by Maren Smith
Her thighs were a cradle for his hips, one that would have been more comfortable for both of them if only he’d bothered to hike the skirt of her nightgown the hell out of the way first. The way he was lying on her now had turned the excess fabric into a tent around both her legs, not just concealing but constraining her, and making it awkward for her to get her legs around him. And she was trying.
God, he loved that.
Garrett rose up far enough to catch the front of her nightgown. Two hard yanks had the cloth ripped right down the middle. Because, yeah, he was a problem solver that way.
Other than to catch her breath, Lydia made no sound. She arched her back and he’d be damned if the full perfection of her high breasts didn’t practically leap up to fill his grasping hand. He squeezed, feeling out all that feminine softness with a lot more eagerness and a lot less finesse than a man his age could be forgiven for. He wasn’t milking a cow, for God’s sake.
He tried to slow down. Take his time. Show her that he was something more than just another man in the faceless dark of her bedroom. He wanted so badly to prove that he could be there for her, provide for all her needs, not just those husbandly duties like food and clothes and a roof to keep her warm and safe, but the carnal ones as well. The womanly ones that so deeply called to every cell and sinew and fiber of his being. Those same needs that made her nipples tighten like new-budding spring flowers. The needs that turned the folds and furrow of her sex into a hot, wet, mouthwatering oasis that just begged to be touched, stroked… tasted.
She scraped her fingers through his hair, gripping his head and chasing his mouth when he broke from her. She could pull all she wanted—his fierce, sultry, stubborn, emerald-eyed temptress—but he was intent now on delivering kisses of a different sort and down he went.
He loved the scent of her, found stronger deep in the valley between her breasts as well as the shadowy curve underneath them. He loved the flinching spasms of her belly as he let his lips wander from ribs to waist. He licked at her navel, tasted the very curve of her hip, left deep suckling marks that no one but he would see come the morning, and only when the steadiness of her breaths had become fast and shaky and every bit as frantic as the fingers digging into his scalp, did he spread her legs wide.
She caught her breath when he scooped her up by her hips, slinging her thighs over his shoulders, and the heat of his breath touched most sensitive flesh. She covered her mouth with her own hand. He covered his mouth with her.
Her knees hooked him, her legs tightening as her hips bucked up into that exhilaratingly intimate kiss. He drank her in, the salty-sweet oils of her body an aphrodisiac more arousing and addictive than any woman he’d ever sampled in his life. Lord knew, he was no saint. Not then, and certainly not now when the only thing that mattered to him was her next undulating movement.
Garrett shifted his grip, wrapping his arm around her left thigh so he could open her folds to the nibbling of his lips and the lashing of his tongue. Her slickness was a need he couldn’t stop himself from savoring. He sank the fingers of his other hand into her core—first one, then a tighter fitting two—just so he could feel those deep, milking spasms as he took her clit into his mouth and loved her.
She made no sound, but in the tenseness of her trembling body, he knew how much she wanted to. He made no sounds either, although it tested every ounce of self-control he had as she rode his mouth and fingers. The greedy well of her body wept for him. He could hear his unspoken name in each shaky breath she exhaled through her nose and in the pulling draw of her body as she begged him to take her properly. To fill her deep and hard. To make her his in every way a man possibly could.
Oh yeah, Paquah and all their future kids were definitely getting moved out to the barn, because this would be the last time he felt her whole being seize upon his thrusting fingers and suckling mouth when he did not also hear her cry his name. He bent her legs back almost to her chest and rose above her, determined to make this the last time he tore himself from the unbearable confines of his britches only to sink into her with this same measure of agonizing slowness, borne of the necessity for quiet. And it absolutely, positively would never happen again that he claimed her for his own with this same brutal civility when all he really wanted to do was ride fit to bust the saddle.
She lost control first, the clenching, milking spasms of her body bringing his own end much, much too soon. His balls tightened, the sheer pleasure of it shooting straight through his core, ravaging the length of his cock and spurting in fiery jets deep inside her. She came with a gasp; he, with a tight-lipped grunt not all the self-control in the world could have muffled. And in the minor eternity that followed, they both held themselves silent and still, bathed in sweat, colored in shadow and the early morning glow of pre-dawn light in which all they could see of one another was the most basic of silhouettes.
It would be the last time that ever happened too. He didn’t tell her so, but Lydia was far from a stupid woman. Somehow, she must have known the depth of his determination. Maybe it scared her a little. Maybe it scared her a lot. All Garrett really knew was, despite how good it felt to tuck her lithesome little body in next to his under the blankets of her bed—a bed that might comfortably hold two for fucking, but sure wasn’t meant to sleep them that way—when he awoke the next morning, he awoke alone. The soft bump of her bedroom door closing startled his head up off the pillow, but finding the room empty—no Paquah, no Lydia, no carpetbag—that startled him even more.
She had left him. Without so much as a fare-thee-well, thanks for the memories, or even a trembling kiss goodbye.
She was running.
He groaned. Damn it.
Chapter Thirteen
Lydia backed towards her door, giving the room that had been her home for the last four months a final once over without being able to concentrate a single thought on anything except the man snoring blissfully away in her bed.
Paquah was trying to go back to sleep against her shoulder. Her carpetbag was in her hand, though she couldn’t for the life of her recall what she’d put into it. A change of clothes maybe, she hoped. A few toys, some toiletries. How could she leave? She didn’t want to leave, but how could she possibly stay?
Garrett drew another deep rattling breath, and her whole body responded in a flood of unbearable warmth and longing. His hand on her pillow, suntanned and work-rough, twitched and so did that traitor’s space between her legs. Twitched and pulsed, feeling the ripples of last night’s pleasure still radiating out of his thrusting fingers and up into her womb, up into her breasts, all the way up into her claustrophobically tight chest, making it impossible for her heart to beat or her lungs to breathe.
She was supposed to be a wife. She was supposed to be a whore. She was never supposed to fall in love. Not again and definitely not with Garrett, of all men. A soldier, a rancher, a brawler. Quick to smile, even when he was mad. Dangerous. Generous. Handsome, fun, funny… quite possibly crazy. Lydia retreated another step toward the door, but the near rhythmic pull of him kept tempting her back to bed. One step wasn’t enough to banish that awful, scintillating, confusing sensation. It didn’t weaken with five. Maybe it would never weaken, no matter how much distance she put between them. Tears flooded her. What the hell was wrong with her?
She rolled her shoulders, squared her back, did her best to ignore the rough canvas-like scrape of her silk chemise against the rawness of nipples that still felt as sensitive as they had last night, when his mouth had nibbled and pulled at them. It was as if his lips had never left. The heat of fierce suckling kisses still drew upon the tips. His fingers still plucked and tweaked, and her nipples responded, swelling on the memory of how good it had felt to have those big hands of his molding her flesh for both their pleasure.
And for the first time in a long time, she hadn’t counted the thrusts until it was over. She hadn’t faked a moan or done things to quicken him along. She hadn’t rolled instantly out of bed to scrub away all evidence of h
is spending.
And she couldn’t recall even a ghost of what Maska had looked like. His features kept morphing into Garrett’s.
Because she was in love with him, and that was never supposed to happen.
How could she let that happen? How could she still feel him inside her? Not the thrusting or the fullness, but the fluttering. Liquid longing trickling through her folds like the lashing of his tongue and lips the night before. Her clit throbbed, heady and hot, her sex trying so hard to convince her that he was still down there. Still devouring one languid kiss at a time. Still driving every erotic nerve in her body on toward yet another orgasm.
Definitely never supposed to happen.
Lydia retreated, stopping only when her hip bumped the door latch. She clung to Paquah. She wrung at the handle of her carpetbag, twisting it in her sweat-dampened palm. Her legs ached to run. Her hips ached from having her thighs pinned back on her chest while he used the very tip of his cock to nudge and tease and test how devastatingly ready she was.
Her pussy spasmed, desperate to feel once more the incredible fullness as he’d pierced her by slow inches.
A heartbeat pulse thumped through her clit as she heard again that breathless chuckle of his when her body had arched under the strings of pleasure as he pulled them.
That stark cold panic again washed over her, not replacing all those other sensations but overriding them. Muting and shocking her with the memory of opening her eyes this morning when, just for half a second, as she lay cradled in Garrett’s strong arms, the heat of his chest burning into her back and each rumbling breath stirring the top of her hair, for just a half-second, she felt… so normal. So safe. Tricking her into believing she had magically gone back in time to those days before she had learned to be afraid. Convincing her, in that moment of sleepy confusion that spanned the void between waking and dreaming, that she would never again be anything but held, safe and loved.
And then she’d recognized she was in the Red Petticoat and reality crashed in.
And it just kept crashing, filling her with anxiousness and dread.
And she just couldn’t keep standing here like some lovelorn idiot until he woke up, because if he looked at her, smiled at her, held out his arms and beckoned her into them… she was terrified she might not be strong enough not to flee straight into them.
It was daylight now. The other Red Petticoat gems—not to mention the rest of Culpepper Cove—would be stirring themselves out of bed by now. She had to get out of here. Now. Before it was too late.
And go… where?
Rattled as she was, it wasn’t until she’d wrestled the door open and slipped out into the hall that that particular unwelcome bit of reality reared up to consume her. She had taken work at the Red Petticoat because she’d had no place else to go. That hadn’t changed. With a half-Indian child and a military squadron sure to be on her trail just as soon as she failed to show up to Paquah’s hearing today, where could she possibly go where no one would notice her passing? How could she hide? How could she even leave town? She needed money, but the bank wouldn’t open for hours yet. Even if she had money, the stagecoach office wasn’t open yet either and who knew when the next stage would roll through town anyway. It could be three, four… nine days late before anyone thought to wonder why. She couldn’t wait three hours, much less three days. But what else was she to do, walk? Maybe if she were only going back to Shady Springs, sure. But though she'd rather walk to hell than a town that was home to a woman such as Millicent, Shady Springs wasn't even big enough to disappear into. She had to go somewhere else. Someplace big enough for regular transportation options like trains or ships, and how was she going to do that with her child on her hip and her suitcase in her hand?
Hopelessness swelled, growing thicker. Heavier. At this point, she wasn’t sure if she could catch a ride or hire a horse because by now everybody in Culpepper Cove had to know about the hearing. If she tried, then they would know she was running, the gossip wheels would begin to turn, someone would inform the sheriff and then, again, the military would be fast on her trail. Or Sheriff Justice, himself, would be and in the back of her mind, came an echo of Gabe’s oft lamented: Nobody bolts faster than a gem.
Funny, how right over the top of that imagined chiding came the soothing balm of Garrett’s voice: I’m the kind of man who wouldn’t hold another’s past mistakes against them.
A rustle of movement issued from the room across the hall. Lydia heard the low rumble of John’s sleepy voice followed by a brisk smack and giggles from Opal. People were waking up. She was running out of time, and yet her feet felt tied to the floor. She had to force that first step and, like every other part of her life, she fumbled it. She caught her foot on something—maybe a crack in the floorboards or nothing at all—and stumbled, falling back into her own doorway before blinding tears washed all the stability out of her legs.
She dropped her bag. She almost dropped her child, too, but she caught him. Paquah raised his head, looking sleepily around as she collapsed with him against the wall.
“Mama?”
Gasps turning to bitter sobs, she sagged all the way down to sit on the floor.
A door opened. Blinded by tears, Lydia couldn’t see whose it was. She couldn’t see anything but the fabric of Paquah’s soft shift as she rocked him, so distraught she didn’t even realize she was touching him in all the same comforting ways that Garrett liked to touch her—his cheek, his head, his hair.
What was she going to do? What could she do?
Nothing!
Let me do it for you…
Covering her eyes, Lydia pressed her lips as tight as she could, rolling them together so she would make no sound. She was so tired of crying. Not since Maska had she ever been so unbearably weak.
“Mama?” Small hands caught at her face. “Mama, what’s wrong?”
“L-Lydia?” Frozen in her bedroom doorway, dressed in naught but a nightgown and shawl, with her long hair still twisted in its bedtime braid, Opal stared at her in open shock and her water pitcher forgotten in her hand.
Another door opened. Maybe two more; the sounds came too close together and Lydia never uncovered her eyes to check. She was afraid of what she would see—the other gems gawking at her, marveling at her stupid fragility. As if she were the only woman ever to know sorrow, here in a place that had only ever known the uselessness of wasted tears.
Paquah wrapped himself around her, hugging as tight as his thin arms could. “It’s all right.” His small hands patted her neck as another touched her hair, settling warm and much larger than she knew her boy’s hands could possibly be on top of her head.
She uncovered her eyes, reaching for that hand as if to ward it away, but the familiarity of that caress continued its gentle path from the top of her head down onto her back anyway.
Lips keening back from tight-gritted teeth, Lydia covered her face with both hands now as her shoulders shook. “D-don’t!”
“Shhh…”
“We’ve got you, Mama,” Paquah added, his small hand joined Garrett’s, mimicking its tender descent down her shaking back.
Her head hurt; her chest was tight. She had to breathe, but if she did there was no way she’d be able to do it soundlessly. She rolled her lips tighter, squeezed her eyes harder, and held her breath longer.
“Lydia?” Opal whispered again, but her hesitant step forward was halted. “B-but…”
“No,” John firmly replied, drawing her back into their room. He closed the door. Leaving her alone.
She’d never felt so abandoned and alone. Even knowing with all her heart that she wasn’t either.
“It’s all right,” Paquah told her. “We won’t let anything happen to you, will we?”
“No,” Garrett rumbled, the heat of his body settling against her as he sank down the wall to sit beside her. His arm wrapped her shoulder, applying ever increasing degrees of pressure until she gave up and let herself be drawn against him. Stupid, stupid, foolish w
oman. She burrowed into his embrace anyway, burying her wet face into the side of his neck while he dispensed his comfort until the raggedness of her sobs began to soften, turning to hiccups, then sniffles and miserable sighs. She’d fallen apart so many times these last few days, it was a wonder he hadn’t given up by now.
She should have known better. Garrett never gave up.
Alternating between stroking her hair and massaging her scalp, he let her lean against him without complaint. Her one chance to flee was well and truly gone long before he finally asked, “Do me a favor, son?”
Paquah raised his head. “What?”
“Run on down to the kitchen and fetch your ma a shot. I think she needs one.”
“Me too.” Patting her head again, Paquah crawled out of her loosening arms. “I’ll be right back.”
“Thank you.” Garrett landed a light pat on the butt as he trotted off down the hall. They both watched until he vanished down the private stairs that led to the back kitchen. It gave Lydia enough time to pull herself together, or at least enough to remember how to breathe without snorting, hiccupping, sniffling or coughing. She felt disgusting. Her eyes hurt. Her nose was still running; without anything handy, she had no choice but to wipe it on her sleeve.
“Why haven’t you left yet?” she grumbled, rubbing at her swollen eyes.
“Give me forty or so years, and then ask me again.”
“No.” She tried to pull away but he kept his arm wrapped tight around her and refused to let her retreat. Lacking the strength to keep fighting, she gave up and lay her head back on his chest instead. “You’re crazy,” she said, but it came out sounding every bit as listless as she felt.
