Silver Brewer: The Silver Foxes of Blue Ridge

by L. B. Dunbar

  I’m rock hard and straining in my boxer briefs. With exaggerated breathing, we stare at one another.

  “Should we talk?” I swallow the question, knowing I want nothing more than to be inside her, but if we need to clear the air, I can wait. A few more minutes.

  “I don’t want to talk,” she whispers, and I’m in her space immediately.

  “Thank fuck.” My mouth crashes to hers as my hands trace the outline of her body down to those black panties. I press them down her hip, and she wiggles so they fall to the floor. I walk her backward until she connects with the wall.

  “You can’t lift me.”

  If she’s daring me, she’ll lose because I shove my boxers down to my feet and then lift her as I stand upright. She squeaks, but I swallow the noise as her legs spread and she wraps them around my body. I’m frantic as my dick twitches between us, desperate to enter her.

  She’s right. I can’t do this and give her what she needs.

  I spin us for the bed, and then we fall onto the mattress. She lets out a laugh as she bounces and then quiets as I guide myself to her entrance.

  “Giant,” she whispers, her eyes meeting mine and growing serious. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  My mouth covers hers again, telling her in that kiss how much I’ve missed her. Her legs spread farther, and our bodies find their way. I enter her while our mouths remain attached, but as I climb inside her, we separate our lips, both moaning in relief.

  Welcome home, I think.

  “You feel so good,” I say, dropping kisses along her neck while I draw back and then rush forward.

  “So good,” she mutters, keeping pace with me, just as eager as always to keep me inside her. We dance the oldest dance known to humans, and then I spin, dragging her on top of me. She sits upright, and her hair tumbles from her bun. Her breasts jiggle with each roll of her hips. Her fingers scrape at my chest.

  “I love you,” I blurt, and she stops moving.

  Her eyes widen. “What?”

  “I love you. I don’t want anything else between us, so that’s the last secret I have. I’m in love with you.”

  “I…”

  I buck up, forcing my dick as deep as I can to prevent her from speaking. She grunts at the sharp intrusion. I’m hoping to distract her from telling me she doesn’t feel the same.

  It’s too soon. That was too fast. We didn’t talk yet.

  “Dammit, Giant. Hold up a second.”

  I stop bucking under her while she sits with my dick buried inside her. “Hold up? Did you just say hold up in a Southern drawl?” More stalling.

  “George Giant Harrington, you just let me talk before you move another muscle.”

  I stare at the determination in her eyes with fear in my chest.

  “I love you, too, honey. I love you, too.” Her voice softens as her shoulders relax. We peer into each other’s eyes in what should be an awkward and difficult moment, and it is. I feel vulnerable and raw, as if she can see into my heart, into my soul, and then she moves, the tempo slower than moments ago. She rolls and nods, her hips swaying while her head lolls. Her eyes close, and I follow her lead, soaking up what we’ve said while drowning in the connection.

  She shifts after a few minutes, sliding up and then slamming back down. I sit up, and her legs flip from straddling my lap to wrapping around my backside. I bounce her up and down, dragging her over me with guided force and relishing the friction.

  “Giant.” Her voice hitches as her clit rubs lower against me.

  “Touch yourself if it helps. Let me watch.” Her hand slips between us.

  Damn, she’s so hot. “Finish,” I hiss, as I’m too close to the edge with her doing what she’s doing while I disappear inside her.

  “I’m coming,” she hums, and I still, pulsing inside her as she clenches over me. It’s incredible to orgasm simultaneously. I feel one with her in a way I’ve never felt before. Her arms wrap around my neck as every drop drains out of me. She doesn’t let me go, even when we’ve stopped, and I hold her pressed to my beating heart.

  I’m never letting her go again.

  + + +

  When I wake, I see Letty exiting the bathroom in only her skirt and a black bra. Damn.

  “Where you going?” I ask, rolling my head to see it’s seven in the morning.

  “I’ve got to go soon.” Her voice is low as she comes to my side of the bed. I sit up and reach for her waist, tugging her to me to pressing a kiss between her breasts. She giggles before she pushes me back. “Honey, don’t be teasing me. I just showered, and I don’t have time. I need to be at Caldwell Woods by eight thirty.”

  I fall back dejected and slip the sheet down to my hips. “I’ve got a wood you can inspect.” I’m teasing her, but her eyes grow dark and hungry. She hums, and then she reaches down for my dick that’s standing at attention. Her fingers wrap around me, and she tugs.

  “Now, who’s teasing who?” I groan, my eyes closing as the pressure around me increases. When my eyes open, she’s bending at the waist, pulling her hair over one shoulder and opening her lips. “Cricket.” I’ve hardly finished her name before she draws me into her warm mouth, swallowing me to the back of her throat.

  “Sweetheart,” I groan again, stroking over her hair as she twirls her tongue around me. My hand skims down her back, over her curvy ass, and lowers for the hem of her skirt. I slip my fingers up the backside of her leg, lifting the material with the climb as her mouth sucks in earnest, drawing me deep. My fingers find her…

  “You’re soaked, Letty.” I love how ready she is for me, and I slip a finger under her thin panty, delving deep while she grunts against my dick. The vibration ripples up the vein, and I choke. She’s so fucking sexy with my finger up her skirt and her mouth on my dick. This woman? Incredible.

  It doesn’t take long before I’m warning her I’m close, and she rocks on my finger. I add another, and her knees buckle. Her teeth scrape up my shaft, and I explode. My eyes close under the sensation, but my fingers still work her until she releases her lips, groaning my name. She comes, holding my dick in her wet palm while drenching my fingers.

  “Woman, a man could grow used to this.”

  She chuckles. “You’re such a charmer.”

  I slip my fingers from her and sit up to take her mouth in a brief kiss.

  “I really have to go,” she whispers after a minute. I nod, acknowledging once again to myself I never want her to leave me.

  She returns to the bathroom to freshen up, and I use my T-shirt on the floor for the time being. When she comes out of the bathroom, her eyes soften despite the gleam of naughtiness after what we did.

  “I wish I could stay for coffee, but I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “I’ll be here,” I tell her, hoping she reads more into the words. I swallow back all the emotion and let the words escape. “I love you.”

  She crosses the room and cups my face. “I love you, too.” Another too quick kiss and then she’s walking away. The door clicks shut, and I fall back on the bed, replaying last night. Our frantic lovemaking. Our declarations. Our talk after both.

  “I want us to work,” I told her as we lay on our sides, facing each other.

  “How would that be?”

  “I don’t want to bring up the past, but I’ve done this before with a greater distance. We’ll have to commit to it. Phone calls. Text messages. Emails.” I reached for her face, hinting at the unanswered messages I sent her.

  “I got them all, and I read them every day. Sometimes more than once a day.” Her eyes lowered to my chest.

  “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I didn’t know what to say, at first. Then I thought I might have overreacted a little. Then I decided we wouldn’t work. I mean, where does a long-distance relationship lead?”

  “Where do you want it to go?” There was something she wasn’t saying.

  When she didn’t answer, I asked something else to take off the pressure.

&nb
sp; “How about we just try it for a bit?” I suggested. “Let it run its course.” As if it would run out—which it won’t, for me. I’d never have enough of this woman.

  “Okay,” she whispered, hesitant and uncertain. I kissed her forehead.

  “Speaking of commitment, I’d like to make sure we’re on the same page. I’m a one-woman man, and I’d like to ask the same of you.”

  “You want me to only see one woman?” she teased, and I chuckled, but I held out for her answer.

  “You don’t even have to ask. It’s only been you since the moment I saw you slinging an ax.”

  “Ax throwing?” I laughed.

  “No, chopping wood, when I almost hit you. You’re all I could focus on.”

  “Sex god,” I teased.

  “Lumbersexual god.”

  “I’ll show you limber,” I said, reaching out for her and tugging her over my chest.

  “Lumber,” she corrected, giggling over me. “Lumber, like wood.”

  “I can show you that, too.” And we headed off to round two for the night.

  My body feels a little used and abused. Sex twice in a night and then a blow job in the morning—I’m one lucky man. Plus, she loves me.

  I smile to myself.

  She says she loves me.

  I stretch and twist to sit up in bed when my phone beeps. Her name pops up on the screen.

  “Hey baby,” I say after she whines my name into the phone. “What’s the matter?”

  “The rental car won’t start. The desk clerk says he thinks the battery’s dead. I called the rental service, but I don’t have time to wait for a jump start.”

  “I’ll be down in a second.”

  28

  Something new from the old

  [Letty]

  Giant to the rescue. It’s cold outside, and I’m inside the lobby, pacing while I wait for him to exit the elevator.

  “Don’t fret,” he says when he sees me, and his warm smile puts me at ease although I’m freaking out. I don’t have time for a car breakdown, not after I took the time to satisfy this delicious man. I couldn’t resist. He was all long and hard, stretched on his back with his shaft upright and ready. I wanted to climb him, but then I’d be even later than I already am. “I have cables in the truck.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he means jumper cables, and he leads me out to the parking lot. I’m parked facing a row of bushes with a car on either side of mine.

  “How would you feel about me just driving you?” Giant asks, and I glance up at him.

  “I can’t ask you to do that. You already drove here in the middle of the night. Then we stayed awake most of the night.” My face heats, recalling the little sleep we had and the reasons.

  “Letty, let’s be straight about this. I’d cross an ocean for you, if I needed to. This”—he points at his truck—“is nothing.” With a hand on my back, he leads me to the passenger side and helps me in. When he enters the driver’s side, he adds, “As long as you don’t mind that I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes.”

  “We can go back to the front desk and get you a toothbrush,” I suggest although I really don’t have time to go up to the room.

  “No worries. I already used yours.”

  My mouth falls open, and I stare at him as he starts the engine.

  “What? You already had something else of mine in your mouth, Cricket. Sharing your toothbrush is the least of things to consider.”

  I laugh with relief as he pulls out of the lot, and we begin the drive to Caldwell Woods.

  I love how easygoing he is today. We talked, and I’m relieved we came to some agreements.

  “How about we try for every two weeks?” he asked. It seemed too long to wait, but it wasn’t too much to ask. He’d never move to Chicago, and he was clear on that when he came to the wedding, but he seems okay with visiting. I wonder what it means for the long-term, but as he said, let’s just see where things lead. I couldn’t answer him when he asked, where did I want us to go? How do you tell a man you’ve known for a month that you want love and marriage, and children and happily ever after with him? Especially when you’ve just said I love you to one another.

  Did it happen too fast? The fullness in my heart says it didn’t.

  “I want to invite you to Thanksgiving.”

  I was shocked at the invitation—and honored. He’s told me about his closeness with his family, which is the opposite of my relationship with mine.

  “Are you sure?”

  “My mother adored you when she met you. She’d love to have you. Besides, it will stop her from setting me up on more blind dates or dinner arrangements.”

  My head turned to look up at him. “Does she do that often?”

  “She did.” I waited for more. “But since I told her how much I like you, she stopped.”

  “Like me? Aww…are we going steady?”

  “Yes,” he teased. “Steady. Very steady.” Then his mouth crashed into mine, and I forgot all about his mother setting him up with other women. Committed, he told me. I was all his.

  “So what do I need to know?” he asks, interrupting my thoughts. “Let me be your sidekick, your Marcus. What do I need to know to get him to sell?”

  I snort at the reference to Marcus. Giant and he could not be more opposite, yet I love them both for different reasons.

  “Well, the property is actually located on a small lake. There once was a resort there. A whole town opposite it at one point. A few buildings remain but not the physical town itself. All the homes are gone.”

  Giant side-eyes me. “Wait. Caldwell Woods? Wasn’t that the location of an old electrohydraulics plant or something?”

  “It was.” The town was built up around the waterworks business and consequentially destroyed when the company moved to a larger city. Most of the land was either still owned by the original plant or returned to the state of Tennessee to go wild. “The piece of property we plan to look at is managed by a recluse.”

  Giant shifts to look at me before turning his eyes back to the road. “That doesn’t sound safe.” He pauses. “I don’t like that you were going to go there alone.”

  “It’s fine,” I say with a dismissive wave, but I must admit meeting a man I didn’t know in the heart of the woods near an abandoned village doesn’t sound all that smart. Then I glance over at Giant. Well, it might have worked out a little bit once before, but Blue Ridge isn’t desolate. “Don’t want me shacking up with a stranger in a tent to obtain the land, huh?”

  Giant scoffs. “Don’t want you shacking up, period. No tent unless it involves me. And yes, I’m a little concerned about your lack of stranger danger.”

  I laugh. “What about me? I could have been the ax murderer.”

  “Considering I’ve seen you throw an ax, that’s highly doubtful.”

  “Hey,” I whine, but then I reconsider. “Why did you take me up that mountain without knowing me?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t think you’d show.”

  “But you prepared everything.”

  He twists his lips and side-eyes me. “I was hopeful.”

  My smile grows. “And why was that?”

  “Because from the moment I met you, Cricket, I could tell you were something special. Spontaneous need, remember?” He quickly glances at me. He told me last night how he wanted something different, something he didn’t know he needed, and apparently, that’s me. I’m all warm inside with the thought. “And I don’t regret one minute of that decision to take you camping, even if I did it under false pretenses.”

  He was never going to let me purchase the land.

  “I don’t regret a minute of it either.”

  He reaches for my hand and brings it to his lips, kissing my knuckles and then holding it against his thigh.

  “I love you,” he whispers, shy and quiet.

  “I love you, too,” I say. More than you know.

  + + +

  Mr. Samuel Calder is an old man, full of stories and mem
ories of the land—what it once was and what he hopes it can be again. A resort sat on the property once upon a time. Ironically, we can’t get to the site without taking a boat to the secluded location across the river—he corrects me, it’s not a lake—and Giant eyes me again, hinting at my lack of stranger danger. There’s no boat to transport us, but the remains of a landing on both sides of the river hint at what once was.

  “I promised my Annie I’d restore it for her. I wanted her to come back to me.” Mr. Calder’s elderly expression speaks of lost love, and my heart breaks a little. With his advanced age, it might be too late to regain whomever the woman was to him.

  However, I’m hopeful of the interest from the hotel company, considering there was once one there. Mr. Calder describes how the resort looked. It’s difficult to envision its past majestic until Mr. Calder shows us some faded pictures of a lodge, golf course, pond, and patio. With the verbal image Mr. Calder paints in addition to the worn photographs, my imagination sees a resort something the likes of Dirty Dancing. We spend an hour listening to Mr. Calder recount memories of the old place as we traipse along the opposite shore of the river. I don’t know what I was thinking because I’m not well prepared in my heeled boots and tight skirt. It reminds me of when I met Giant. I was equally unprepared for meeting the large man graciously walking next to me, discussing the land with my perspective client. Mr. Calder’s weathered skin and liquid blue eyes hold so much passion for this place and its memories.

  “Been in my family for generations.” His voice drifts, and I’m not certain if he’s talking about the property or the company.

  “Company moved upstream, but the resort went on for years after.” His eyes remain sad as he looks across the water. “Then it disappeared as well.” He already explained how the company razed the nearby community. His fingers shake as he reaches for his forehead and rubs. “But I’m going to bring it back. Bring her back.”