by Anne Calhoun
With what? Would he have a job after Hawthorn finished his methodical, by-the-book review of the situation? The person who set him up knew him well enough to use Conn’s reckless reputation to his advantage; he’d be smart enough to cover their tracks. Conn could be here in Lancaster without a job, maybe without his freedom, and Cady would be gone.
An old, familiar fear sidled up from his gut. Rejection, losing the home and family he’d claimed for himself, a loneliness so pervasive he thought no more of it than breathing. The McCools claimed him as one of their own; the next generation of kids even called him Uncle Conn. Cady’s mother and Emily were very friendly and welcoming. But he didn’t fool himself into thinking friendly meant forever. Cady’s mom took care of people in her neighborhood; it was probably just instinct to include whoever was hanging around from Cady’s entourage. Anyway, it didn’t satisfy the urge for a family of his own, the one formed in partnership with the woman he loved, the children they made together. It was the dream he’d always had and never thought he would fulfill.
Because he didn’t deserve it, and if he had it, he’d fuck it up. Deep down, he knew this to be true. His father left him, and what little remaining family he had passed him around when raising him overwhelmed them. They did their best, but asking older relatives to take in a rambunctious, difficult kid was a recipe for trouble.
He’d been plenty of trouble.
They pulled into the garage, and fell into their rhythm, Conn leading the way, Cady half a step behind. They’d left lights on in the main living space, the soft spotlights over the stove, a reading lamp by the chair with its back to the big windows, but their careful scan of the rooms for any further signs of a stranger’s presence in the house revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was as it had been when they left.
Cady shrugged out of her coat and tugged his hat from her head, leaving both on the kitchen island. “Take off your coat and gloves,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do about the tree sap after I take a shower.”
He shouldered out of his coat and set them on the pile of outerwear, then walked over to the sink to clean his hands. He’d scraped off most of the tree sap when Cady’s phone pealed out Madonna’s “Vogue.” He dried his hands and fished it from the pocket. Emily’s name lit up the screen.
“Hi, Emily,” he said.
“Oh. Conn. Where’s Cady? I want to talk to her about the pictures.”
“Hold on a second,” he said, and walked through her bedroom to the master bathroom. He tapped on the door with one knuckle, heard her call, “Yeah?”
“Your sister’s on the phone.”
“What?” she said, louder. “Just come in. The water’s running and I can’t hear you.”
He opened the door, mouth already forming the words It’s your sister when a cloud of steam billowed out. His mouth stopped and no sound came out. Cady stood naked beside the open shower door, one foot raised to step into the glass enclosure. She was all slender, womanly curves, hips and breasts and shoulders, her sex hidden by neatly trimmed dark curls. Her breasts lifted as she reached into the shower and adjusted the temperature. His heart did a funny little skip as she looked back at him, her hair curling as moisture gathered on the strands, one eyebrow arched inquisitively.
He couldn’t have her family life, but he could have her.
“She’ll call you back,” Conn said and hung up.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You’re letting the steam out,” Cady said. With every beat of her heart her extremities regained sensation as steam-warmed blood pumped through her body to her fingers and toes. “Come in and shut the door.”
Conn tossed her phone on the counter and walked into the room, kicking the door shut behind him.
“Who was it?” she said. “You didn’t just hang up on Chris, did you?”
“Your sister,” he said.
“That’s not much better,” she said like she wasn’t stark naked, like he wasn’t looking at her like … like she didn’t know what. No man had ever looked at her like that before. He stood just inside the door, feet spread and braced, hands jammed in his pockets, glorious shoulders gloriously squared up. She had the feeling that if he were wearing his gun belt, his thumbs would have been tucked in the leather. But this was an older reaction to the cop she’d seen at her homecoming concert. He looked a little lost, like the steam was dissolving his foundations so they coiled over their heads and away. He’d been there in body all day, but wary, hanging on the perimeter, and outsider to the end.
Until now.
“What did she want?” Cady asked, Emily’s recent issues still warring with her desire and her growing feelings for Conn for space in her brain.
“No idea,” he said. His eyes darkened as he looked her over. “I opened the door, you were naked, and my brain stopped working.”
She had to smile at that. Steam hissed from the jets lining the tiled rectangular shower stall. She opened a drawer for a hair elastic, then pulled her hair up into a messy knot on her head. It flopped to the side, but the mirror had fogged over so she couldn’t see how ridiculous she looked.
Based on the expression on Conn’s face, she didn’t look ridiculous at all. His gaze flicked over her once, topknot to tiptoe, then lingered on the way back up, pausing at the curve of her belly, her breasts, her face. Long accustomed to being objectified by men, by fans, by music industry executives, it took her a moment to understand how different she felt under Conn’s gaze. She felt seen. Admired. Wanted. Not as Queen Maud of the Maud Squad, but as crazy-haired, uncertain-about-her-future, likes-to-drive-fast-in-the-middle-of-the-night Cady.
She opened the door to the big glass enclosure, but thought before she spoke. They weren’t at the stage where they could take anything for granted. They’d made no promises, never gone past casual and into intimate. She’d heard what he said about cops being bad bets; he wasn’t just affirming her truth about touring musicians. He was telling her a truth of his own. Realistically, there was no chance this would last longer than her stay in Lancaster.
But until she left town, she’d take everything she could from her time with Conn McCormick. “You coming in?” she asked quietly.
The words dissipated into the steam now drifting through the master bathroom, obscuring Conn’s face like thin clouds obscured the sky. He answered with his body, reaching behind his neck to pull his Henley over his head, then set his hands on his belt.
She never, ever got tired of watching a man unfasten his belt. There was something so incredibly sexy about the movements. “Slow down,” she said.
Both of his eyebrows shot up, making his forehead wrinkle in a really interesting, adorable way. Even though she’d been wearing his hat for most of the Christmas tree shopping trip, his hair hung over his forehead, turning his face boyish despite the tough set of his jaw. Some distant, recording part of her mind noted the incongruities. It was the sheer size of him, bigger than anyone she regularly spent time with, but the man inside the muscles didn’t feel like he’d pumped the iron to boost his ego or meet the expectations of an image-conscious public. Based on the flashes of vulnerability she saw in his eyes, the way he looked at her askance, like he expected her to disappear, his muscles were a front, a defensive wall as unforgiving as the walls he liked backing her into. He wasn’t anything as simplistic as “hot.” Instead, he was compelling, made you look twice, then keep on looking in an effort to know more, trying to figure him out, catch his attention, keep his interest.
Cady was now of the opinion that “hot” was what you settled for when you couldn’t get “compelling.” When he was dressed, she forgot about the sheer size of him. He’d mastered the art of not being seen, somehow using his demeanor to hide his bulk, so that when he stripped, it was a shock to her system. He was a walking wall of muscle.
“Keep going,” she said, because Conn was clearly a we-better-both-be-on-the-same-page guy. “Just … slower.”
His face cleared, relaxed into something amused and
sexy at the same time. Hands on his hips, he rolled his head on his shoulders as if he was knocking out tension, then focused on her again. “Want to watch a show rather than be a show?”
“Something like that,” she said.
Their voices were barely audible over the running water. Conn tugged the end of his worn brown leather belt free from the loop, waited, then tugged it back to release the prong. Leather glided against leather, and then the belt hung loose.
Without touching herself she felt the little electric shocks of arousal intensify between her legs. Steamy heat gathered, droplets of moisture forming at her temples, slipped down her sternum, gathered in her sex.
“Too fast?”
“Just right,” she said, and waved her hand to indicate he should get on with it.
He took his time with his zipper, letting her see the strength of his erection straining at the gray boxers he wore before popping open the last of the buttons of his fly. The jeans came off first, kicked next to the vanity. He palmed himself through the soft cotton of his boxers, then stuck his thumbs in his waistband and lifted the fabric over his erection to fall to his ankles. Hands back on his hips, his cock bobbed straight out in front of him, lifting ever so slightly with his heartbeat. A flush darkened his skin from his cheeks down to his chest, the dark lines and swirls of the tattoos black on pink skin. Whether this was from the steam or arousal, she didn’t know, or care.
Condoms were in the second drawer. She tore one free from the strip and turned back to the open shower door. “Come here,” she said.
He crowded her through the door, hot skin and hard muscles chivvying her through the zero-entry doorway until he could close the door behind them. Steam enveloped them when the door closed. She turned to face him, lifting one hand to his sternum and holding her ground.
“You’re doing that thing again,” she said. It was hard to think with this muscled expanse at eye level, tattoos swirling under the sheen of steam gathering on his bare skin, and even harder to think when his fingers curled around her hip.
“What thing?”
“That thing were you use your body to herd me where you want me to be,” she said, making shooing gestures with her hands into what little space remained between their bodies. “It’s kind of hot.”
He chuckled, the sound blending into the water, and stopped moving. “Kind of hot and kind of wrong?”
“Maybe a little bit wrong,” she said, and smoothed her hands over his pectorals. In response his cock bobbed against her hip. “That doesn’t mean I want you to stop.”
He leaned forward just enough to get his mouth by her ear. “Good. I don’t want to stop.”
His teeth closed on her ear lobe, sending lightning streaking along her nerves. It was hard to breathe after that. How did he do this to her, short-circuit her brain with so little effort? They were naked, yes, but barely touching, and it was growing more difficult to even see him as steam obscured her vision, droplets condensing on her eyelashes. Conn looked down at her, his eyes darkened to slate blue, his hair clinging to his forehead as he backed her up a step, then another, across the floor to the tiled bench running the short length of the rectangle. She bumped into it, then sat down, no longer wondering how he did what he did, slipping into the flow as easily as water slid down the glass panels.
The new position put his cock, hard and straining upward, at face level. Automatically she reached for it, looking forward to going down on him, but to her surprise he kept moving and got down on his knees on the tile, edging forward until he could plant his hands on either side of her hips. Conveniently, the move parted her legs. A ripple of sensation eddied through her sex as she stared into his eyes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” she replied.
He lowered his head. Expecting a kiss she parted her lips, but he surprised her again by stopping with his plush mouth just above hers, with each inhale giving her fleeting contact that disappeared with each exhale. The contact was brief, sweet, tantalizing. She pushed her head forward just enough to satisfy temptation, and felt his hand close in her hair, pulling her back.
“Not yet,” he said.
To her trained ear, his smile came through in his voice, but she could feel it against her lips as his hand flattened against the tile again. Desperate for more, she licked her mouth, scraped her upper teeth over her lower lip, trying to draw the taste of him into her mouth. He licked her lip, fleeting, hot. She whimpered, wriggled a little, feeling her nakedness and emptiness deep inside her body.
“You like to tease,” she said.
“I like to take my time. Enjoy it.” He kissed her then, quick and soft, no tongue, just the pressure of lips against lips. “I like to have.” Shaping the words moved his mouth against hers, a different form of contact. She inhaled his breath, the intimacy of the air drawing from his lungs into hers, an intimacy she’d not considered before.
Just like the intimacy of having. She caught his jaw in her hand and leaned back just enough to get a good look in his eyes. He was so close she couldn’t look into both eyes at once, but had to flick back and forth between them. Her mind was racing at the same speed. “Having” mattered to Conn. It mattered to everyone, of course, but it went deep into Conn McCormick’s soul. “Because so much of what you do is fast,” she said. “Drag racing. Eating on the run in your car. Going from call to call.”
His hand stilled on her hip. She peered into his eyes,
Tell me more, Conn. You can tell me. I swear I’ll keep your heart safe.
For a moment he looked like he regretted speaking the words. “Guess so,” he said, minimizing the implications of what he’d said.
She brushed her thumb over his impossible mouth, felt his tongue briefly touch the pad. “You can have me,” she said.
Under normal circumstances the language was old-fashioned, a euphemism for sex, for casual, for fucking. But she meant it in a different way, offering herself to him the way she used to build rapport with an audience at a personal show, starting with something softer, slow tempo, drawing them in without the crutch of an upbeat, driving song, a top-ten hit, a recognizable number. Back when she put herself out there through her music rather than “performed.”
For a flash of time Conn’s eyes widened, just long enough for her to see the expression, then see it change, then wonder if she’d seen it at all. But her heart skittered in her chest. She’d seen it. Her body told her that, more truthfully than words.
She was still cupping his jaw, her body language holding him ever so slightly at bay. Suiting actions to words, she slid her hand down his throat, then drew her thumb over his collarbone to the hollow in his shoulder. It was her turn to nip his earlobe.
“You can have me, as slow as you want,” she whispered, and watched him shiver.
It felt so right to surrender to what she was making with him. For a long, charged moment she stared at him, wondering if he felt the same thing she did, that storm surge inside that usually meant songs were coming. Right now she wasn’t sure what it meant, but she trusted it, trusted her body. Trusted Conn.
Wondering if she’d broken the spell, she leaned back a little, resuming their original positions, making space for Conn to have what he wanted to have. Time paused while he hesitated. She darted forward and nipped his lower lip. He growled, low in his throat, and kissed her, hot, possessive, licking into her mouth, obviously determined to switch gears to fast and furious. Panting, she tore her mouth away and rested her forehead on his, then gently kissed the tender corner of his mouth, coaxing him to stay here, with her. The stubble scraped against her lips, now swollen and sensitive. Then she lifted her head, recreating the hair’s breadth of space between their mouths, and waited.
A shuddering exhale, then tension ebbed from his muscles and he picked up where he’d left off the first time, brushing his mouth back and forth over hers, stimulating delicate nerves to hyperawareness. She breathed out, soft and slow, and consciously relaxed. Without the driving desire her bo
dy softened, allowing her to feel the heat building in her core, her nipples, tight and hot despite the steam, the growing ache in her belly.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and shifted her bottom on the seat. Intense vulnerability shifted, strengthened, transformed into intense need as her body made known how desperately it wanted contact with his. All that hard, hot strength was within reach and yet so far away. He put one hand on her hip and pressed into her abdomen with his thumb, making her clit pulse and emphasizing the ache in her core. She circled her hips under his hand, the pressure frustratingly unsatisfying, but more than she had before.
“Give me something,” she demanded, so he gave her his mouth, his kiss blatantly, possessively mimicking sex, doing nothing to assuage the ache inside her. When she moaned, then nipped at his lower lip, he gave a soft rumble of a laugh, tightened his hands on her hips, and pulled her forward.
Caught off guard, her eyes flew open to find him gazing at her, heavy-lidded. He leaned forward and braced his arms at the elbow under her back, flattened palms supporting her upper body weight. Her skin was heat-reddened, the color similar to the flush standing high on Conn’s cheekbones. It wasn’t from the steam, but from the heat simmering between them. Still looking at her, he bent to her nipple and licked off the moisture collected on each hard tip. Cady’s eyes closed again.
“Too much?” he asked.
She trembled at the rough scrap of his stubble over her soft flesh, then said, “I don’t want to miss anything. Looking is distracting.”
She didn’t need to see him worshipping her body, the sounds and sensations told her everything she needed to know about his body position, and how turned on he was. The flat of his tongue against her nipple, then pointed to circle it, then the sharp edge of his teeth, gentle pressure tightening until she gasped from the sharp, hot flare of desire in her sex. The whispering pulse of steam from the jets, the prickling sensation of sweat blooming on her skin, her soft noises, his rougher ones, music in the sultry air.
