by Pamela Clare
She did what he’d done to her, licking and teasing his nipples, kissing her way down his chest and over his abdomen, licking and nipping him until his skin seemed to burn. She nudged his legs apart, sat between his thighs, her hands still exploring him. Then she stepped onto the floor, lifted his boxer briefs over his erection, and pulled them off, tossing them God knew where.
Her gaze dropped to his cock, a quick gust of breath leaving her lungs. “I knew you’d be hung.”
Wait. She’d spent time thinking about his dick?
He opened his mouth to ask what had made her think that when she took hold of him. The breath caught in his throat, making words impossible.
She stroked him slowly from head to root and back again, her fingers cool against his aching cock. “Show me how you like it.”
He reached down, guided her, increasing the pressure. She caught on fast, so he released her hand, left her to it. “Just … like … that.”
His eyes drifted shut—then flew open when she took him into the heat of her mouth. He gasped at the shock of it, his cock jerking.
She looked up at him, her gaze never leaving his as she devoured him, her mouth and fist moving in tandem over the aching length of his cock, her tongue swirling over its straining head. He willed his muscles to relax, wanting to enjoy this, wanting to make it last, but it felt too damned good.
“Stop. Rain. Jesus. Stop.” This wasn’t how he wanted tonight to end.
He wanted to be inside her.
He twisted, reached for his nightstand, pulled a condom out of the drawer.
She took it from him, tore the wrapper open with her teeth, and tossed it, then rolled the condom onto his erection. Her gaze met his again, her lips curving in a sexy-as-hell smile as she crawled up his body, straddled him, then guided him inside her, taking him slowly, inch by inch.
Holy … hell!
She was slick and wet and tight, the feel of her blowing his mind, even through latex. She rested her palms against his chest and began to move, her hips undulating in a way that was blatantly erotic, her clit rubbing against the root of his cock. Her eyes drifted shut, her lips parting on a breathy exhale. “That feels … so … good.”
Rain, sweet Rain.
He’d wanted her for so long… wanted this. He let her set the rhythm, her motions enough to keep him hard and aroused, but not enough to make him come. There was time for that later.
Would she be able to come again? God, he hoped so.
He reached up to take the weight of her breasts into his hands, palming her nipples, pinching them, teasing them. He knew now how sensitive she was, how much she liked that. She moaned, arched, her motions faster now, the tension inside her building again. He reached down with one hand to tease her clit. She rocked against the pressure, her head falling forward, her hair a curtain around her face, her nails biting into his chest. He kept one hand busy between her legs, reached up with the other to move her hair aside. He needed to see her face, to watch her come.
Her eyes went wide, and she sucked in a breath, then cried out, a look of carnal delight washing over her face.
That was it.
In a single motion, Joe flipped her onto her back, growled out her name. “Rain.”
It was a plea, need for her slamming in his chest like a heartbeat. His gaze met hers, green eyes looking up at him. “You are so … fucking … beautiful.”
He drove himself into her, years of wanting her, years of fighting his desire for her breaking through his control. He loved her… loved Rain … wanted her… needed her so fucking much. He shattered, the bliss of climax blasting through him, shaking him apart, leaving him breathless.
He sank against her, his head on her breast, her heart beating against his cheek. And for a time, he couldn’t move. It was only later, when he’d come back to himself, that he realized something wasn’t right. “The condom. It broke.”
Chapter 12
Rain lay back against Joe’s chest in his big marble bathtub, a little tipsy, her body replete, her heart singing. She hadn’t felt this sexually satisfied or safe with a man since … ever. This had been better than any fantasy, better than anything her imagination could have invented. She’d never known what it felt like to love a man with her whole heart—and have him love her back. Not that he’d said those words, exactly …
For a time, they sat there in silence, the water warm against their skin, empty champagne glasses and flickering candles on the window sill, steam on the window.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry for what?” Oh. Right. “Condoms break. I’ll stop by the pharmacy tomorrow to pick up Plan B and make an appointment with my GYN to get something long term.”
“I’m paying for it.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Women deal with more than their fair share when it comes to sex. You’re the ones who have periods and deal with birth control and get pregnant and have babies and breastfeed. Men ought to do something. I want to do my part. Besides, you’ve got enough going on right now with your house.”
When he put it that way…
“Okay. It’s a deal. You can pay. But tonight was the most amazing sexual experience of my life, and I don’t want to waste the afterglow worrying.” She pushed all thoughts of an unwanted pregnancy aside. “You’re incredible. You know that, right?”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Tonight was … ” A lump formed in her throat. “Perfect.”
“For me, too.” He kissed her hair, the fingers of one hand lazily stroking her ribcage just beneath her breast.
“How did you get to be so good in bed? Or maybe I don’t want to know.”
“I had a female friend in college who overheard me say something really sexist and stupid about sorority sisters craving dick. She got in my face and broke the news that dicks alone don’t do it for most women and that a lot of women can be sexually content without having a penis inside them at all. Whoa! For an 18-year-old guy, that was a shocker. She said for most women, good sex was all about the clit. When I challenged that, she told me to try jerking off without touching my dick and see how fast I came.”
Rain laughed. “I like this woman.”
He chuckled, too. “It had never dawned on me until that moment that women’s experience of sex could be so different from men’s. I knew about the clit, of course, but I hadn’t understood how important it was for women’s ability to enjoy sex. I’d always thought good sex involved a lot of ramming. It was fantastic for me, so it must be good for her, too, right? After that, I set out to learn everything I could.”
Rain tried to imagine Joe saying something awful like that and couldn’t. “You must have been a different person back then.”
“I was my father’s son and Silas’ great-great-grandson. I was an asshole, the spoiled son of a mining mogul and his Playboy Playmate wife.”
“Your mom was a Playboy bunny?” Rain hadn’t known that.
“Miss June 1968. My dad showed me her centerfold when I was about ten.”
“Ten?” Rain turned in Joe’s arms. “He showed you nude photos of your mom?”
That was screwed up.
Joe nodded. “He was proud of them. He told me he’d known she was the woman for him when he’d heard her say she would never let herself get fat.”
Rain’s jaw dropped. “How shallow can a man be?”
“They were a perfect match. He married her for her body. She married him for his money. By the time I went off to boarding school, they hated each other.”
Rain turned so that she was sitting in his lap, her legs around his hips. She ran a hand up the wet skin of his chest. “I don’t think you were spoiled. I think you were neglected, mistreated. What kind of father shares nude photos of his wife with their son?”
“That’s my family—a long line of selfish assholes. That’s one reason I’ve never wanted kids. For four generations now, Moffats have married women they don’t love, fathered one son, a
nd passed on the asshole gene to the next generation.”
“Then why aren’t you an asshole?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Who says I’m not?”
She held his gaze, defied him to contradict her. “I do.”
“My grandmother deserves most of the credit. She did her best to break the mold. My grandfather got her pregnant and had to marry her. Back then, even a rich man couldn’t knock a woman up and walk away—not when her father was a US Senator. She was a genuinely good person. She didn’t deserve my grandfather. She tried to raise my father right, and I think it broke her heart to see how much like his father he turned out to be. She tried again with me, did her best to instill some empathy and compassion. That’s why she gave me Silas’ journals.”
“She gave you the journals?”
He nodded. “My grandfather had wanted them burned to protect the family’s reputation. She hid them away, told him they were ash. After my father died—he was killed in a plane crash when I was twenty-four—she entrusted them to me. What I read made me sick, opened my eyes. My father’s death and Silas’ journals were like a slap in the face. I finished my master’s degree, realized I didn’t give a damn about mining or Wall Street. I bought a plane ticket and came to Scarlet Springs.”
Rain sometimes forgot that Joe hadn’t grown up in Scarlet like she had, in part because his ties to the town went back further than hers. “It must have been a shock after growing up in … wherever you grew up.”
How could she know him so well and yet know so little about him?
“Weston, Massachusetts.” He moved a strand of wet hair off her cheek. “I was amazed by Colorado—the mountains, the people. It was a new world. I learned to ski and climb. I met people who lived life on their terms, who said what they meant and meant what they said, who valued freedom more than money. I decided to stay. I wanted to find a way to give back to the town, to make up for what Silas had done. I had no idea how to do that until I asked Bob Jewell where a person could get a good beer. He said, ‘You want good beer? Go to Boulder.’”
Rain and Joe both laughed at that.
“So that’s why you started a brewpub.”
“At first, I was just thinking about the business side of it, filling a market niche and brewing good beer. Then this teenage girl walked in.” Joe’s gaze softened, and he ran his knuckles down Rain’s cheek. “She had a new baby. Some asshole ten years older than she was had gotten her pregnant and left her to give birth alone in a minivan. She begged me for a job, promised me she’d work hard. She had the biggest, greenest eyes I’d ever seen. I caught her last name—Minear—and I couldn’t turn her away.”
Rain gaped at him. “Jenny. That’s why you did so much for me.”
Joe nodded.
She’d thought he’d done it all out of pity, but it had been guilt. He’d been trying to atone for Silas’ sins. Oh, Joe. “You’re not Silas. You didn’t need to do that.”
“Yes, I did.” His lips curved in a soft smile. “Besides, you gave me so much more than I gave you.”
“I … I did?”
“I watched you throw yourself into the job, watched how you smiled and gave it your best even after a sleepless night with Lark. I saw how you interacted with people, how they gravitated toward you. Empathy, kindness, doing the right thing—I always had to think about it, to weigh things out before I knew what to do. It came naturally to you.”
Rain shook her head. “You’re one of the kindest men I know. You always try to do the right thing. I love that about you.”
“Thanks for saying that, but it hasn’t always been that way. When I came to Scarlet, I still had a lot to learn, and you were my teacher—one of them, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“You hadn’t been working at the pub for long when Bear walked in, hungry and cold. If it had been left to me, I’d have told him to get out, but you treated him like family and bought him supper even though you barely had the money to feed yourself. I watched you and felt ashamed. Why hadn’t I thought to do that? That’s when it came to me. Knockers wasn’t just about making sure Scarlet Springs had good beer. It was about building community, giving the people of Scarlet a place to come together, helping them get a sense of this town as more than just a former mining town gone bust. You gave me a sense of purpose, Rain, and you were just seventeen.”
Rain found herself blinking back tears.
Sex had never left Joe feeling like this before—his heart full, his mind empty, his body satisfied down to his very bones.
“Why did you change your mind?” Rain rested her cheek against his shoulder, her breasts pressing against his chest, her legs still wrapped around his hips. “One minute you made it clear we weren’t going to sleep together, and the next...”
How could Joe explain it so that she could understand?
He traced the curve of her spine with his fingers. “I’ve wanted you since the first day I met you, and I hated myself for that. You were seventeen, so vulnerable and alone, and I was twenty-seven, the same age as that asshole who’d hurt you. You depended on me, trusted me. I didn’t want to betray that trust. I didn’t want to be him or Silas, so I shut that part of myself off—or I tried to.”
“You’re nothing like either of them.”
Oh, but he could have been. “I’m not a saint.”
“Do you think the things you’ve done matter less because you had to think them through?” She cupped his cheek. “You’ve chosen to do what’s right. You gave up a lucrative career to try to set right wrongs that weren’t yours. That tells me everything I need to know about you.”
He looked into her eyes, the redemption she offered like a drug. “So much of what I’ve done here in Scarlet has been to make myself worthy of your respect. I’d be a different person without you.”
“Worthy of my respect? I’ve always respected you. God knows where Lark and I would have ended up without you.” She kissed him, then frowned. “I get why you couldn’t get together with me back then. But I quit yesterday. I wasn’t your employee, and you still wouldn’t touch me.”
“What did you think I’d do—ball you right there on the gym floor?”
“That would have been nice.”
“How could I? I knew you needed the job. I couldn’t accept your resignation, sleep with you, and then hire you back the next day.”
“So what changed?”
Joe wasn’t sure he was ready for this conversation, but he couldn’t hold anything back from her, not after tonight. He told her how the staff had been angry with him when they’d learned she had quit and why and how Rico had gotten in his face about it. “He told me you were serious about leaving Scarlet, which scared the hell out of me. Then he said … that you loved me.”
Rain lifted her head, her green eyes wide. “He did?”
Joe owed Rico. “I had to find out the truth. The moment you said those words yourself…”
“That made sex okay all of a sudden?”
“Yeah.” Couldn’t she see? “All the women who’ve told me they loved me have been after one thing. They didn’t give a damn about me. But you’re not like that. If you say you love me, then, for whatever reason—and I can’t fathom why—you really do love me. I’ve never had that before.” Joe ran his thumb over her cheek, fought for the courage to say words he’d never said to any woman. “The truth is … I love you, too.”
Her eyes filled with tears, her lips curving in a tremulous smile. “I kind of figured, but it’s really nice to hear you say it.”
He wiped the tears from her cheeks, his heart soaring. “I love you, Rain. I’ve loved you since that first time you bought Bear supper.”
“Really? That was so long ago.” She cupped his cheek, leaned in, kissed him. “What happens now? Can I have my job back, or is that still breaking your rules?”
He hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I don’t want people gossiping about you.”
Rain laughed. “This is Scarlet, remember? People talk.�
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Oh. Yeah.
Hell.
“Do we have to talk about this right now?” He needed time to think it over. Besides, there were other things he’d rather do.
“We don’t have to talk at all.” Rain slipped her hands behind his neck, drew his head closer to hers, and kissed him.
He let her set the pace, awed by her, overwhelmed by his love for her. She was as close to heaven as he’d ever get, his church, the source of his salvation, his beginning and end. He opened his mouth to her, yielded to her touch, her will be done.
She took her time with him, kissing him slow and deep, the heat between them on a slow build. He cupped her breasts, teased her nipples to erectness, blood rushing to his groin, making him erect, too. Then she reached down between them, took his cock in one hand, and stroked him.
He fought to keep his eyes open, not wanting to miss a single thing—the sensual light in her eyes, the flush that came over her breasts as she grew aroused, the little smile on her lips. She lifted herself up, and for a moment he thought she meant to take him inside her. He was about to reach for the condom he’d brought into the bathroom when she rubbed her clit against the underside of his cock.
Whoa.
This was something new. Could she come like this?
Rain rocked against him, stroking him with her clit and labia, the friction enough to keep him hard but not enough to make him come. That was fine with him. It turned him on to see her like this—aroused, uninhibited, hungry for him. He toyed with her breasts, determined to make it as good for her as he could.
She pressed him harder against herself, holding him in place with the flat of her hand, her eyes drifting shut, her breath coming faster now, an expression like pain on her face. She gave a frustrated moan, her eyes flying open. “I want you inside me.”
He reached for the condom, tore it open with his teeth, and rose onto his knees to roll it down the length of his aching cock. “Turn around. Get on your knees.”
She did as he asked, water sluicing down her creamy skin as she turned away from him, exposing that beautiful ass of hers. She spread her knees as far apart as the tub would allow, gripped the sides of the tub, then looked back at him over her shoulder. “Hurry.”
