and you brought her flowers and went on a date with her, asshole. You’re
confusing things, not her. She’s going to think that’s a relationship.
No, she wouldn’t. She’d get emotional support elsewhere. Maybe from Rob Strong.
Another emotion surged in Ben’s gut, as unfamiliar as the anticipation. It took him a second to
recognize jealousy. Rather than relieved, he was jealous at the thought of Rachel turning to another man for
help or guidance, or even just a listening ear.
How are you going to feel when this is over?
He battled green all the way to his apartment complex, where he parked and walked around the hood to
open Rachel’s door for her. He put his hands on her knees just as she slid off the passenger seat, shifting
his hands up her thighs, lifting her skirt as his fingers curled around the firm curve of her ass. After the first
date she wore plain cotton underwear, something he hadn’t seen on a woman since he went to college. No
thongs or boy shorts or cheeky panties. Plain cotton briefs. Usually white.
The sensation of warm cotton on warmer skin sent heat flaring along his nerves and hardened his cock.
He shifted her along the truck as he stepped into her body and aligned them from chest to thigh. She
wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder, her breath quickening against his
chest. He slipped his finger under the cotton, then gently parted her soft folds and found slick heat. In
response she widened her stance ever so slightly and made a soft noise.
“I like the skirt,” he murmured. The scent of the single rose in her hair melded with the heat rising from
her bare shoulder, almost crowding out the electrified scent of rain. He wanted to crawl all over her,
growling, nipping, nuzzling, until she opened to him and let him in. He worked his free hand into her hair,
weaving his fingers into the braid and flower stem, tugging her head back so he could look into her eyes.
Heat rose in the golden brown depths, transforming them into aged whiskey. When her soft pink lips
parted, he couldn’t help himself. He bent and kissed her, lightly at first, using heat and the merest pressure
to tempt her to open to him, then touched the tip of his tongue to hers. She shuddered from head to toe
when he did, and he edged her panties down a little farther to the tops of her thighs. He turned his wrist and
purposefully sought her clit, swollen and slick at the top of her pussy. Circled it. Kept his touch as light as
the pressure of his tongue on hers, soft, tempting, seducing. Emotion trickled along his nervous system,
more notable for what this lacked than what infused it. The music at the club had lowered his walls. After a
night at No Limits he was jacked up like a prizefighter, ready to fuck, unbreachable defenses up against
whomever he was with. Tonight music made him vulnerable, and Rachel slipped into his bloodstream like
a drug.
His heart pounded against his rib cage as he watched her succumb to the pleasure. His cock throbbed in
response, and he rubbed against her hip in time to his finger’s movements. Blood hammered in his ears, his
breathing a distant rush while hers echoed soft and breathy against his neck.
A car pulled into the lot, the lights sweeping across the truck in a wide semicircle as the driver parked in
front of the opposite building. Rachel pushed at his shoulder, so Ben withdrew his hand and stepped to the
side, using his body and stance to block inquisitive gazes. She shoved her skirt down, then tugged her
panties back into place through the fabric.
“Upstairs,” he said even as she said, “Can we go upstairs?”
She hurried up the stairs in front of him. When they gained the relative privacy at the top of the
stairwell he plucked the rose from her braid and spun her, then slid it into the cleft between her breasts and
buried his face in her collarbone as desire swamped him. He could do this. He could let emotion swamp
him, drown them both.
The scent of the rose and Rachel’s skin was stronger here, the flower crushed by his cheek and
releasing its scent into the dark, secret valley between her breasts. He backed her into the door and tugged at
the skirt with one hand as he tried to free his keys from his pocket with the other. “I want to fuck you so
bad,” he said.
The door swung open and they stumbled into his dark apartment, shedding clothes as they went. She
ripped open the snaps on his shirt and clawed it down his arms to puddle on the floor by the kitchen, then
went for his belt. His vision narrowed to white-clad, panting Rachel as he tugged her panties to her knees,
and gravity did the rest when he spun her around, hoisted her with one arm and bore her backward onto his
bed. Two feminine gasps echoed into the moonlit air of his bedroom.
Two. That wasn’t right. In the past, sure, but tonight? No.
His eyes snapped wide open to see Rachel flat on her back, her head inches away from the unmistakable
curve of a woman’s ass, resting on her heels in the middle of the bed.
There was a woman already in his bed.
Adrenaline shot through his veins just as Rachel went wild under him, shoving at his shoulders and
squirming to get free. They both scrambled backward like cats jumping out of a bathtub. On the bed a
woman struggled to regain her balance as the mattress dipped and lurched, her efforts hampered by her
kneeling position and the handcuffs restraining her hands behind her back. The black ball gag in her mouth
turned her words into garbled nonsense, but Ben got the horrified gist.
Juliette shook her hair back out of her face as best she could and stared at them, and for a long horrible
second no one in the room said anything. Then Rachel clapped both hands to her mouth just as Ben found
his voice.
“Jesus fucking
Christ
! What the
fuck
?”
“Lord have mercy,” Rachel whispered through her hands.
He recognized an automatic stress response when he heard one, or two. Ben gripped her shoulder and
spun her to the door, then down the hall, into the living room. Away from his bed.
“Sit,” he commanded, all but shoving her into the sofa. He stood in front of her, ran both hands over
his hair, then reached down and did up his buttons and buckled his belt.
“Ben,” Rachel said, still talking through her hands. Her eyes were the size of saucers. “Who is that?”
“She’s . . . Jesus . . . she’s a woman I know,” he said as puzzle pieces began clicking into place. “From
No Limits. Don’t go anywhere,” he said.
Still covering her mouth, her eyes alight with horror and fascination and what might just be the saving
grace of amusement, she shook her head slowly.
He spun on his heel and stalked down the hall, where he snagged his shirt from the floor, then into the
bedroom. Yanking the sleeves over his arms, he looked at Juliette, and it didn’t take a psychologist to see
the humiliation in her eyes. Still keeping his gaze locked above the collarbone, he fumbled in her hair for
the buckle to release the ball gag.
“There’d better be a fucking brilliant explanation for this,” he said as he examined the handcuffs. He
and Steve both used the brand issued by the department. These were a different brand, and his key